DOG HELP ME 2

The sea off Firth Scotland is being routinely polluted by low-level radiation. The words ‘low-level’ I take no comfort from since they are self evidently meaningless. Soon there will be salmon in Waitrose sporting goatees or Brazilians- their enlarged genitals will have been morally moussed. The offending power station has been very ticked off by the appropriate authorities. We can all sleep easy then.

I once heard a quite connected story delivered with some delight by the Head of The Drama Department at my university. He attended my ethically bizarre wedding believing it to be a grave mistake on the parts of his two star students from that particular year. I remember him catching my eye whilst I was in full flood doing a Richard Burton on my reception speech- he’d seen the lie of it laid bare and in that glance he’d told me so. But I was young and thought an agreeable lie to make my family smile would be compostable. He knew differently and ultimately he was right. Every lie has inescapable resonances.

After a short seminar I’d been asked to stay behind with him and share a coffee- agreeable but not in itself an honour, he punctiliously favoured everyone the same. Though we would become close- friends almost, as I was with the Head Of College. At that time we discussed the urban myth of alligators in the sewers. Maybe he was testing my suggestibility. We went on to talk about the effects of increased levels of female hormone finding its way into the water table because of the vast uptake of the contraceptive pill and how it was reportedly changing the gender of fish and other water creatures. I remember feeling a little like a small boy who’d just twigged the awful truth that his dad was about to tell him old hat shit about the birds and the bees.

He sighed very wearily, just this safe side of despair and said that he had a friend, a research biologist, whose life’s work had concerned the cross-breeding and in-breeding of fish. This man’s house had an aquatic lab attached to it. In there, he said, were things he wished he’d never seen, living things that should have had no right to life. Apparently the embryos had been subjected to a variety of ‘foreign’ conditions. I do remember low-level radiation being one of them.

Now I am not generally a fan of freaks- three headed fish do not excite me. As a child, my father had taken me on his bony shoulders to see a travelling Freak Show. I was there being compulsively repelled and attracted a whole decade before Diane Arbus’ images hit me. There was a two headed lamb and a bearded lady and a darkness that smelled of wrong and straw and dried piss. I confess to a not altogether healthy fascination with dwarves and, before you waste your time, I can tell you there are no gay dwarf sites on the world wide web. Yes. Sad, I know. I have looked. A number of times. My man is 5’ 5’’. More than a dick’s length shorter than me.

I just wanted to say to the ignorant masses that the reproductive sex acts between a married couple where the man is gay and the woman is a lesbian do not produce freaks per se. Yes they will be different. They will be different because primarily their parent’s auras are somewhat gaudy and could not be described by Dulux as Papyrus. I rather like that. I’m not altogether sure that they do all of the time.

Next to that Senior Lecturer’s Study was an empty costume room I was using to construct savage crowns for a production of Oedipus- six inch nails and galvanised chicken wire. I was on my own. The door opened. I had company and he locked it, this adventurer from the year below me. With no pretence at subtlety he got his cock out. And so it went on- me alarmed that our gasps of breath might carry though the walls. He kissed my cheek before he went. Always knew you were, he told me, the engagement never fooled me.

I don’t remember his name but he was small in all departments except his eyes. His eyes were memorably huge, enormous, like you sometimes see in inbred goldfish. He waived his arms like fantails and was somewhat cold and noticeably slimy. Following in the footsteps of Lyall Watson, he was doing a degree in oceanography. We never exchanged another solitary word.

BUG-CATCHING BUTTS

To be honest I was neither shocked nor rocked by Gay Times' recent signature article on arse fucking 'Be A Better Bottom'- cute headline but the bottom line really is that it was not at all innovatively informative and was somewhat patronising; a sad trend for this gay glossy which survives on half its pages being devoted to pink pound advertising the largest percentage of which is for gratuitous sex services. Check out the increasingly graphic escort ads.

Surprise surprise but gay men do know about rectal sex! OK it took a Radio 1 DJ weeks to determine that Frankie Goes To Hollywood's hit 'Relax' was about butt stuffing but he was a straight man- the BBC do employ some.

Amazingly this pointless article- it gave no direct advice as to maximise cleanliness or minimise pain, ended with this quote by Gordon Mundie a health expert from the Terrence Higgins Trust 'People have been having anal sex for thousands of years. Straight men, heterosexual women and lesbians all stick stuff up their bottoms. The muscles in your arse will stretch but they'll go back to how they were. Lots of gay men have been taking it up the arse for years and I don't know any who are wearing a nappy as a result.'

It hurts- less with practice. A big cock hurts more. A fist- don't go there, though I know some do; they are masochists. Lube helps greatly AND a condom- always use water based lube to secure the barrier viability of the condom. Bleeding is not uncommon.

Research rectal douching- you can buy bathroom kits.

All that aside I find it deeply freaking to read that the gay world is still pussy footing about this subject which has always been far from a bunch of violets. Male rape happens- no candles and whale music there. There are 'sex with strangers' back rooms in almost every gay night club worldwide- without the light on any pretence at cleanliness is just laughable. Those places make sleaze pigs smile. When you fuck butt expect to encounter shit.

Gay Times, true to form, fought shy of the dark side- Madonna, Madonna. In the same arena there are young gay guys who are desperate to feel a sense of profound belonging and for them being fucked up the arse is just not enough- they crave to be gang banged by HIV positive gay men; they want to hurt, to bleed and get infected. They want that because they believe, in this twisted world, that without the virus they are not entirely gay. They call themselves bugcatchers and they go to bugcatching parties where the modus operandi is unsafe sex.

Try putting a gloss on that.

NOT OFTEN QUOTED

We may possibly be best defined, not by our visible wealth or what we wear, but by what we say or what we have committed to a document. [Tough that on the fame drenched simpletons such as Posh and Becks.] Damn! I must be proper fucked. Do I care? Not very much. That’s not apathy. The fact is I am something of a literary rogue, so lock up your brain’s thought daughters.

Quite able to charm and soothe I choose instead, as I think fit, to court confrontation, rape your virgin apathy, enjoy a brief dalliance with it, shoot my load and move on. Awake now? You should be- it is a fact that ejaculate always stings myopic eyes like merry hell.

'Ghastly God is late again, her love is vastly overrated.' Mmm. I wrote that. It defines me well.

I so love it, the lingering controversy- the Holy Roman Church infested with cassock lifters, the C-of-E wringing white knuckle hands over Women Bishops, Gay Bishops and [waiting in the wings] Transgender Bishops who might finally add a certain theatrical frissons to the patently silly act of being frocked or, more correctly, ‘putting on drag’ or ‘cross-dressing’. And in the bosom of these faiths and the vast majority of all religions there reside well woven nests of fundamental vipers- the Bigoted Sexist Bishops, the majority of whom are black asps, who will not ever desist in hissing their unspiritual poison. Schism is inevitable. Ayes to the right, Gay nays to the left. The rotten snakes. Yes. I am anti-theist, a faithist, but I am not a racist- my partner of twenty four years is a beautiful human being and half-caste. We sleep together, weep together, have consensual man-on-man sex together.

Christ may not have had at his disposal an equivalent word in Aramaic for ‘frottage’, but my guess is he would have understood this phenomenally pleasant sensation and maybe he would even have engaged in it with any one of his disciples. Could Judas have been a spurned bum chum whose jealousy wrought such mythic grief?

Even the majestic Massai of the present day turn passionately bi-curious when off hunting- an all male enterprise [like most religions] where, as per tradition, cunt is never on offer but nubile boys are. Besides which, on every date I’ve ever made with this flighty deity I’ve either been dumped or got fed up waiting. I am no longer intrigued by the empty promise of some holistic orgasm from this call-girl of the universe. Get real. If I were a choirboy I’d be sorely tempted, out of sheer boredom, to spank my bishop during evensong. The answer, as it is was written, sits in your own hands or hastily borrowed handkerchief.

PS

Do investigate the natural history of snails. They are able, in the absence of members of the opposite sex, to reproduce by fucking themselves. [Relatively uncharted porn-film waters.] I am told the sinning beasts are simply delicious with a buttery garlic sauce. Your idiosyncratic God just has to be a woman, GLBT to boot, a chef de cuisine, and she/he is nothing if not fiendishly inventive. Fuck! According to you she even made me. Call it an own goal if you like, a dribbling error by the perfect one. Bon appétit.

DOG HELP ME

I’ve never much taken to fish on any tangential meaning- you’d be a fool not to understand why I am not a fan of cunnilingus, though the word itself always seems to exert an element of moist charm or alarm. I like words that insinuate themselves into the psyche and take a while to dissipate like a bad smell. One of my longest standing female friends has this favourite phrase- house-guests like fish go off after three days. An instinctive disser of history I have always argued that our distant yesterdays could be brought to life if we finally got to grip with how our revered yesterdays actually stank. We shy away from this because we suspect correctly that they were rank. It becomes part of the complex tapestry of lies that we teach to our unsuspecting offspring. King Henry VIII smelled putrid, far higher than a pole-cat, that is a fact. However, it is all relative, because so did everyone else- except that person holding one of the highest offices in the land at the time ‘The King’s Arse Wiper’. Proud he may have been, rich even, but he would have reeked of the monarch’s shit.

One of my favourite books which, as usual, was made into a less than satisfactory film is the olfactoraly magnificent ‘Perfume’ by Patrick Susskind. The hero is born in a fish market, grows to fillet fish for a living but eventually becomes the finest perfumer in the whole of France- albeit one with a murderous obsession. Read it. It will educate your nose and more besides.

I recall some televisual feast based on the life of the playwright Marlowe- an alleged spy and predatory homosexual, a contemporary of Shakespeare. There was a scene where he had taken lodgings at an inn. It was usual to share rooms with strangers. He tries his luck and as luck would have it... It was screened after 10pm. I couldn’t help thinking then- as he was obviously giving head to the young man, what the ambient odour might have been. Was it predominantly parmesan or smoked kipper? This was not me being in any way perverse. This was me aching to get inside history- genital warts and all.

I know the court of wife-killing Henry was frightfully cold. Dutch master paintings of the period show the Thames frozen over and supporting fayres and red hot braziers roasting chestnuts. Indeed one Christmas the whole of his court left Hampton court on horseback and in horse-drawn carriages to return to London along the frozen river. This was the age of the cod-piece. I’d always pondered why the word cod. It was a decorative cricketer’s box that exaggerated the size of one’s very smelly cock. It was big enough to contain a pomander- a spiced dried orange spiked with cloves. Festive. Yum. Did the fashion come about one wonders because the extreme cold reduced the size of men’s flaccid dicks to the size of the smallest button mushroom- a not very approachable button mushroom.

My after-thought is this- all you wishful, wistful time travellers beware.