I regularly recieve links and updates from the National Sexuality Resource Center (NSRC) through my work with the local sexual health service providers network, here's one I got today that I thought might raise a few eyebrows.... DR
Retrieved 4/11/09 from http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/dialogues/blog/view/3539/6241?utm_source=NSRC+News&utm_campaign=f910b24a6d-NSRC_Newsletter_November_03_2009_draft_211_3_2009&utm_medium=email
I believe in the Power of PORN!
Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 02:50:09pm
by Christopher White
Today, I'm writing in honor of the the Morality in Media's (MIM) WRAP Week: White Ribbons Against Pornography, which is also supported by one of my favorite anti-gay organizations, Concerned Women for America (CWA). According to the MIM website the event, which is being held all week from October 25 through November 1, "WRAP week is intended to educate the public about the extent of the pornography problem and what can constitutionally be done about it." The CWA goes on to point out the truth about all of us "Pornography advocates" who apparently claim that porn is a "victimless crime" are delusional and spreading lies - I'd like to point out that I am a proud advocate and voracious consumer of pornography, particularly of the online and amatuer produced variety and I have NEVER stated that it is a victimless crime. Mainly, because pornography is no longer a crime in United States - either producing it or viewing it. Of course, I know there are legal issues regarding the production and distribution of porn and that these laws may vary from state to state. I'll let my lawyer friends weigh in on this one.
I want to counter their claims (and misuses of research) with the idea that pornography is actually the opposite of "dangerous" and can actually be beneficial to helping individuals and couples practice lifelong sexuality education and explore their sexual pleasures, fantasies, and desires in a safe and practical way. First, I want to point out that my own research has shown that young men tend to claim that pornography is one of the main resources for understanding the realities of sexual behaviors. That fact may frighten some of you because you might be concerned that what they see in commercial porn may not be truly representative of what happens in real life. To that, I suggest that you give them a little credit for having the critical skills of being able to distinguish between highly produced movies and reality. I would also suggest that this is one more reason why it is so very important that schools and parents provide the necessary education to make sure they have critical thinking skills when it comes to being media consumers. Then, think about it. Where else are young people (or adults for that matter) going to turn to get the graphic depictions that enable understanding of the physics and mechanics of behaviors if not pornography? I am pretty sure there are not many health education books or biology books that provide the actual details of intercourse much less oral sex, anal sex, playing with sex toys, rimming, mutual masturbation, and I could go on and on and on.
Next, I want to ask you to consider the reasons that adults consume pornography. Let's say that it's because we get tired of the same old sexual activities we've been doing since puberty and allow us to consider what the anti-porn people refer to as needing more and more to be able to achieve sexual arousal and pleasure. So what. I think we might want to openly acknowledge that our sexuality and our sex lives change over time, whether it's due to age and changing bodies or because we are in long-term relationships. We crave novelty just as we do in other parts of our lives. Contrary to the idea of porn being dangerous, I suggest that porn is one of the best places to explore your sexuality, to learn new things to try out, and to fulfil your fantasies. It is not an accident that every time a new technology emerges that one of the first things we do is make new, more easily accessible forms of pornography or perhaps that it is actually the desire for new and more easily accessible pornography that drives technology. Most of us love to access porn and want to do so without any fear, shame, or guilt for doing so.
Finally, let's consider ways in which individuals, couples, or even groups of people can have safe, consensual sexual experiences without having to leave the safety and comfort of their own homes. Of course, I am not in anyway suggesting that porn or any kind of online interactions become a replacement for actual live human interactions. But I do think it can be a safe alternative for some people who may want to explore and have a little fun but aren't necessarily interested in picking someone up at a bar, going to a sex club, or cruising in a park or highway rest area. Then there's the individual or couple in a committed relationship who may want to have other types of sexual encounters but have agreed to a boundary that live, in the flesh sexual encounters are off limits. They may choose to engage and interact with others online by chatting, camming, exchanging photos and videos, or even just going online to look at user-generated porn on amateur sites.
For all of these reasons, I think that we ought to consider promoting greater pornography consumption (and production in this user-generated content world we live in) for people of all ages as a way of learning about sex and sexuality throughout our lives and as a way of expressing and exploring our sexualities. We hear a great deal of discussion about the blurring of the virtual and real worlds as more and more people participate in online social networks and other sites on which content is produced by users - photos, blogs, music, videos, and even live video streams from our offices and homes. So why not think the same way when it comes to our sexual lives?
On that note, I encourage all of you to celebrate WRAP by getting off online just a little bit more than you were probably going to do anyway. Have fun!
Showing posts with label Porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Porn. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
It Has To Be Said...
The Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists
By Johann Hari
Retrieved 02/09/09 from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-strange-strange-story_b_136697.html
The news that Jorg Haider - the Austrian fascist leader - spent his final few hours in a gay bar with a hot blond has shocked some people. It hasn't shocked me. This is a taboo topic for a gay left-wing man like me to touch, but there has always been a weird, disproportionate overlap between homosexuality and fascism. Take a deep breath; here goes.
Some 10,000 gay people were slaughtered in the Nazi death-camps. Many more were humiliated, jailed, deported, ethnically cleansed, or castrated. One gay survivor of the camps, LD Classen von Neudegg, has written about his experiences. A snapshot: "Three men had tried to escape one night. They were captured, and when they returned they had the word 'homo' scrawled across their clothing. They were placed on a block and whipped. Then they were forced to beat a drum and cheer, 'Hurrah! We're back! Hurrah!' Then they were hanged." This is one of the milder events documented in his book.
So the idea of a gay fascist seems ridiculous. Yet when the British National Party - our own home-grown Holocaust-denying bigots - announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism didn't blink. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was - including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It's time to admit something. Fascism isn't something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is - in part, at least - a gay thing, and it's time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.
Just look at our own continent over the past decade. Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn ran on blatantly racist anti-immigrant platform, describing Islam as "a cancer" and "the biggest threat to Western civilisation today." Yet with two little fluffy dogs and a Mamma complex, he was openly, flamboyantly gay. When accused by a political opponent of hating Arabs, he replied, "How can I hate Arabs? I sucked one off last night."
Jorg Haider blasted Austria's cosy post-Nazi politics to rubble in 2000 when his neo-fascist 'Freedom Party' won a quarter of the vote and joined the country's government as a coalition partner. Several facts always cropped up in the international press coverage: his square jaw, his muscled torso, his SS-supporting father, his rabid anti-Semitism, his hatred of immigrants, his description of Auschwitz and Dachau as "punishment centres". A few newspapers mentioned that he is always surrounded by fit, fanatical young men. A handful went further and pointed out that several of these young men are openly gay. Then one left-wing German paper broke the story everybody else was hinting at. They alleged Haider is gay.
Rumours of an Indian waiter with "intimate details" of Haider's body broke into the press. The Freedom Party's general manager Gerald Miscka quickly quit, amid accusations that he was Haider's lover. Haider's close gay friend Walter Kohler - who has been photographed showing off a holstered pistol while Haider chuckled - declared his opposition to outing politicians. Haider - who was married and has two children - kept quiet while his functionaries denied the rumours. The revelation that he died after leaving a gay bar suggests these rumours were true.
On and on it goes. If you inter-railed across Europe, only stopping with gay fascists, there aren't many sights you'd miss. France's leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was not batting for the straight side. Germany's leading neo-Nazi all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, "For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were 'especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.'"
And it wouldn't be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight. They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as "evil", and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying, "The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world's journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures repulsive."
But scratch to homophobic surface and there's a spandex swastika underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote a four-page pamphlet detailing his 'affair' with Nick Griffin. "Griffin sought out intimate relations with me," openly-gay Webster explained, "in the late 1970s. He was twenty years younger than me." Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, says it's all too plausible. Homosexuality is "extremely prevalent" in the upper echelons of the British far right, and at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement's organisers were gay, he claims.
Gerry Gable, editor of the anti-fascist magazine 'Searchlight', explains, "I have looked at Britain's Nazi groups for decades and this homophobic hypocrisy has been there all the time. I cannot think of any organisation on the extreme right that hasn't attacked people on the grounds of their sexual preference and at the same time contained many gay officers and activists."
Griffins' alleged gay affair would stand in a long British fascist tradition. The leader of the skinhead movement all through the 1970s was a crazed, muscled thug called Nicky Crane. He was the icon of a reactionary backlash against immigrants, feminism and the 'hippy' lifetsyle of the 1960s. His movement's emphasis on conformity to a shaven, dehumanised norm resembled classical fascist movements; Crane soon became a campaigner and leading figure in the National Front. Oh, and he was gay. Before he died of AIDS in the mid-1980s, Crane came out and admitted he had starred in many gay porn videos. Just before he died in 1986, he was allowed to steward a Gay Pride march in London, even though he still said he was "proud to be a fascist."
The rubber-soled friction between gay fascists and progressive British gay people sparked into anger in 1985 when the Gay Skinhead Movement organised a disco at London's Gay Centre. Several lesbians in particular objected to the "invasion" of the centre. They felt that the cult of "real men" and hypermasculine thugs was stirring up the most base feelings "in the very place, the gay movement, where you would least expect them."
And this Gaystapo has an icon to revere, an alternative Fuhrer to worship: the lost gay fascist leader Ernst Rohm. Along with Adolf Hitler, Rohm was the founding father of Nazism. Born to conservative Bavarian civil servants in 1887, Ernst Rohm's life began - in his view - in the "heroic" trenches of the First World War. Like so many of the generation who formed the Nazi Party, he was nurtured by and obsessed with the homoerotic myth of the trenches - heroic, beautiful boys prepared to die for their brothers and their country.
He emerged from the war with a bullet-scarred face and a reverence for war. As he put it in his autobiography, "Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order." After being disbanded, he tried half-heartedly to get a foothold in civilian life, but he saw it as alien, bourgeois, boring. He had no political beliefs, only prejudices - particularly hatred of Jews. Historian Joachim Fest describes Rohm's generation of alienated, demobbed young men humiliated by defeat as "agents of a permanent revolution without any revolutionary idea of the future, only a wish to eternalize the values of the trenches."
It was Rohm who first spotted the potential of a soap-box ranter called Adolf Hitler. He saw him as the demagogue he needed to mobilize support for his plan to overthrow democracy and establish a "soldier's state" where the army ruled untrammelled. He introduced the young fascist to local politicians and military leaders; they knew him for many years as "Rohm's boy." Gay historian Frank Rector notes, "Hitler was, to a substantial extent, Rohm's protégé." Rohm integrated Hitler into his underground movement to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
Rohm's blatant, out homosexuality seems bizarre now, given the gay genocide that was to follow. He talked openly about his fondness for gay bars and Turkish baths, and was known for his virility. He believed that gay people were superior to straights, and saw homosexuality as a key principle of his proposed Brave New Fascist Order. As historian Louis Snyder explains, Rohm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behaviour pattern of high repute... He flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted his cronies do the same. He believed straight people weren't as adept at bullying and aggression as homosexuals, so homosexuality was given a high premium in the SA." They promoted an aggressive, hypermasculine form of homosexuality, condemning "hysterical women of both sexes", in reference to feminine gay men.
This belief in the superiority of homosexuality had a strong German tradition that grew up at the turn of the twentieth century around Adolf Brand, publisher of the country's first gay magazine. You could call it 'Queer as Volk': they preached that gay men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented an elite, warrior caste that should rule. They venerated the ancient warrior cults of Sparta, Thebes and Athens.
Rohm often referred to the ancient Greek tradition of sending gay solider couples into battle, because they were believed to be the most ferocious fighters. The famous pass of Thermopylae, for example was held by 300 soldiers - who consisted of 150 gay couples. In its early years, the SA - Hitler and Rohm's underground army - was seen as predominantly gay. Rohm assigned prominent posts to his lovers, making Edmund Heines his deputy and Karl Ernst the SA commander in Berlin. The organisation would sometimes meet in gay bars. The gay art historian Christian Isermayer said in an interview, "I got to know people in the SA. They used to throw riotous parties even in 1933... I once attended one. It was quite well-behaved but thoroughly gay. But then, in those days, the SA was ultra-gay."
On June 30th 1934, Rohm was awoken in a Berlin hotel by Hitler himself. He sprang to his feet and saluted, calling, "Heil Mein Fuhrer!" Hitler said simply, "You are under arrest," and with that he left the room, giving orders for Rohm to be taken to Standelheim prison. He was shot that night. Rohm was the most high-profile kill in the massacre known as 'the Night of the Long Knives'.
Rohm had been suspected by Hitler of disloyalty, but his murder began a massive crackdown on gay people. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, described homosexuality as "a symptom of degeneracy that could destroy our race. We must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates."
German historian Lothar Machtan argues that Hitler had Rohm - and almost all of the large number of gay figures within the SA - killed to silence speculation about his own homosexual experiences. His 'evidence' for Hitler being gay is shaky and has been questioned by many historians, although some of his findings are at least suggestive. A close friend of Hitler's during his teenager years, August Kubizek, alleged a "romantic" affair between them. Hans Mend, a despatch rider who served alongside Hitler in the First World War, claimed to have seen Hitler having sex with a man. Hitler was certainly very close to several gay men, and never seems to have had a normal sexual relationship with a woman, not even his wife, Eva Braun.
Rudolph Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of Hitler's private thoughts on homosexuality. "It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the breeding pool the very men the Volk most needs." This idea - that homosexuality is 'contagious' and, implicitly, tempting - is revealing.
Rohm is venerated on the Homo-Nazi sites that have bred on the internet like germs in a wound. They have names like Gays Against Semitism (with the charming acronym GAS), and the Aryan Resistance Corps (ARC). Their Rohmite philosophy is simple: while white men are superior to other races, gay men are "the masters of the Master Race". They alone are endowed with the "capacity for pure male bonding" and the "superior intellect" that is needed for "a fascist revolution." The ARC even organises holiday "get-togethers" for its members where "you can relax amongst the company of our fellow white brothers."
So it's fairly easy to establish that gay people are not inoculated from fascism. They have often been at its heart. This begs the bigger question: why? How did gay people - so often victims of oppression and hate - become integral to the most hateful and evil political movement of all? Is it just an extreme form of self-harm, the political equivalent to the gay kids who slash their own arms to ribbons out of self-hate?
Gay pornographer and film-maker Bruce LaBruce has one explanation. He claims that "all gay porn today is implictly fascist. Fascism is in our bones, because it's all about glorifying white male supremacy and fetishizing domination, cruelty, power and monstrous authority figures." He has tried to explore the relationship between homosexuality and fascism in his movies, beginning with 'No Skin Off My Ass' in 1991. In his disturbing 1999 film "Skin Flick', a bourgeois gay couple - one black, one white - are sexually terrorised by a gang of gay skinheads who beat off to 'Mein Kampf' and beat up 'femmes'. He implies that bourgeois gay norms quickly break down to reveal a fascist lurking underneath; the movie ends with the black character being raped in front of his half-aroused white lover, as the racist gang chant, "Fuck the monkey."
I decided to track down some gay fascists and ask them directly. Wyatt Powers, director of the ARC, says, "I always knew in my heart racist and gay were both morally right. I don't see any conflict between them. It's only the Jew-owned gay press that tries to convince us that racialism is the same thing as homophobia. You can be an extreme nationalist and gay without any contradiction at all."
One comment board on a gay racist website goes even further into racist lunacy. One gay man from Ohio says, "Even if you are gay and white, or retarded and white, YOU ARE WHITE, BOTTOM LINE! Instead of letting the white race go extinct because of worthless races such as the Africans or Mexicans popping out literally millions of babies a day, we have to fight this fucked up shit they are doing. They are raping our country." It's true that racism and homophobia do not necessarily overlap - but as Rabbi Bernard Melchman explains, "Homophobia and anti-Semitism are so often part of the same disease." Racists are usually homophobic. Even after reading all their web rantings, I didn't feel any closer to understanding why so many gay men ally themselves with people who will almost always turn on them in the end, just as the Nazis did.
Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has a sensitive and intriguing explanation. "There are many reasons for this kind of thing," he says. "Some of them are in denial. They are going for hyper-masculinity, the most extreme possible way of being a man. It's a way of ostentatiously rejecting the perceived effeminacy of the homosexual 'Other'. These troubled men have a simple belief in their minds: 'Straight men are tough. Queers are weak. Therefore if I'm tough I can't be queer.' It's a desperate way of proving their manhood."
'Searchlight' magazine - the bible of the British anti-fascist movement, with moles in every major far-right organisation - offers an alternative explanation. "Generally condemned by a society that continues to be largely hostile to gays, some men may find refuge and a new power status in the far right," one of their writers has explained. "Through adherence to the politics espoused by fascist groups, a new identity emerges - one where they aren't outcasts, because they are White Men, superior to everyone else. They render the gay part of their identity invisible - or reject the socially less acceptable parts, like being feminine - while vaunting what they see as superior."
But there's another important question: will fascist movements inevitably turn on gay people? In the case of the Nazis, it seems to have been fairly arbitrary; Hitler's main reason for killing Rohm was unrelated to his sexuality. From my perspective as a progressive-minded leftie, all fascism is evil; but should all gay people see it as inimical to their interests? Is it possible to have a gay fascist who wasn't acting against his own interests? Fascism is often defined as "a political ideology advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies equality to certain groups." It's true that this hierarchy could benefit gay people at the expense of, say, black people. But given the prevalence of homophobia, isn't that - even for people who don't see fascism as inherently evil - a terrible risk to take? Won't a culture that turns viciously on one minority get around to gay people in the end? This seems, ultimately, to be the lesson of Ernst Rohm's pitiful, squalid little life.
The growing awareness of the role gay men play in fascist movements has been abused by some homophobes. In an especially nutty work of revisionist history called 'The Pink Swastika', the 'historian' Scott Lively tries to blame gay people for the entire Holocaust, and describes the murder of gay men in the camps as merely "gay-on-gay violence." A typical website commenting on the book claims absurdly, "The Pink Swastika shows that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi homosexuals than there even was against homosexuals themselves."
Yet we can't allow these madmen to prevent a period of serious self-reflection from the gay movement. If Bruce LaBruce is right, many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus can thrive. Do some gay people really still need to learn that fascists will not bring on a Fabulous Solution for gay people, but a Final Solution for us all?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.
By Johann Hari
Retrieved 02/09/09 from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-strange-strange-story_b_136697.html
The news that Jorg Haider - the Austrian fascist leader - spent his final few hours in a gay bar with a hot blond has shocked some people. It hasn't shocked me. This is a taboo topic for a gay left-wing man like me to touch, but there has always been a weird, disproportionate overlap between homosexuality and fascism. Take a deep breath; here goes.
Some 10,000 gay people were slaughtered in the Nazi death-camps. Many more were humiliated, jailed, deported, ethnically cleansed, or castrated. One gay survivor of the camps, LD Classen von Neudegg, has written about his experiences. A snapshot: "Three men had tried to escape one night. They were captured, and when they returned they had the word 'homo' scrawled across their clothing. They were placed on a block and whipped. Then they were forced to beat a drum and cheer, 'Hurrah! We're back! Hurrah!' Then they were hanged." This is one of the milder events documented in his book.
So the idea of a gay fascist seems ridiculous. Yet when the British National Party - our own home-grown Holocaust-denying bigots - announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism didn't blink. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was - including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It's time to admit something. Fascism isn't something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is - in part, at least - a gay thing, and it's time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.
Just look at our own continent over the past decade. Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn ran on blatantly racist anti-immigrant platform, describing Islam as "a cancer" and "the biggest threat to Western civilisation today." Yet with two little fluffy dogs and a Mamma complex, he was openly, flamboyantly gay. When accused by a political opponent of hating Arabs, he replied, "How can I hate Arabs? I sucked one off last night."
Jorg Haider blasted Austria's cosy post-Nazi politics to rubble in 2000 when his neo-fascist 'Freedom Party' won a quarter of the vote and joined the country's government as a coalition partner. Several facts always cropped up in the international press coverage: his square jaw, his muscled torso, his SS-supporting father, his rabid anti-Semitism, his hatred of immigrants, his description of Auschwitz and Dachau as "punishment centres". A few newspapers mentioned that he is always surrounded by fit, fanatical young men. A handful went further and pointed out that several of these young men are openly gay. Then one left-wing German paper broke the story everybody else was hinting at. They alleged Haider is gay.
Rumours of an Indian waiter with "intimate details" of Haider's body broke into the press. The Freedom Party's general manager Gerald Miscka quickly quit, amid accusations that he was Haider's lover. Haider's close gay friend Walter Kohler - who has been photographed showing off a holstered pistol while Haider chuckled - declared his opposition to outing politicians. Haider - who was married and has two children - kept quiet while his functionaries denied the rumours. The revelation that he died after leaving a gay bar suggests these rumours were true.
On and on it goes. If you inter-railed across Europe, only stopping with gay fascists, there aren't many sights you'd miss. France's leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was not batting for the straight side. Germany's leading neo-Nazi all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, "For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were 'especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.'"
And it wouldn't be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight. They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as "evil", and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying, "The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world's journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures repulsive."
But scratch to homophobic surface and there's a spandex swastika underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote a four-page pamphlet detailing his 'affair' with Nick Griffin. "Griffin sought out intimate relations with me," openly-gay Webster explained, "in the late 1970s. He was twenty years younger than me." Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, says it's all too plausible. Homosexuality is "extremely prevalent" in the upper echelons of the British far right, and at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement's organisers were gay, he claims.
Gerry Gable, editor of the anti-fascist magazine 'Searchlight', explains, "I have looked at Britain's Nazi groups for decades and this homophobic hypocrisy has been there all the time. I cannot think of any organisation on the extreme right that hasn't attacked people on the grounds of their sexual preference and at the same time contained many gay officers and activists."
Griffins' alleged gay affair would stand in a long British fascist tradition. The leader of the skinhead movement all through the 1970s was a crazed, muscled thug called Nicky Crane. He was the icon of a reactionary backlash against immigrants, feminism and the 'hippy' lifetsyle of the 1960s. His movement's emphasis on conformity to a shaven, dehumanised norm resembled classical fascist movements; Crane soon became a campaigner and leading figure in the National Front. Oh, and he was gay. Before he died of AIDS in the mid-1980s, Crane came out and admitted he had starred in many gay porn videos. Just before he died in 1986, he was allowed to steward a Gay Pride march in London, even though he still said he was "proud to be a fascist."
The rubber-soled friction between gay fascists and progressive British gay people sparked into anger in 1985 when the Gay Skinhead Movement organised a disco at London's Gay Centre. Several lesbians in particular objected to the "invasion" of the centre. They felt that the cult of "real men" and hypermasculine thugs was stirring up the most base feelings "in the very place, the gay movement, where you would least expect them."
And this Gaystapo has an icon to revere, an alternative Fuhrer to worship: the lost gay fascist leader Ernst Rohm. Along with Adolf Hitler, Rohm was the founding father of Nazism. Born to conservative Bavarian civil servants in 1887, Ernst Rohm's life began - in his view - in the "heroic" trenches of the First World War. Like so many of the generation who formed the Nazi Party, he was nurtured by and obsessed with the homoerotic myth of the trenches - heroic, beautiful boys prepared to die for their brothers and their country.
He emerged from the war with a bullet-scarred face and a reverence for war. As he put it in his autobiography, "Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order." After being disbanded, he tried half-heartedly to get a foothold in civilian life, but he saw it as alien, bourgeois, boring. He had no political beliefs, only prejudices - particularly hatred of Jews. Historian Joachim Fest describes Rohm's generation of alienated, demobbed young men humiliated by defeat as "agents of a permanent revolution without any revolutionary idea of the future, only a wish to eternalize the values of the trenches."
It was Rohm who first spotted the potential of a soap-box ranter called Adolf Hitler. He saw him as the demagogue he needed to mobilize support for his plan to overthrow democracy and establish a "soldier's state" where the army ruled untrammelled. He introduced the young fascist to local politicians and military leaders; they knew him for many years as "Rohm's boy." Gay historian Frank Rector notes, "Hitler was, to a substantial extent, Rohm's protégé." Rohm integrated Hitler into his underground movement to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
Rohm's blatant, out homosexuality seems bizarre now, given the gay genocide that was to follow. He talked openly about his fondness for gay bars and Turkish baths, and was known for his virility. He believed that gay people were superior to straights, and saw homosexuality as a key principle of his proposed Brave New Fascist Order. As historian Louis Snyder explains, Rohm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behaviour pattern of high repute... He flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted his cronies do the same. He believed straight people weren't as adept at bullying and aggression as homosexuals, so homosexuality was given a high premium in the SA." They promoted an aggressive, hypermasculine form of homosexuality, condemning "hysterical women of both sexes", in reference to feminine gay men.
This belief in the superiority of homosexuality had a strong German tradition that grew up at the turn of the twentieth century around Adolf Brand, publisher of the country's first gay magazine. You could call it 'Queer as Volk': they preached that gay men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented an elite, warrior caste that should rule. They venerated the ancient warrior cults of Sparta, Thebes and Athens.
Rohm often referred to the ancient Greek tradition of sending gay solider couples into battle, because they were believed to be the most ferocious fighters. The famous pass of Thermopylae, for example was held by 300 soldiers - who consisted of 150 gay couples. In its early years, the SA - Hitler and Rohm's underground army - was seen as predominantly gay. Rohm assigned prominent posts to his lovers, making Edmund Heines his deputy and Karl Ernst the SA commander in Berlin. The organisation would sometimes meet in gay bars. The gay art historian Christian Isermayer said in an interview, "I got to know people in the SA. They used to throw riotous parties even in 1933... I once attended one. It was quite well-behaved but thoroughly gay. But then, in those days, the SA was ultra-gay."
On June 30th 1934, Rohm was awoken in a Berlin hotel by Hitler himself. He sprang to his feet and saluted, calling, "Heil Mein Fuhrer!" Hitler said simply, "You are under arrest," and with that he left the room, giving orders for Rohm to be taken to Standelheim prison. He was shot that night. Rohm was the most high-profile kill in the massacre known as 'the Night of the Long Knives'.
Rohm had been suspected by Hitler of disloyalty, but his murder began a massive crackdown on gay people. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, described homosexuality as "a symptom of degeneracy that could destroy our race. We must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates."
German historian Lothar Machtan argues that Hitler had Rohm - and almost all of the large number of gay figures within the SA - killed to silence speculation about his own homosexual experiences. His 'evidence' for Hitler being gay is shaky and has been questioned by many historians, although some of his findings are at least suggestive. A close friend of Hitler's during his teenager years, August Kubizek, alleged a "romantic" affair between them. Hans Mend, a despatch rider who served alongside Hitler in the First World War, claimed to have seen Hitler having sex with a man. Hitler was certainly very close to several gay men, and never seems to have had a normal sexual relationship with a woman, not even his wife, Eva Braun.
Rudolph Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of Hitler's private thoughts on homosexuality. "It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the breeding pool the very men the Volk most needs." This idea - that homosexuality is 'contagious' and, implicitly, tempting - is revealing.
Rohm is venerated on the Homo-Nazi sites that have bred on the internet like germs in a wound. They have names like Gays Against Semitism (with the charming acronym GAS), and the Aryan Resistance Corps (ARC). Their Rohmite philosophy is simple: while white men are superior to other races, gay men are "the masters of the Master Race". They alone are endowed with the "capacity for pure male bonding" and the "superior intellect" that is needed for "a fascist revolution." The ARC even organises holiday "get-togethers" for its members where "you can relax amongst the company of our fellow white brothers."
So it's fairly easy to establish that gay people are not inoculated from fascism. They have often been at its heart. This begs the bigger question: why? How did gay people - so often victims of oppression and hate - become integral to the most hateful and evil political movement of all? Is it just an extreme form of self-harm, the political equivalent to the gay kids who slash their own arms to ribbons out of self-hate?
Gay pornographer and film-maker Bruce LaBruce has one explanation. He claims that "all gay porn today is implictly fascist. Fascism is in our bones, because it's all about glorifying white male supremacy and fetishizing domination, cruelty, power and monstrous authority figures." He has tried to explore the relationship between homosexuality and fascism in his movies, beginning with 'No Skin Off My Ass' in 1991. In his disturbing 1999 film "Skin Flick', a bourgeois gay couple - one black, one white - are sexually terrorised by a gang of gay skinheads who beat off to 'Mein Kampf' and beat up 'femmes'. He implies that bourgeois gay norms quickly break down to reveal a fascist lurking underneath; the movie ends with the black character being raped in front of his half-aroused white lover, as the racist gang chant, "Fuck the monkey."
I decided to track down some gay fascists and ask them directly. Wyatt Powers, director of the ARC, says, "I always knew in my heart racist and gay were both morally right. I don't see any conflict between them. It's only the Jew-owned gay press that tries to convince us that racialism is the same thing as homophobia. You can be an extreme nationalist and gay without any contradiction at all."
One comment board on a gay racist website goes even further into racist lunacy. One gay man from Ohio says, "Even if you are gay and white, or retarded and white, YOU ARE WHITE, BOTTOM LINE! Instead of letting the white race go extinct because of worthless races such as the Africans or Mexicans popping out literally millions of babies a day, we have to fight this fucked up shit they are doing. They are raping our country." It's true that racism and homophobia do not necessarily overlap - but as Rabbi Bernard Melchman explains, "Homophobia and anti-Semitism are so often part of the same disease." Racists are usually homophobic. Even after reading all their web rantings, I didn't feel any closer to understanding why so many gay men ally themselves with people who will almost always turn on them in the end, just as the Nazis did.
Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has a sensitive and intriguing explanation. "There are many reasons for this kind of thing," he says. "Some of them are in denial. They are going for hyper-masculinity, the most extreme possible way of being a man. It's a way of ostentatiously rejecting the perceived effeminacy of the homosexual 'Other'. These troubled men have a simple belief in their minds: 'Straight men are tough. Queers are weak. Therefore if I'm tough I can't be queer.' It's a desperate way of proving their manhood."
'Searchlight' magazine - the bible of the British anti-fascist movement, with moles in every major far-right organisation - offers an alternative explanation. "Generally condemned by a society that continues to be largely hostile to gays, some men may find refuge and a new power status in the far right," one of their writers has explained. "Through adherence to the politics espoused by fascist groups, a new identity emerges - one where they aren't outcasts, because they are White Men, superior to everyone else. They render the gay part of their identity invisible - or reject the socially less acceptable parts, like being feminine - while vaunting what they see as superior."
But there's another important question: will fascist movements inevitably turn on gay people? In the case of the Nazis, it seems to have been fairly arbitrary; Hitler's main reason for killing Rohm was unrelated to his sexuality. From my perspective as a progressive-minded leftie, all fascism is evil; but should all gay people see it as inimical to their interests? Is it possible to have a gay fascist who wasn't acting against his own interests? Fascism is often defined as "a political ideology advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies equality to certain groups." It's true that this hierarchy could benefit gay people at the expense of, say, black people. But given the prevalence of homophobia, isn't that - even for people who don't see fascism as inherently evil - a terrible risk to take? Won't a culture that turns viciously on one minority get around to gay people in the end? This seems, ultimately, to be the lesson of Ernst Rohm's pitiful, squalid little life.
The growing awareness of the role gay men play in fascist movements has been abused by some homophobes. In an especially nutty work of revisionist history called 'The Pink Swastika', the 'historian' Scott Lively tries to blame gay people for the entire Holocaust, and describes the murder of gay men in the camps as merely "gay-on-gay violence." A typical website commenting on the book claims absurdly, "The Pink Swastika shows that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi homosexuals than there even was against homosexuals themselves."
Yet we can't allow these madmen to prevent a period of serious self-reflection from the gay movement. If Bruce LaBruce is right, many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus can thrive. Do some gay people really still need to learn that fascists will not bring on a Fabulous Solution for gay people, but a Final Solution for us all?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Dirty, DIRTY, Eugh!!
I found this video over at http://rosephase.blogspot.com/2009/06/propaganda.html and I have to say, for a film that that rails so insistently against pornography, nudity and sexuality, it sure doesn't leave much to the imagination...
;)
Friday, June 5, 2009
Whatever Happened To... The Power Rangers??
Ok, well I knew that Jason the Red Power Ranger became a gay porn actor called Austin St John, but this really surprised me:
One of the guys on the original Power Rangers Show was just sentenced to death:
Actor SKYLAR DELEON has been sentenced to death for murdering Arizona couple TOM and JACKIE HAWKS. The former child star and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers regular has been convicted of chaining the couple to the anchor of the luxury yacht they were trying to sell him and throwing them overboard in 2004. Their bodies have never been found. Deleon then claimed the boat as his own. His lawyer pleaded for a life sentence, but the jury chose to serve up the most severe penalty. Orange County Superior Court Judge Frank F. Fasel imposed the death sentence recommended on Friday (10Apr09). DeLeon was also convicted in the 2003 killing of John Jarvi.
http://niketalk.yuku.com/topic/168488
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Pornocalypse Now
(stolen from AdBusters at http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/83/pornocalypse_now.html)
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”—George Orwell
Now that Gitmo is basically kaput and Bush’s war on the future has been replaced with Obama’s strategy for the present, is Orwell’s forewarning still relevant? Or has the real-world manifestation of the Orwellian already reached its peak and entered into decline?
Let me entertain you with a fantastic scenario – If Orwell had been born in 1984 rather than 1903, he would be a member of a subset of young men whose lives have been framed by two critical shifts in the mental landscape: the collapse of the global superpowers (USSR/US) and the rise of the pornography industry. Obviously there are countless events that have shaped the world in the past quarter century, but in terms of timing and impact, none have had such a profound effect on the average G8 20-something as the reshaping of conflict and sexual narratives. Just as the war on terror mainstreamed the notion of war without actual war, the pornography industry has successfully popularized sex without sex. So what would this bizarro Orwell be getting up to while the world totters on the brink of depression? Plumbing the depths of the English language or playing Call of Duty in his underwear? As newspapers are dying off quicker than Mexican salamanders, our young Orwell would probably not be a down-and-out journalist, but more likely a disengaged copywriter – his dystopian prose taking on an entirely different shape and form:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a woman’s face. Now zoom out, it’s a slutty blonde bitch getting her ass hammered by two monster cocks. Coming soon to DVD, Nazi Sluts 9: Invasion of the Schwarzkommando!”
It’s the early ’90s, sometime during the beginning of the Clinton era, around the time that the Democrats put an end to the Republican war on porn that raged throughout the Reagan/Bush years. The Berlin Wall has crumbled and East Germans are no longer forced to smuggle in their contraband pornos from the liberated West. Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms have made it possible for Moscovites to get their hands on Japanese camcorders, the first small steps towards the production of Soviet smut.
History is so, like, over. Western liberal democracy has proven itself to be the superior form of human governance and capitalism is set to conquer the remaining holdouts by the end of the decade. This ideological evolution is made consummate by the image of a barrel-chested David Hasslehoff, running in slow motion down a sunbathed beach with nothing but tits ’n ass heat-waving in the periphery. This is, in the words of Slavoj Žižek, the true utopia.
“Professional ethics … I’m not just a doctor, I’m a man!”
I’m sitting in a rumpus room with some friends, surrounded by a pastiche of half-empty bottles of Crystal Pepsi, Cherry Coke, miscellaneous snack standards and bits and pieces of Super Nintendo paraphernalia.
The tips of my fingers are stickied with thousands, if not millions, of microscopic junk particles that have joined to create a thin, coagulated coating of Cheetos-brand neon magic cheese dust.
I let the plastic Cheetos bag fall onto the epically-outdated shag carpet and I’m licking my fingers one by one – lapping up the Sunset Yellow FCF (CI 15985 or Yellow No. 6), the disodium-based colorant that gives Cheetos their trademark hue. My eyes are glued to the TV. It’s a newer Japanese model that’s connected by an analog umbilical of tangled black wires to an oversized VCR that loads chunky VHS tapes from the top.
Beyond the faint hum of the machinery, my mates’ chuckles and gasps and the crunching sound of cheesy poofs, my ears are keenly attuned to the dialogue of the “film” that’s got us so transfixed.
“Fuck my pussy doctor!” the nurse commands, putting an end to the corndog foreplay that I thought would never cease. She then lays herself out on the examination table and spreads her milky thighs wide open as the shot dissolves into a close-up of a mustachioed physician’s abstractly penetrating gaze.
And so it began. My virgin eyes were submerged into an ocean of luma-chroma sex acts and the outrageous poetics of consumerist eros: turgid hard-ons mechanically harpooning seeping vaginal canals and gracefully spraying sperm streams atop mountainous titties with their omnipresent nipple peaks.
But my encounters with the world of adult home videos were rare. Like Playboy or Hustler, skin flicks had to be obtained indirectly, usually through an older bro who would just end up taking your money and keeping the booty for himself.
And then everything changed, drastically. The nightly news told a story about some hicks in Oklahoma City who had detonated their imaginary Death Star with a truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Boom: disconnected body parts strewn about and a federal building torn into shreds within seconds. Pundits and experts alike labeled the attack as an act of domestic terrorism. But the tasseography of the news ticker was of no interest, the television had become redundant and outdated. I was 14 and a friend had just gotten a 14.4 US Robotics dial-up modem – our ticket to unchecked informational freedom and, more importantly, thousands of pictures of naked women.
In tune with my demographic dropping its collective nutsack, pornography transformed from a primarily physical medium into a limitless stream of easily accessible imagery. Production costs bottomed out, profits exploded and a booming transnational porno industry came into its own.
The mass appeal of Deep Throat,-era sex cinema hits was resurrected in the form of downloadable masturbation resources. Only now, rather than experiencing sex media in a gender-inclusive mainstream setting, Internet pornography catered primarily to the individual male’s niche desires. Jerk-off fantasies were the dominant leitmotifs of the early Internet – its raison d’être. The Internet was, and still is, for porn. In the ever-expanding webiverse, pornographic imagery supplied the perfect vacuum in which blogs, social networking and YouTube could come into existence. Buoyed by this exponential growth and the backing of media conglomerates like News Corp, the production of hard-core video increased by 700 percent from 1992 to 2005, with worldwide revenues clocking in at nearly $100 billion. Porn had officially arrived, and its enviable profit margins forced “legit” mass media to gradually conform to the aesthetic of its fleshy contours.
It was as if the white noise of consumerism had turned a shade of hot pink. All of a sudden the leader of the free world was evoking Peter North via René Magritte à la “this is not a blow job.” Soon after, the world gasped as two giant metal phalluses penetrated the twin monoliths of capitalist civilization. A blockbuster snuff film to ring in the new century, the “I can’t look but I must” sensation of the 9/11 tape loop would go on to serve as the stylistic precursor for 2 Girls 1 Cup.
-$-
Fast-forward to the summer of 2007. I’m 26 and I’ve been tapped by a bro to do a shoot for a website that specializes in “gangsta porn” – tattooed bad-girls tricked out with sawed-off shotguns and a “fuck the world” attitude.
I walk into the makeshift studio and there are a number of naked and semi-naked porn “stars” (white dwarfs really) floating around like wandering livestock. After drilling back a couple vodka tonics, I follow the girls over to a cheap white-paper backdrop and we get to into it. “Spread your legs,” I say. “Eat her pussy out, yeah, that’s it, oh fuck yeah.” I’m just regurgitating tired clichés but it feels natural, like swinging a bat or popping a jump shot. Hostile facial contortions and faux cunnilingus ensue. The producer is up to his eyeballs in blow, pacing back and forth, his teeth chattering up and down like a wind-up toy.
Around the same time that I’m snapping snatch for a hundred bucks an hour, a fellow that goes by the nom de guerre of Max Hardcore is on his way to prison for obscenity offences, the first victim of the Bush administration’s reignition of the Bible Belt’s anti-porn crusades.
An infamous character even within the industry, Mr. Hardcore is a noteworthy pioneer of the gonzo subgenre – a grimy lo-fi POV style that champions a depraved and misogynistic approach to adult video. The typical Hardcore film features female performers who are made to look like prepubescent teens, schoolgirls who skip class to get brutalized by Mr. Hardcore himself.
A Wisconsin-born, cowboy hat-wearing opportunist, Hardcore took advantage of the mid ’90s amateur boom and has steadily pushed the limit ever since. His work foreshadows the style of video (no plot and little pretense) that now dominates Internet upload sites: an increasingly violent performance style dubbed “abuse porn.”
I’m browsing a porn upload site, watching a scene from a Hardcore compilation vid, and writing the sentence you are reading right now, my MacBook on my lap nuking any possibility of future offspring. The video features a performer dressed up to appear as if she were 13, she’s sucking off Hardcore in the most hard-core of manners, so forcefully that she begins to vomit through her nose. Hardcore responds by urinating into her mouth and onto her face and with urine in her eyes and mascara running down her cheeks, she starts looking like a battered clown. In the next clip Hardcore is pulling on her hair and shoving a dildo down her esophagus and she begins to fake cry, which turns out to be more disturbing than if she were to shed real tears.
Not my cup of tea. I continue to surf, looking for a video that features Sasha Grey, who should be calling me for an interview at any moment. Grey, 21, is the porno industry’s public relations wet dream come true. She has already performed in over 100 adult films and stars in Steven Soderbergh’s arthouse feature The Girlfriend Experience. She’s slated to be the “next Jenna Jameson,” and might be the first porn star to successfully convert her adult video (AV) celebrity into a legit acting career. What interests me about Grey is that she represents a notable shift in the pornographic ideal – she doesn’t project the typical persona that we’ve come to accept as the standard AV schtick. She’s young and calculated and delivers performances that are provocatively masculine. A quick Google reveals that her personal brand is rooted in the alternative. She’s done an American Apparel advertising campaign, promotes herself as a quasi-postfeminist intellectual and frequently name-drops the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The first video that pops up is titled Sasha Grey Anal. I click play figuring it will provide a good warm-up for our phoner. It starts with a close-up of Grey’s lips and she is directly addressing the viewer:
“I want to be your sex slave, I want you to hurt me, I want you to make me cry. I’ll do anything, anything at all, whatever you want, I’m such a fucking whore, I need to train, I need to be broken, I want you to fucking hurt me.”
A couple of minutes later some dude is holding the camera and staring down at Grey, who is staring up at us while giving one of her trademark ‘throat fuck’ blowjobs. She sounds like she’s choking, and the dude starts to drag her by the hair with his cock still in her mouth.
Then the phone rings, not in the video, but in my apartment. It’s her, the real Sasha Grey, as opposed to the porno-world Sasha Grey flickering on my laptop.
“What does the word pornographic mean to you?”
“To me it’s not just people having sexual encounters, or pictures of people having sex in magazines. More than half of the news we see on television today is pornographic because it’s not real news. It’s pure junk for the mind…They are manipulating the audience to feel a certain way. It’s all encompassing. American Idol is pornographic, completely exploiting people’s talent or lack of talent for television ratings.”
On screen, Sasha is gagging on a dildo that the dude has just pulled out of her ass. “Choke yourself on it” he says. I skip ahead a few minutes and Sasha is presenting to the viewer a rather apt existential dilemma:
“Is that what you fucking want? You want this filthy whore’s tight little asshole?"
The real Sasha Grey says in my left ear:
“… I think we’re still very repressed, especially in America. It comes back to what does pornography mean. In Europe there are more films that have to do with sexuality than violence and here in America it is the opposite. And I think we can sell sex all day on television, in magazines and on billboards but when it comes down to it people are still afraid to talk about their sexuality …”
“So are we lacking an important dialogue?”
“Definitely, It’s still embarrassing. If you try to speak with a Midwest housewife, or a young 20-something from the Midwest and say cunt or pussy she is going to freak out, even if you say vagina – for some of them, the word vagina is a disgusting, vile word. You have to say ‘down there.’ It’s really bizarre.”
The calm, thoughtful tone of her voice creates an unsettling sensual cocktail when mixed with the vacancy of her pixilated hazel eyes, an oasis of “the real” in a desert of unreality. Or perhaps it’s just a mirage or a “lovemark,” as marketing guru Kevin Roberts might say. The Sasha Grey brand is an ideal vehicle for the normalization of porn because she’s a willing industry activist who genuinely believes that the consumption of her videos promotes a positive understanding of sexual health.
But has our outlook on sex become so pornofied that we’re willing to accept 20 minutes of vacuous anal sex as sex-positive edutainment? Although porn has been embraced by feminists looking to shrug off the failures of the Dworkin era, the discussion that predominates current analysis of the medium tends to ignore the nature of the industry’s core demographic: males, aged 18-29.
If the average porn consumer – a male North American, Japanese or European 20-something – were to walk into a doctor’s office and receive a virility exam, the results would be abysmal. Due to our toxic living standards and the prevalence of untested chemicals in the social environment, the male gender has recently entered into rapid physiological and genetic decline.
In affluent, industrialized nations, the birth of males has dropped every year for the past 30 years. Genital defects, learning disabilities, autism, ADD and a variety of other afflictions have all skyrocketed in males while remaining comparatively low in females. But perhaps the most telling indicator of the male plight comes down to that which is essentially synonymous with the pornographic: sperm. The average Gen Y bro has a sperm count that is 50 percent lower than his father’s and, of the few spermazoids he does have, 85 percent of them are genetically damaged. According to Dr. Fernando Marina, fertility expert at Barcelona’s CEFER Reproduction Institute, if this trend continues, all men will be infertile within 60 years.
On a genetic level, the male gender is crumbling, which almost seems natural when one considers the fragmented state of modern masculinity.
On the other end of the feminist spectrum of opinion from Sasha Grey is Virginie Depentes, who initially gained notoriety (and infamy) with the release of her book/film Baise Moi (Fuck Me), which follows the story of a part-time prostitute and a part-time porn actress as they go on a hyper-sexual, murderous rampage against the rape-prone patriarchal society that oppresses and humiliates them. In her latest book, King Kong Theory, Despentes states:
“Pornography hits the blind corner of reason. It directly addresses our primitive fantasies, bypassing words and thought. The hard-on or wetness comes first, wondering why follows behind. Self-censorship reactions are shaken. Porn images don’t give us any choice: here’s what turns you on, here’s what makes you respond.”
I recently had a discussion with Despentes on the subject of porn and masculinity, during which she commented:
“In front of climate change or economic crisis, men and women are equal. We are being confronted with something very big … I don’t think men are trying to understand what masculinity is like women did with femininity in the ’70s. Lots of women asked themselves ‘what was femininity?’ Men seem to think masculinity is so natural. It’s not.”
In her work, Despentes raises two very interesting points pertaining to the pornographic dialogue. First, that the traditional anti-porn stance on how violent and misogynistic material incites rape and violence towards women is false due to an inaccurate analysis: pornography actually subdues rather than provokes. Consuming pornography does not lead to more sex, it leads to more porn. Much like eating McDonalds everyday will accustom you to food that (although enjoyable) is essentially not food, pornography conditions the consumer to being satisfied with an impression of extreme sex rather than the real.
Second, unlike women, men have largely failed to re-evaluate their sense of purpose in the 21st century. Feminism as a social revolution resulted in the emancipation of the female and the displacement of traditional male roles. Rather than making a conscious effort to resituate “the masculine” in the context of rising gender equality, heterosexual men have in many ways fallen into a subconscious, anti-feminine counterrevolution.
And this takes us back to our imaginary Orwell. Picture him sitting on a couch, in his underwear, at 2:00 a.m. His naked profile lit by the warm glow of a laptop screen. He’s surfing the net, reading about how Hitler invented the first sex doll, which prompts him to play a quick round of Call of Duty. He’s tossing grenades and sniping Nazis, but then he gets bored so he pops in a bukkake DVD and tosses off to the image of a female performer being submerged in seminal fluid. He’s satiated and disconnected but in the virtual world he’s still a dominant, violent, virulent alpha male.
The porn industry, now bigger than Hollywood and pro sports combined, has facilitated the transformation of sex into a liquid consumer good. There is nothing left to separate the individual from the market and the industry’s success has also produced a feedback loop that results in its own intensification. In order to compete with porn, the mainstream media appropriates the pornographic, which in turn forces porn producers and websites to create more vicious and chaotic content. The mainstream becomes porn and porn gradually edges closer to snuff.
Of course very little of this sexual media reflects reality in any way. When watching hard-core porn, one is struck by the message it so desperately attempts to communicate: sex is boring. And the more violent the porn, it seems, the more anti-sex its message. But could anything be further from the truth? Isn’t having sex with another living, human being the one thing that provides the most intense connection with the present moment?
As our surroundings become inundated with pornographic imagery aimed at keeping us plugged into the feedback loop, it’s easy to get distracted from what’s going on beyond all the hot pink noise. It’s in this fog of fake fucking that man sleepwalks closer toward an abyss of genetic implosion, environmental destruction and total economic collapse.
But crisis can precipitate change, and what needs to occur now is the genesis of a new “masculinism” – a philosophy of man that embraces the achievements of feminism and strives to reconnect with the real.
Since the beginning of America’s recession, over 80 percent of those who’ve been laid off have been men. This ironic byproduct of pay inequality provides a couple of great opportunities: the chance for a radical shift in gender relations, and the chance for men to rediscover how to subsist outside of the tyranny of consumer ease.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The last of the great film-school slackers, Douglas Haddow now works as a writer/designer/consultant in Vancouver, British Columbia. He enjoys reading, bike-riding, sunny days, tasty waves and positive vibrations. He has a blog: pblks.com
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”—George Orwell
Now that Gitmo is basically kaput and Bush’s war on the future has been replaced with Obama’s strategy for the present, is Orwell’s forewarning still relevant? Or has the real-world manifestation of the Orwellian already reached its peak and entered into decline?
Let me entertain you with a fantastic scenario – If Orwell had been born in 1984 rather than 1903, he would be a member of a subset of young men whose lives have been framed by two critical shifts in the mental landscape: the collapse of the global superpowers (USSR/US) and the rise of the pornography industry. Obviously there are countless events that have shaped the world in the past quarter century, but in terms of timing and impact, none have had such a profound effect on the average G8 20-something as the reshaping of conflict and sexual narratives. Just as the war on terror mainstreamed the notion of war without actual war, the pornography industry has successfully popularized sex without sex. So what would this bizarro Orwell be getting up to while the world totters on the brink of depression? Plumbing the depths of the English language or playing Call of Duty in his underwear? As newspapers are dying off quicker than Mexican salamanders, our young Orwell would probably not be a down-and-out journalist, but more likely a disengaged copywriter – his dystopian prose taking on an entirely different shape and form:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a woman’s face. Now zoom out, it’s a slutty blonde bitch getting her ass hammered by two monster cocks. Coming soon to DVD, Nazi Sluts 9: Invasion of the Schwarzkommando!”
It’s the early ’90s, sometime during the beginning of the Clinton era, around the time that the Democrats put an end to the Republican war on porn that raged throughout the Reagan/Bush years. The Berlin Wall has crumbled and East Germans are no longer forced to smuggle in their contraband pornos from the liberated West. Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms have made it possible for Moscovites to get their hands on Japanese camcorders, the first small steps towards the production of Soviet smut.
History is so, like, over. Western liberal democracy has proven itself to be the superior form of human governance and capitalism is set to conquer the remaining holdouts by the end of the decade. This ideological evolution is made consummate by the image of a barrel-chested David Hasslehoff, running in slow motion down a sunbathed beach with nothing but tits ’n ass heat-waving in the periphery. This is, in the words of Slavoj Žižek, the true utopia.
“Professional ethics … I’m not just a doctor, I’m a man!”
I’m sitting in a rumpus room with some friends, surrounded by a pastiche of half-empty bottles of Crystal Pepsi, Cherry Coke, miscellaneous snack standards and bits and pieces of Super Nintendo paraphernalia.
The tips of my fingers are stickied with thousands, if not millions, of microscopic junk particles that have joined to create a thin, coagulated coating of Cheetos-brand neon magic cheese dust.
I let the plastic Cheetos bag fall onto the epically-outdated shag carpet and I’m licking my fingers one by one – lapping up the Sunset Yellow FCF (CI 15985 or Yellow No. 6), the disodium-based colorant that gives Cheetos their trademark hue. My eyes are glued to the TV. It’s a newer Japanese model that’s connected by an analog umbilical of tangled black wires to an oversized VCR that loads chunky VHS tapes from the top.
Beyond the faint hum of the machinery, my mates’ chuckles and gasps and the crunching sound of cheesy poofs, my ears are keenly attuned to the dialogue of the “film” that’s got us so transfixed.
“Fuck my pussy doctor!” the nurse commands, putting an end to the corndog foreplay that I thought would never cease. She then lays herself out on the examination table and spreads her milky thighs wide open as the shot dissolves into a close-up of a mustachioed physician’s abstractly penetrating gaze.
And so it began. My virgin eyes were submerged into an ocean of luma-chroma sex acts and the outrageous poetics of consumerist eros: turgid hard-ons mechanically harpooning seeping vaginal canals and gracefully spraying sperm streams atop mountainous titties with their omnipresent nipple peaks.
But my encounters with the world of adult home videos were rare. Like Playboy or Hustler, skin flicks had to be obtained indirectly, usually through an older bro who would just end up taking your money and keeping the booty for himself.
And then everything changed, drastically. The nightly news told a story about some hicks in Oklahoma City who had detonated their imaginary Death Star with a truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Boom: disconnected body parts strewn about and a federal building torn into shreds within seconds. Pundits and experts alike labeled the attack as an act of domestic terrorism. But the tasseography of the news ticker was of no interest, the television had become redundant and outdated. I was 14 and a friend had just gotten a 14.4 US Robotics dial-up modem – our ticket to unchecked informational freedom and, more importantly, thousands of pictures of naked women.
In tune with my demographic dropping its collective nutsack, pornography transformed from a primarily physical medium into a limitless stream of easily accessible imagery. Production costs bottomed out, profits exploded and a booming transnational porno industry came into its own.
The mass appeal of Deep Throat,-era sex cinema hits was resurrected in the form of downloadable masturbation resources. Only now, rather than experiencing sex media in a gender-inclusive mainstream setting, Internet pornography catered primarily to the individual male’s niche desires. Jerk-off fantasies were the dominant leitmotifs of the early Internet – its raison d’être. The Internet was, and still is, for porn. In the ever-expanding webiverse, pornographic imagery supplied the perfect vacuum in which blogs, social networking and YouTube could come into existence. Buoyed by this exponential growth and the backing of media conglomerates like News Corp, the production of hard-core video increased by 700 percent from 1992 to 2005, with worldwide revenues clocking in at nearly $100 billion. Porn had officially arrived, and its enviable profit margins forced “legit” mass media to gradually conform to the aesthetic of its fleshy contours.
It was as if the white noise of consumerism had turned a shade of hot pink. All of a sudden the leader of the free world was evoking Peter North via René Magritte à la “this is not a blow job.” Soon after, the world gasped as two giant metal phalluses penetrated the twin monoliths of capitalist civilization. A blockbuster snuff film to ring in the new century, the “I can’t look but I must” sensation of the 9/11 tape loop would go on to serve as the stylistic precursor for 2 Girls 1 Cup.
-$-
Fast-forward to the summer of 2007. I’m 26 and I’ve been tapped by a bro to do a shoot for a website that specializes in “gangsta porn” – tattooed bad-girls tricked out with sawed-off shotguns and a “fuck the world” attitude.
I walk into the makeshift studio and there are a number of naked and semi-naked porn “stars” (white dwarfs really) floating around like wandering livestock. After drilling back a couple vodka tonics, I follow the girls over to a cheap white-paper backdrop and we get to into it. “Spread your legs,” I say. “Eat her pussy out, yeah, that’s it, oh fuck yeah.” I’m just regurgitating tired clichés but it feels natural, like swinging a bat or popping a jump shot. Hostile facial contortions and faux cunnilingus ensue. The producer is up to his eyeballs in blow, pacing back and forth, his teeth chattering up and down like a wind-up toy.
Around the same time that I’m snapping snatch for a hundred bucks an hour, a fellow that goes by the nom de guerre of Max Hardcore is on his way to prison for obscenity offences, the first victim of the Bush administration’s reignition of the Bible Belt’s anti-porn crusades.
An infamous character even within the industry, Mr. Hardcore is a noteworthy pioneer of the gonzo subgenre – a grimy lo-fi POV style that champions a depraved and misogynistic approach to adult video. The typical Hardcore film features female performers who are made to look like prepubescent teens, schoolgirls who skip class to get brutalized by Mr. Hardcore himself.
A Wisconsin-born, cowboy hat-wearing opportunist, Hardcore took advantage of the mid ’90s amateur boom and has steadily pushed the limit ever since. His work foreshadows the style of video (no plot and little pretense) that now dominates Internet upload sites: an increasingly violent performance style dubbed “abuse porn.”
I’m browsing a porn upload site, watching a scene from a Hardcore compilation vid, and writing the sentence you are reading right now, my MacBook on my lap nuking any possibility of future offspring. The video features a performer dressed up to appear as if she were 13, she’s sucking off Hardcore in the most hard-core of manners, so forcefully that she begins to vomit through her nose. Hardcore responds by urinating into her mouth and onto her face and with urine in her eyes and mascara running down her cheeks, she starts looking like a battered clown. In the next clip Hardcore is pulling on her hair and shoving a dildo down her esophagus and she begins to fake cry, which turns out to be more disturbing than if she were to shed real tears.
Not my cup of tea. I continue to surf, looking for a video that features Sasha Grey, who should be calling me for an interview at any moment. Grey, 21, is the porno industry’s public relations wet dream come true. She has already performed in over 100 adult films and stars in Steven Soderbergh’s arthouse feature The Girlfriend Experience. She’s slated to be the “next Jenna Jameson,” and might be the first porn star to successfully convert her adult video (AV) celebrity into a legit acting career. What interests me about Grey is that she represents a notable shift in the pornographic ideal – she doesn’t project the typical persona that we’ve come to accept as the standard AV schtick. She’s young and calculated and delivers performances that are provocatively masculine. A quick Google reveals that her personal brand is rooted in the alternative. She’s done an American Apparel advertising campaign, promotes herself as a quasi-postfeminist intellectual and frequently name-drops the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The first video that pops up is titled Sasha Grey Anal. I click play figuring it will provide a good warm-up for our phoner. It starts with a close-up of Grey’s lips and she is directly addressing the viewer:
“I want to be your sex slave, I want you to hurt me, I want you to make me cry. I’ll do anything, anything at all, whatever you want, I’m such a fucking whore, I need to train, I need to be broken, I want you to fucking hurt me.”
A couple of minutes later some dude is holding the camera and staring down at Grey, who is staring up at us while giving one of her trademark ‘throat fuck’ blowjobs. She sounds like she’s choking, and the dude starts to drag her by the hair with his cock still in her mouth.
Then the phone rings, not in the video, but in my apartment. It’s her, the real Sasha Grey, as opposed to the porno-world Sasha Grey flickering on my laptop.
“What does the word pornographic mean to you?”
“To me it’s not just people having sexual encounters, or pictures of people having sex in magazines. More than half of the news we see on television today is pornographic because it’s not real news. It’s pure junk for the mind…They are manipulating the audience to feel a certain way. It’s all encompassing. American Idol is pornographic, completely exploiting people’s talent or lack of talent for television ratings.”
On screen, Sasha is gagging on a dildo that the dude has just pulled out of her ass. “Choke yourself on it” he says. I skip ahead a few minutes and Sasha is presenting to the viewer a rather apt existential dilemma:
“Is that what you fucking want? You want this filthy whore’s tight little asshole?"
The real Sasha Grey says in my left ear:
“… I think we’re still very repressed, especially in America. It comes back to what does pornography mean. In Europe there are more films that have to do with sexuality than violence and here in America it is the opposite. And I think we can sell sex all day on television, in magazines and on billboards but when it comes down to it people are still afraid to talk about their sexuality …”
“So are we lacking an important dialogue?”
“Definitely, It’s still embarrassing. If you try to speak with a Midwest housewife, or a young 20-something from the Midwest and say cunt or pussy she is going to freak out, even if you say vagina – for some of them, the word vagina is a disgusting, vile word. You have to say ‘down there.’ It’s really bizarre.”
The calm, thoughtful tone of her voice creates an unsettling sensual cocktail when mixed with the vacancy of her pixilated hazel eyes, an oasis of “the real” in a desert of unreality. Or perhaps it’s just a mirage or a “lovemark,” as marketing guru Kevin Roberts might say. The Sasha Grey brand is an ideal vehicle for the normalization of porn because she’s a willing industry activist who genuinely believes that the consumption of her videos promotes a positive understanding of sexual health.
But has our outlook on sex become so pornofied that we’re willing to accept 20 minutes of vacuous anal sex as sex-positive edutainment? Although porn has been embraced by feminists looking to shrug off the failures of the Dworkin era, the discussion that predominates current analysis of the medium tends to ignore the nature of the industry’s core demographic: males, aged 18-29.
If the average porn consumer – a male North American, Japanese or European 20-something – were to walk into a doctor’s office and receive a virility exam, the results would be abysmal. Due to our toxic living standards and the prevalence of untested chemicals in the social environment, the male gender has recently entered into rapid physiological and genetic decline.
In affluent, industrialized nations, the birth of males has dropped every year for the past 30 years. Genital defects, learning disabilities, autism, ADD and a variety of other afflictions have all skyrocketed in males while remaining comparatively low in females. But perhaps the most telling indicator of the male plight comes down to that which is essentially synonymous with the pornographic: sperm. The average Gen Y bro has a sperm count that is 50 percent lower than his father’s and, of the few spermazoids he does have, 85 percent of them are genetically damaged. According to Dr. Fernando Marina, fertility expert at Barcelona’s CEFER Reproduction Institute, if this trend continues, all men will be infertile within 60 years.
On a genetic level, the male gender is crumbling, which almost seems natural when one considers the fragmented state of modern masculinity.
On the other end of the feminist spectrum of opinion from Sasha Grey is Virginie Depentes, who initially gained notoriety (and infamy) with the release of her book/film Baise Moi (Fuck Me), which follows the story of a part-time prostitute and a part-time porn actress as they go on a hyper-sexual, murderous rampage against the rape-prone patriarchal society that oppresses and humiliates them. In her latest book, King Kong Theory, Despentes states:
“Pornography hits the blind corner of reason. It directly addresses our primitive fantasies, bypassing words and thought. The hard-on or wetness comes first, wondering why follows behind. Self-censorship reactions are shaken. Porn images don’t give us any choice: here’s what turns you on, here’s what makes you respond.”
I recently had a discussion with Despentes on the subject of porn and masculinity, during which she commented:
“In front of climate change or economic crisis, men and women are equal. We are being confronted with something very big … I don’t think men are trying to understand what masculinity is like women did with femininity in the ’70s. Lots of women asked themselves ‘what was femininity?’ Men seem to think masculinity is so natural. It’s not.”
In her work, Despentes raises two very interesting points pertaining to the pornographic dialogue. First, that the traditional anti-porn stance on how violent and misogynistic material incites rape and violence towards women is false due to an inaccurate analysis: pornography actually subdues rather than provokes. Consuming pornography does not lead to more sex, it leads to more porn. Much like eating McDonalds everyday will accustom you to food that (although enjoyable) is essentially not food, pornography conditions the consumer to being satisfied with an impression of extreme sex rather than the real.
Second, unlike women, men have largely failed to re-evaluate their sense of purpose in the 21st century. Feminism as a social revolution resulted in the emancipation of the female and the displacement of traditional male roles. Rather than making a conscious effort to resituate “the masculine” in the context of rising gender equality, heterosexual men have in many ways fallen into a subconscious, anti-feminine counterrevolution.
And this takes us back to our imaginary Orwell. Picture him sitting on a couch, in his underwear, at 2:00 a.m. His naked profile lit by the warm glow of a laptop screen. He’s surfing the net, reading about how Hitler invented the first sex doll, which prompts him to play a quick round of Call of Duty. He’s tossing grenades and sniping Nazis, but then he gets bored so he pops in a bukkake DVD and tosses off to the image of a female performer being submerged in seminal fluid. He’s satiated and disconnected but in the virtual world he’s still a dominant, violent, virulent alpha male.
The porn industry, now bigger than Hollywood and pro sports combined, has facilitated the transformation of sex into a liquid consumer good. There is nothing left to separate the individual from the market and the industry’s success has also produced a feedback loop that results in its own intensification. In order to compete with porn, the mainstream media appropriates the pornographic, which in turn forces porn producers and websites to create more vicious and chaotic content. The mainstream becomes porn and porn gradually edges closer to snuff.
Of course very little of this sexual media reflects reality in any way. When watching hard-core porn, one is struck by the message it so desperately attempts to communicate: sex is boring. And the more violent the porn, it seems, the more anti-sex its message. But could anything be further from the truth? Isn’t having sex with another living, human being the one thing that provides the most intense connection with the present moment?
As our surroundings become inundated with pornographic imagery aimed at keeping us plugged into the feedback loop, it’s easy to get distracted from what’s going on beyond all the hot pink noise. It’s in this fog of fake fucking that man sleepwalks closer toward an abyss of genetic implosion, environmental destruction and total economic collapse.
But crisis can precipitate change, and what needs to occur now is the genesis of a new “masculinism” – a philosophy of man that embraces the achievements of feminism and strives to reconnect with the real.
Since the beginning of America’s recession, over 80 percent of those who’ve been laid off have been men. This ironic byproduct of pay inequality provides a couple of great opportunities: the chance for a radical shift in gender relations, and the chance for men to rediscover how to subsist outside of the tyranny of consumer ease.
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The last of the great film-school slackers, Douglas Haddow now works as a writer/designer/consultant in Vancouver, British Columbia. He enjoys reading, bike-riding, sunny days, tasty waves and positive vibrations. He has a blog: pblks.com
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Quadruple Whammy -- SHAG Week, Deviant, CHAFF 2007
Queer enough?
What’s queer? Who’s queer?
These days, we usually use the word to talk about the ‘non-straight’ people in society, the obvious non-conformists like transsexuals, lesbians, gay men and bisexuals among us. Most of us understand ‘queer’ to mean same-sex orientation to some degree or the physical transition from one sex to the other, and for most intents and purposes, it suits just fine.
But who are we leaving out?
There are lots of other people out there who don’t call themselves straight but aren’t covered by our four ‘normal’ queer categories. Can the term ‘queer’ encompass all these many varied identities and behaviours?
First off the mark, how about people who are intersex, that is born neither male nor female, or some combination of both? Well of course, we queer people say earnestly, yes, obviously they belong under this umbrella with us. But we don’t think about them much, do we? We don’t make really make room in our communities for them, because we’re actually highly invested in people having ‘the right bits’. Gay girls emphatically want girl’s bits to play with, and gay guys are NOT welcoming of anyone who looks male overall but has some other sort of plumbing. Gay guys are positively elitist when it comes to the size and shape of certain organs. We're more about genitals than perhaps even straight people are. If the bits we expect to find aren't there, or are somewhat different, we react with something like disgust.
What about people who consider themselves transgender, but have no intention of making any sort of physical transition? The woman who secretly considers herself innately male, for instance, but lives an otherwise regular life? Or how about the ultra feminine woman, complete with all the plumbing, who is genetically male?
Shall we consider the transvestite – a straight man or woman who enjoys taking on the opposite gender only some of the time, with no interest in actually making a permanent transition? We in the queer community jump to the assumption that these people are bisexual or gay, given our experience with drag queens and kings, but surprisingly enough the vast majority of transvestites are actually heterosexual men.
What of the conventional male-female couple who enjoy swapping sexual roles and behaviours in the sack, celebrating their dual genderedness? A man may have no attraction to other men, and yet enjoy pretending to be a woman in the sack, and this role-playing is not that uncommon in women either. Similarly, there are men out there who would be considered ‘straight’ by all standards, except for their enjoyment of their female partner penetrating them with a sex toy or digit, and there’s a lot of resistance and discrimination toward these men among the majority male population. Surely, that qualifies them for queer status?
What about the man or woman who knows himself or herself to have the capacity to relate sexually to both men and women, who lives a happy, conventional life with the wife or husband and kids, never actively pursuing sexual relationships with anyone of the same-sex? In essence, a non-practicing bisexual? Queer enough? Do they need to be identified as queer? Maybe not, if queerness is qualified by participation in a lifestyle or community involving other queer people. But if it is, what of the celibate gay man or woman, someone who does not pursue sexual or social relationships with anyone, yet happily identifies as homosexual?
Recently in New Zealand, the tiny asexual community is striving to make itself heard. These are people who may have romantic interests and sometimes even sexual relationships with spouses, yet do not experience any sort of sexual attraction. That’s a difficult idea for a lot of us to get our heads around, but they’re here, and they’ll be queer, if we let them. Why not?
What are we to make of the straight man that chooses to have sex with men for convenience or out of a rejection of women? That’s not acceptable practice in the wider community – so is it queer? Or how about heterosexual platonic lovers, those happy few who choose never to have sex with their loved one - not just until they are married, but NEVER? They won’t be harassed by the heterosexual population at large, very likely, but they’ll certainly be considered odd or somehow faulty. Should we welcome such couples under our big queer umbrella?
And then there’s heterosexual polygamists and the polyamorous… those people who either have multiple spouses or multiple romantic relationships (FYI they’re not the same thing). Does a woman with two husbands living together in one household, sharing her romantically, fiscally and physically, count as queer? What about a man with a wife and a girlfriend or two who all know about each other and are happy with the arrangement? That’s definitely not acceptable in our day and age, though there are the beginnings of the tiniest whispers of social change around these issues.
The point I’m trying to make is that there is a vast array of diverse sexual behaviour out there that is in conflict with traditional conceptions of what it is to be ‘straight,’ ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable.’ By altering our notions of what it is to be queer, and inviting all those sex, love and gender nonconformists to share with us a position of confident opposition to the mandated model of heterosexuality in our culture, we can free our society of the expectation that weighs so heavily on so many of us. That’s the ‘queer’ I want to be a part of: a movement that stands in opposition to repression and conformity, that seeks to liberate and enable all to express their love, sexuality and many gendered identities.
Danny Rudd
Wank, wank, wank…
Is it mere coincidence that the idea of ‘the homosexual’ as an entirely separate type of human being emerged in the same century and culture as did the invention of the photographic image and the moving picture, or did the birth of these technologies in fact help create ‘the homosexual’ as a category of human, by making graphic imagery of same-sex sexual behaviours more accessible, thereby allowing greater numbers of men to cement their sexuality?
The historically recent emergence of visual technologies such as photography, print and film has allowed for the mass production of graphic depictions of human sexual behaviour. Inevitably, amongst the masses of ‘straight’ pornography made available by these technologies, some of these images were of same-sex behaviours. Now, I’m not suggesting for a moment that exposure to homosexual imagery actually causes homosexual urges, as it’s obvious that a person can have same sex attractions without having ever laid eyes on gay porn. There must have been a ready market for homosexual porn for it to have got off the ground at all. And clearly, homosexual sex acts occur in societies where the graphic image is absent. My argument, rather, is that it is the repeated, deliberate exposure to the static or moving depiction of exclusively male-male sex, in connection with masturbation, that has allowed a greater number of men than ever before to cement a preference for the type of sexual conduct depicted by homosexual pornography.
Let me explain how this happens in a little more detail. Through looking at images that depict certain behaviours (say, rimming or fellatio) and masturbating in contemplation of those images, a man creates a mental and perhaps even neural association between the behaviours he observes and sexual pleasure. He is then more likely to repeat the act of masturbation in response to the stimulus, in an attempt to recreate the initial pleasurable experience, and the more often he does this, the stronger the association becomes, until he finds himself unable to ‘get off’ in response to any other stimulus. I would suggest that this masturbatory process might in fact be responsible for more than the small-scale adoption of specific sex acts, that it is in fact largely responsible for creating an exclusive preference for one gender over the other. And maybe this has made exclusive homosexuality more prevalent in our Western societies than it might otherwise be. Commercial demand prompts greater supply and all the networking that goes with it, and before long there are enough people to form a rudimentary community.
In other words, gayness as an identity is largely the product of the male obsession with whacking off while looking at dirty pictures. I could be wrong, but I think there’s pretty good evidence for this assertion. For instance, in those cultures without ready access to film and print, where homosexual behaviour among men has been observed or reported, there is arguably more fluidity in male sexuality: the men almost without fail go on to develop sexual relationships with women after an ‘apprenticeship’ with older men, or they maintain sexual relationships with both men and women throughout their adult lives. In such cultures, actual communities founded on same-sex sexual behaviour are unheard of. Even historically, in classical societies such as those of the Greeks and Romans, it was considered the norm for men who engaged in homosexual sex acts to marry heterosexually and engage in heterosexual coupling as well. It is also telling that gay women, who are on the whole less likely to expose themselves to pornography, commonly report more fluidity in their sexual identity and expression than do gay men.
It would be fascinating to conduct sociological and psychological studies into this much neglected area of human behaviour… of course, no such studies have been proposed by mostly male queer theorists, who have much invested politically in the notion of homosexuality as something innate and immutable. Yes, the conception of inborn homosexuality has paved the way for rights and recognition, but increasingly as gay and bisexual women’s voices are heard, the biological determinist position looks less tenable.
Danny Rudd
A Challenge…
A lot of men these days proudly declare themselves feminists, or talk about being in touch with their feminine side… but what does that actually mean? Isn’t that an acknowledgement that each of us has a spark of female inside us? Doesn’t that mean we’re all just the tiniest bit transgendered? Funny, then, that we sensitive new age guys don’t give ourselves girl’s names.
Say what?
That’s a bit extreme, I hear you say, surely? The very idea makes even the most sensitive, most new age-y guys squirm. But if we are really, truly pro-female and comfortable with our inner femininity, however slight, we shouldn’t have any trouble with it. If we do, we’re hypocrites.
I gave myself a girl’s name. At first I kept it to myself, and that was weird enough. I found it hard just thinking of a girl’s name I could comfortably call myself… until I realised I wouldn’t feel comfortable with any girl’s name, because while I’m pretty darn feminist, I have some deep-seated discomfort with the idea of people calling me a girl in a derogatory way. Society tells us subtly that it’s not acceptable, and we listen. But after trying fairly androgynous-sounding names like Danni [sic] and Tara, I pushed myself and picked something more feminine, precisely because it made me uncomfortable. Then when I let my friends know I wanted to try it on for a day, they made it pretty obvious they thought I was being stupid, I got the message loud and clear. As a guy, I’m not allowed to be a Sarah.
But for a girl to have a guy’s name, like Terri or Jo, or even a name derived from a male name, like Geraldine or Paula, is quite normal… do you see the double standard here? It’s ok for a girl to ‘aspire’ to manliness, not just in name but in things like confidence and comfort of clothing and so on, but for a guy to look like a girl… that’s just not on. That’s because as a society, we still stupidly think there’s something inferior about femaleness. And that’s what’s behind effeminate males and drag queens being harassed and male-to-female transgender people being called immoral or perverted.
THAT’S not on.
So come on guys, put yourselves to the test… give yourself a girl’s name, even for just a day, and see if it makes you think or feel any differently. What are you afraid of?
Danny Rudd
Poison Seed
I don’t know whether I should be relieved or horrified that a lot of young bisexual and gay men these days don’t know what the term ‘bug chasing’ means.
According to that veritable fount of knowledge, Wikipedia: bugchasing (or bug chasing) is a slang term for a subculture of gay men who desire, and actively pursue HIV infection. Bugchasers ‘chase the bug’ by seeking sexual partners who are HIV positive for the purpose of having unprotected sex and sero-converting; ‘giftgivers’ are HIV+ men who attempt to infect bugchasers with HIV.
That’s insane, right? Why would anyone actually want to contract HIV?
There’s a lot of debate about how prevalent this behaviour actually is. A widely discredited article in Rolling Stone a couple of years back suggested that up to 25% of people who contract HIV do so on purpose, while some researchers consider it little more than an internet fantasy. But it does exist.
People who consider themselves bugchasers want to take control of their sex lives and destiny… basically, they see HIV infection as inevitable and just want to get it out of the way. A lot of them think using condoms is unnatural and gets in the way of their sexual pleasure by reducing the sensitivity of their penis. The problem is that these guys don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. Medications are available now which, while not curing the disease, can prolong an infected person’s life and to some extent hide the more unpleasant aspects. And in the States, doctors prescribe steroids to HIV+ men to prevent muscle wasting, and as a result a lot of positive men are able to achieve the trim, muscular looks the rest of us aspire to and desire.
Coupled with this, there is an alarming recent trend in gay pornography to glamorise ‘bare-backing’ or unprotected anal sex. There are now HIV+ gay porn stars saying that their positive status allows them to indulge in unprotected orgiastic behaviour without fear of the consequences, because they’ve already got the worst thing they can get, and thanks to the medications, it’s not doing them any noticeable harm. One such porn star is Treasure Island Media’s Dawson, the hulkingly well-built poster boy for ‘carefree’ HIV+ sexuality. So the message is clear: you can look hotter and get more sex if you've got the bug.
Sounds great, right? Trouble is, while outwardly you might look attractive and able to have as much sex as you want with whomever, there’s a whole lot else going on that the glamour account of HIV isn’t letting you in on. All those medications cause really uncomfortable and sometimes crippling side effects, and they’re not foolproof. You could get another strain of HIV from unsafe sex that your current medication can’t protect you from, get sick quickly and die unpleasantly. Or if you live in a country where the drugs aren’t covered by insurance or welfare and you can’t afford them, you’re in for an excruciating, drawn out death, being ugly to boot, as opportunistic skin infections tarnish your good looks.
The bugchasers could know all this, but they don’t. Why? Well, partly they’re just sick of hearing all the warnings, it’s like the news: you get desensitised after a while. But more so, the gay community is deeply age-segregated: we younger guys just don’t get to know the older guys because we don’t want them hitting on us. We’re only interested in the hot boys, who mostly happen to be young, like ourselves. This is all perfectly natural, really, we’re a pretty conceited lot, but this segregation means that we don’t hear the stories the older guys could tell. And maybe we don’t want to: we’re young, this is supposed to be the time of our lives, we don’t want to think about death. But the truth is, the older guys saw their friends, lovers and sex partners dying all around them, they haven’t forgotten, and now we’re at risk and we’re not listening to the stories that might help us to take more responsibility for ourselves and each other.
The point of all this is that it really is desperately important for all you guys who are having receptive anal sex, whether straight, bi or gay, to protect yourselves by insisting your sex partner(s) use condoms. Don’t be fooled into thinking it doesn’t matter – because getting HIV infection will seriously fuck up your life. I have friends who are positive, and all the discrimination, shame, cramps, diarrhoea, vomiting, lesions and blindness aren’t worth it. Believe me.
Danny Rudd
What’s queer? Who’s queer?
These days, we usually use the word to talk about the ‘non-straight’ people in society, the obvious non-conformists like transsexuals, lesbians, gay men and bisexuals among us. Most of us understand ‘queer’ to mean same-sex orientation to some degree or the physical transition from one sex to the other, and for most intents and purposes, it suits just fine.
But who are we leaving out?
There are lots of other people out there who don’t call themselves straight but aren’t covered by our four ‘normal’ queer categories. Can the term ‘queer’ encompass all these many varied identities and behaviours?
First off the mark, how about people who are intersex, that is born neither male nor female, or some combination of both? Well of course, we queer people say earnestly, yes, obviously they belong under this umbrella with us. But we don’t think about them much, do we? We don’t make really make room in our communities for them, because we’re actually highly invested in people having ‘the right bits’. Gay girls emphatically want girl’s bits to play with, and gay guys are NOT welcoming of anyone who looks male overall but has some other sort of plumbing. Gay guys are positively elitist when it comes to the size and shape of certain organs. We're more about genitals than perhaps even straight people are. If the bits we expect to find aren't there, or are somewhat different, we react with something like disgust.
What about people who consider themselves transgender, but have no intention of making any sort of physical transition? The woman who secretly considers herself innately male, for instance, but lives an otherwise regular life? Or how about the ultra feminine woman, complete with all the plumbing, who is genetically male?
Shall we consider the transvestite – a straight man or woman who enjoys taking on the opposite gender only some of the time, with no interest in actually making a permanent transition? We in the queer community jump to the assumption that these people are bisexual or gay, given our experience with drag queens and kings, but surprisingly enough the vast majority of transvestites are actually heterosexual men.
What of the conventional male-female couple who enjoy swapping sexual roles and behaviours in the sack, celebrating their dual genderedness? A man may have no attraction to other men, and yet enjoy pretending to be a woman in the sack, and this role-playing is not that uncommon in women either. Similarly, there are men out there who would be considered ‘straight’ by all standards, except for their enjoyment of their female partner penetrating them with a sex toy or digit, and there’s a lot of resistance and discrimination toward these men among the majority male population. Surely, that qualifies them for queer status?
What about the man or woman who knows himself or herself to have the capacity to relate sexually to both men and women, who lives a happy, conventional life with the wife or husband and kids, never actively pursuing sexual relationships with anyone of the same-sex? In essence, a non-practicing bisexual? Queer enough? Do they need to be identified as queer? Maybe not, if queerness is qualified by participation in a lifestyle or community involving other queer people. But if it is, what of the celibate gay man or woman, someone who does not pursue sexual or social relationships with anyone, yet happily identifies as homosexual?
Recently in New Zealand, the tiny asexual community is striving to make itself heard. These are people who may have romantic interests and sometimes even sexual relationships with spouses, yet do not experience any sort of sexual attraction. That’s a difficult idea for a lot of us to get our heads around, but they’re here, and they’ll be queer, if we let them. Why not?
What are we to make of the straight man that chooses to have sex with men for convenience or out of a rejection of women? That’s not acceptable practice in the wider community – so is it queer? Or how about heterosexual platonic lovers, those happy few who choose never to have sex with their loved one - not just until they are married, but NEVER? They won’t be harassed by the heterosexual population at large, very likely, but they’ll certainly be considered odd or somehow faulty. Should we welcome such couples under our big queer umbrella?
And then there’s heterosexual polygamists and the polyamorous… those people who either have multiple spouses or multiple romantic relationships (FYI they’re not the same thing). Does a woman with two husbands living together in one household, sharing her romantically, fiscally and physically, count as queer? What about a man with a wife and a girlfriend or two who all know about each other and are happy with the arrangement? That’s definitely not acceptable in our day and age, though there are the beginnings of the tiniest whispers of social change around these issues.
The point I’m trying to make is that there is a vast array of diverse sexual behaviour out there that is in conflict with traditional conceptions of what it is to be ‘straight,’ ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable.’ By altering our notions of what it is to be queer, and inviting all those sex, love and gender nonconformists to share with us a position of confident opposition to the mandated model of heterosexuality in our culture, we can free our society of the expectation that weighs so heavily on so many of us. That’s the ‘queer’ I want to be a part of: a movement that stands in opposition to repression and conformity, that seeks to liberate and enable all to express their love, sexuality and many gendered identities.
Danny Rudd
Wank, wank, wank…
Is it mere coincidence that the idea of ‘the homosexual’ as an entirely separate type of human being emerged in the same century and culture as did the invention of the photographic image and the moving picture, or did the birth of these technologies in fact help create ‘the homosexual’ as a category of human, by making graphic imagery of same-sex sexual behaviours more accessible, thereby allowing greater numbers of men to cement their sexuality?
The historically recent emergence of visual technologies such as photography, print and film has allowed for the mass production of graphic depictions of human sexual behaviour. Inevitably, amongst the masses of ‘straight’ pornography made available by these technologies, some of these images were of same-sex behaviours. Now, I’m not suggesting for a moment that exposure to homosexual imagery actually causes homosexual urges, as it’s obvious that a person can have same sex attractions without having ever laid eyes on gay porn. There must have been a ready market for homosexual porn for it to have got off the ground at all. And clearly, homosexual sex acts occur in societies where the graphic image is absent. My argument, rather, is that it is the repeated, deliberate exposure to the static or moving depiction of exclusively male-male sex, in connection with masturbation, that has allowed a greater number of men than ever before to cement a preference for the type of sexual conduct depicted by homosexual pornography.
Let me explain how this happens in a little more detail. Through looking at images that depict certain behaviours (say, rimming or fellatio) and masturbating in contemplation of those images, a man creates a mental and perhaps even neural association between the behaviours he observes and sexual pleasure. He is then more likely to repeat the act of masturbation in response to the stimulus, in an attempt to recreate the initial pleasurable experience, and the more often he does this, the stronger the association becomes, until he finds himself unable to ‘get off’ in response to any other stimulus. I would suggest that this masturbatory process might in fact be responsible for more than the small-scale adoption of specific sex acts, that it is in fact largely responsible for creating an exclusive preference for one gender over the other. And maybe this has made exclusive homosexuality more prevalent in our Western societies than it might otherwise be. Commercial demand prompts greater supply and all the networking that goes with it, and before long there are enough people to form a rudimentary community.
In other words, gayness as an identity is largely the product of the male obsession with whacking off while looking at dirty pictures. I could be wrong, but I think there’s pretty good evidence for this assertion. For instance, in those cultures without ready access to film and print, where homosexual behaviour among men has been observed or reported, there is arguably more fluidity in male sexuality: the men almost without fail go on to develop sexual relationships with women after an ‘apprenticeship’ with older men, or they maintain sexual relationships with both men and women throughout their adult lives. In such cultures, actual communities founded on same-sex sexual behaviour are unheard of. Even historically, in classical societies such as those of the Greeks and Romans, it was considered the norm for men who engaged in homosexual sex acts to marry heterosexually and engage in heterosexual coupling as well. It is also telling that gay women, who are on the whole less likely to expose themselves to pornography, commonly report more fluidity in their sexual identity and expression than do gay men.
It would be fascinating to conduct sociological and psychological studies into this much neglected area of human behaviour… of course, no such studies have been proposed by mostly male queer theorists, who have much invested politically in the notion of homosexuality as something innate and immutable. Yes, the conception of inborn homosexuality has paved the way for rights and recognition, but increasingly as gay and bisexual women’s voices are heard, the biological determinist position looks less tenable.
Danny Rudd
A Challenge…
A lot of men these days proudly declare themselves feminists, or talk about being in touch with their feminine side… but what does that actually mean? Isn’t that an acknowledgement that each of us has a spark of female inside us? Doesn’t that mean we’re all just the tiniest bit transgendered? Funny, then, that we sensitive new age guys don’t give ourselves girl’s names.
Say what?
That’s a bit extreme, I hear you say, surely? The very idea makes even the most sensitive, most new age-y guys squirm. But if we are really, truly pro-female and comfortable with our inner femininity, however slight, we shouldn’t have any trouble with it. If we do, we’re hypocrites.
I gave myself a girl’s name. At first I kept it to myself, and that was weird enough. I found it hard just thinking of a girl’s name I could comfortably call myself… until I realised I wouldn’t feel comfortable with any girl’s name, because while I’m pretty darn feminist, I have some deep-seated discomfort with the idea of people calling me a girl in a derogatory way. Society tells us subtly that it’s not acceptable, and we listen. But after trying fairly androgynous-sounding names like Danni [sic] and Tara, I pushed myself and picked something more feminine, precisely because it made me uncomfortable. Then when I let my friends know I wanted to try it on for a day, they made it pretty obvious they thought I was being stupid, I got the message loud and clear. As a guy, I’m not allowed to be a Sarah.
But for a girl to have a guy’s name, like Terri or Jo, or even a name derived from a male name, like Geraldine or Paula, is quite normal… do you see the double standard here? It’s ok for a girl to ‘aspire’ to manliness, not just in name but in things like confidence and comfort of clothing and so on, but for a guy to look like a girl… that’s just not on. That’s because as a society, we still stupidly think there’s something inferior about femaleness. And that’s what’s behind effeminate males and drag queens being harassed and male-to-female transgender people being called immoral or perverted.
THAT’S not on.
So come on guys, put yourselves to the test… give yourself a girl’s name, even for just a day, and see if it makes you think or feel any differently. What are you afraid of?
Danny Rudd
Poison Seed
I don’t know whether I should be relieved or horrified that a lot of young bisexual and gay men these days don’t know what the term ‘bug chasing’ means.
According to that veritable fount of knowledge, Wikipedia: bugchasing (or bug chasing) is a slang term for a subculture of gay men who desire, and actively pursue HIV infection. Bugchasers ‘chase the bug’ by seeking sexual partners who are HIV positive for the purpose of having unprotected sex and sero-converting; ‘giftgivers’ are HIV+ men who attempt to infect bugchasers with HIV.
That’s insane, right? Why would anyone actually want to contract HIV?
There’s a lot of debate about how prevalent this behaviour actually is. A widely discredited article in Rolling Stone a couple of years back suggested that up to 25% of people who contract HIV do so on purpose, while some researchers consider it little more than an internet fantasy. But it does exist.
People who consider themselves bugchasers want to take control of their sex lives and destiny… basically, they see HIV infection as inevitable and just want to get it out of the way. A lot of them think using condoms is unnatural and gets in the way of their sexual pleasure by reducing the sensitivity of their penis. The problem is that these guys don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. Medications are available now which, while not curing the disease, can prolong an infected person’s life and to some extent hide the more unpleasant aspects. And in the States, doctors prescribe steroids to HIV+ men to prevent muscle wasting, and as a result a lot of positive men are able to achieve the trim, muscular looks the rest of us aspire to and desire.
Coupled with this, there is an alarming recent trend in gay pornography to glamorise ‘bare-backing’ or unprotected anal sex. There are now HIV+ gay porn stars saying that their positive status allows them to indulge in unprotected orgiastic behaviour without fear of the consequences, because they’ve already got the worst thing they can get, and thanks to the medications, it’s not doing them any noticeable harm. One such porn star is Treasure Island Media’s Dawson, the hulkingly well-built poster boy for ‘carefree’ HIV+ sexuality. So the message is clear: you can look hotter and get more sex if you've got the bug.
Sounds great, right? Trouble is, while outwardly you might look attractive and able to have as much sex as you want with whomever, there’s a whole lot else going on that the glamour account of HIV isn’t letting you in on. All those medications cause really uncomfortable and sometimes crippling side effects, and they’re not foolproof. You could get another strain of HIV from unsafe sex that your current medication can’t protect you from, get sick quickly and die unpleasantly. Or if you live in a country where the drugs aren’t covered by insurance or welfare and you can’t afford them, you’re in for an excruciating, drawn out death, being ugly to boot, as opportunistic skin infections tarnish your good looks.
The bugchasers could know all this, but they don’t. Why? Well, partly they’re just sick of hearing all the warnings, it’s like the news: you get desensitised after a while. But more so, the gay community is deeply age-segregated: we younger guys just don’t get to know the older guys because we don’t want them hitting on us. We’re only interested in the hot boys, who mostly happen to be young, like ourselves. This is all perfectly natural, really, we’re a pretty conceited lot, but this segregation means that we don’t hear the stories the older guys could tell. And maybe we don’t want to: we’re young, this is supposed to be the time of our lives, we don’t want to think about death. But the truth is, the older guys saw their friends, lovers and sex partners dying all around them, they haven’t forgotten, and now we’re at risk and we’re not listening to the stories that might help us to take more responsibility for ourselves and each other.
The point of all this is that it really is desperately important for all you guys who are having receptive anal sex, whether straight, bi or gay, to protect yourselves by insisting your sex partner(s) use condoms. Don’t be fooled into thinking it doesn’t matter – because getting HIV infection will seriously fuck up your life. I have friends who are positive, and all the discrimination, shame, cramps, diarrhoea, vomiting, lesions and blindness aren’t worth it. Believe me.
Danny Rudd
Saturday, January 12, 2002
It's All Fucked Up
Walked into town from Ben and Becky's in the rain to meet Brent at Strawberry Fare, only to find that he wasn't there - Tall Steve rang him to tell him I was there waiting for him, and kept me company until he arrived. Apparently he hadn't thought I'd actually show up, and had decided to stay in bed.
We sat talking for about an hour, he seemed really nice and jolly, we ate desserts, which were really nice, and then he drove me in his little red suzuki alto to visit Adrian and Vicki at her parents' house in Proctor Street. Derek and Joan were really lovely, as usual, and it was nice to see Adrian and Vicki although of course I didn't say anything about my secret gay life, and then I walked to Bryce's work at the Cotswald Hotel.
I waited for Bryce in his car listening to his cds, and then when he finished work we spent the afternoon just hanging out. At seven, he dropped me off at the movie theatre where I'd arranged to meet Tall Steve and Brent, and Tall Steve had brought his partner along, Short Leon. We went and watched the brilliant new Pixar film, Monsters, Inc., followed by dinner in town.
Afterwards, we drove to a nice house not far from the centre of town, owned by some of Brent's friends. There were a whole bunch of gay guys there, it was going to be a movie night. They had a huge TV, and it was linked up to a computer. The host's partner disappeared up the stairs with some guy, and they were gone for a while, and I remember thinking he looked a bit sad about it, though I don't think I really cottoned on to what that might mean til later.
We sat around watching movies off the computer, and Tall Steve insisted that I lie down across his lap. He was stroking my leg, and I felt a bit uncomfortable, I could see his boyfriend Short Leon watching from across the room. They put on some weird porn, with a guy in a motorbike kelmet and nothing else fucking himself slowly with a traffic cone. I was getting really uncomfortable, because I was turned on, and went and hid in the bathroom, trying to compose myself. When I came out, I asked to leave, and Brent drove me back to Ben and Becky's house.
I got in the door, feeling pretty creeped out, and realised I'd left my hat at the house.
We sat talking for about an hour, he seemed really nice and jolly, we ate desserts, which were really nice, and then he drove me in his little red suzuki alto to visit Adrian and Vicki at her parents' house in Proctor Street. Derek and Joan were really lovely, as usual, and it was nice to see Adrian and Vicki although of course I didn't say anything about my secret gay life, and then I walked to Bryce's work at the Cotswald Hotel.
I waited for Bryce in his car listening to his cds, and then when he finished work we spent the afternoon just hanging out. At seven, he dropped me off at the movie theatre where I'd arranged to meet Tall Steve and Brent, and Tall Steve had brought his partner along, Short Leon. We went and watched the brilliant new Pixar film, Monsters, Inc., followed by dinner in town.
Afterwards, we drove to a nice house not far from the centre of town, owned by some of Brent's friends. There were a whole bunch of gay guys there, it was going to be a movie night. They had a huge TV, and it was linked up to a computer. The host's partner disappeared up the stairs with some guy, and they were gone for a while, and I remember thinking he looked a bit sad about it, though I don't think I really cottoned on to what that might mean til later.
We sat around watching movies off the computer, and Tall Steve insisted that I lie down across his lap. He was stroking my leg, and I felt a bit uncomfortable, I could see his boyfriend Short Leon watching from across the room. They put on some weird porn, with a guy in a motorbike kelmet and nothing else fucking himself slowly with a traffic cone. I was getting really uncomfortable, because I was turned on, and went and hid in the bathroom, trying to compose myself. When I came out, I asked to leave, and Brent drove me back to Ben and Becky's house.
I got in the door, feeling pretty creeped out, and realised I'd left my hat at the house.
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