Best Sex Writing 2010 (20 page)

Vicky was my other running partner, less given to good-morning kisses. She was also the heartbreaker to beat all heartbreakers and to walk down the street with her was to walk with a star. Were it not so wildly inappropriate, the word
stud
might fit, but in any event, we would walk down the street together and she would point out her many conquests, some smiling back, some turning away pained and others wondering what the hell she was doing with the likes of me. She mentioned her friendships, as she called them, as casually as a gardener might extol the virtues of his (or her) gardenias.

We had tried to have sex just once, but her body was too well trained to allow it; still we were, in high school terms, dating, spending all our time with each other. Occasionally she would drift into someone’s arms and I would feel bereft and ridiculous. Once she spent a few days with the ex-girlfriend of one of my best male friends and there was an unhappy afternoon when this man and I sat in the park watching the two of them together across the way. We smoked and brooded and offered much bitter conjecture to each other about the nature of women who could leave men for other women. For the man who loves lesbians, lesbian sex is not enticing in the least. It is a threat to one’s dearest hopes. To watch the object of your desire cavort with another woman is to feel more than unmanly, it is to feel irrelevant.

If it seems contradictory to pine for the girl one would not kiss, the girl one would not have sex with, it should. There were layers upon layers of contradictions and confusions, a sea of mismatched identities identifying with one another. Of course it was strange but it was utterly within context. Half the businesses in town appeared to be lesbian-owned, from the coffee shop where we all commiserated to the hot tub emporium and the social center for that set, a fish restaurant cum nightclub called the Northstar. It was on a date with Vicky that things began to fall apart yet further. We were at the Green Street Cafe and quite unaccountably I found myself unable to tear my eyes off our waitress. Vicky humored me for a short time, filling me in on the gossip. Courtney was the waitress’s name. She was also known as a glamour dyke (she looked a little like Claudia Schiffer) and psycho, due to a public altercation with her last girlfriend that resulted in a knockout punch delivered on the dance floor of the Northstar. Presently Vicky wondered aloud if I might like to pay some attention to her instead of staring at the psycho glamour dyke. A scene developed. I didn’t care about her, she said, and before I could respond Vicky had stormed out, her food untouched.

In an essay in
Esquire,
the gay writer Jonathan Van Meter posited that the 1990s is the “Post-Gay Era.” His point was borne of personal experience; most of his friends had switched back and forth between gay and straight and he reasoned that after two decades of encroaching androgyny people had gotten down to liking people as opposed to genders. My own experience bore this out. My obsession had kept me firmly on the female track but most of my friends began to veer uncertainly. Courtney rather immediately settled into happy heterosexual domesticity with me and I reflect that of the three longish-term relationships I had,
all three women stayed with men—a poet, a fireman and a yoga guru respectively.

By the same token, my own propensity for the gay girls began to wane. Courtney certainly had much to do with that, or rather falling in love with her did. My friends, however, remained steadfast. I moved to New York and only kept up with Kate as the months went on. She would visit every few weeks and I would half-heartedly be her beard for the evening, going to such clubs as Meow Mix and the Clit Club. She introduced me to a coterie of women called, thanks to a newspaper article, the Muffia, a group of successful womyn (publicists, club owners, musicians and the like) but I failed utterly to feel a part of things. The playfulness was not there; we were all aging, or growing up perhaps.

One evening Kate asked me, plainly, to fuck her. “To spread her legs as wide as possible and to fuck the shit out of her” was her indelicate turn of phrase. I could barely muster the enthusiasm to say no, let alone explain my rejection. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. Her request had been made in the same plaintive yet icy tone as my first lesbian; everything had come full circle and I didn’t want to be there anymore.

I’ve visited Northampton a few times since then. Everyone has dispersed, changed, grown. Some sobered up, many married their partners in genuine ceremonies. Two couples had children by means of fertilization and one of those couples decided they needed a man in the house and a woman formerly known as Karen became, quite wholly, Ken. I reflected that there ought to be another button saying
I’m a man trapped inside a lesbian’s body (politic)
. Or perhaps just,
I’m a human being
.

Visions will linger, of course. At a suspiciously trendy yoga center in downtown Manhattan recently I was introduced to Ingrid Casares, the current pop-culture-friendly dyke of choice,
late of Madonna’s bed. Also there I bumped into a woman I’d known in Northampton, a formidable entity who’d broken Cambria’s heart. She strode up to me and shook my hand firmly and I thought of the things Cambria told me she’d done with that hand and I felt the old tug of irrelevant lust, just a tinge.

Called upon to sign legislation banning lesbian sex, Queen Victoria is said to have refused on the grounds that she could not imagine what on earth women could possibly do with one another. After an immersion in the culture I have to say that I echo the Queen’s sentiment. There is something mysterious and wonderful that I never could put my finger on. The space between all of us is vast enough, but between them, and for a short time between us, that space seemed much closer, less unforgiving, more welcoming.

In
A Moveable Feast,
Ernest Hemingway wrote that to live in Paris in the 1920s was to be the luckiest of men. Noting that Hemingway’s talent did not begin to fly until the intervention of Gertrude Stein, I would add that Northampton in the 1990s was quite the most magical of places. I’ve done things backward—gazed at my cake through my twenties and only started devouring it now. I might add, in a not entirely male fashion, that it tastes better this way.

 

 

There is something innately pornographic about comic books. Something about the form itself, the uninhibited passion of everything from the bright, gaudy colors on dirty newsprint to the characters’ exuberant declarations of heroism, villainy, love, and despair, inspires the pornographic imagination. Nothing is ever done halfway in comics, either physically or emotionally, and even the blandest books keep sexuality simmering right under the surface. Comics fans may almost universally revile his name today, but when psychiatrist Frederick Wertham asserted in his 1954 book
Seduction of the Innocent
that Batman’s relationship with Robin was a homosexual fantasy and that
Wonder Woman
was a handbook for lesbian bondage, he was pretty much spot-on. You don’t even need to know about the details of William Moulton Marston’s very unorthodox sex life to cock an eyebrow at all the ropes and spanking that
cropped up while Wonder Woman was battling the Nazis.

But sex had been an intimate part of comic books for a good ten years before Superman made his 1938 debut in
Action Comics #1.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, the first form of mass-produced pornography for thousands of Americans came in the form of crudely printed comic books called “Tijuana bibles,” “eight-pagers,” or simply “fuck books.” The Tijuana bibles were porn in its purest form, without the slightest pretension toward art or nuance. They were not about sensuality or eroticism. They were about fucking, in a time when fucking was portrayed in no other mass medium. Tijuana bibles were created in a time before the Internet, before DVDs, before pay-per-view, before VHS or Betamax, before adult movie palaces on public streets, before a stack of
Playboy
magazines could be found in every home in America. Between the wars, the country was making the transition from nineteenth-century morals and technology to the modern age, and it did it in uneven heaves and starts. People were just getting used to the novelty of having radios, and large parts of the country wouldn’t have electricity or running water until after World War II. For thousands of Americans, their first explicit images of sex, the only ones that were regularly available to them, were the thin, cheap pages of the Tijuana bibles.

The typical Tijuana bible was eight pages long in a four by three format in black-and-white, or sometimes red or blue and white ink. Some bibles were sixteen pages long, and a few very extravagant ones even reached the mammoth size of thirty-two pages. One of the ironies of time is that virtually the only comics distributed today that are similar in size and shape to the Tijuana bibles are the Christian tracts that Jack Chick has drawn and sold for the last thirty-nine years. The content and philosophy of Chick’s work is 180 degrees away from that of the fuck
books, if no less extreme in its passion and fantasy. In Chick’s world, teenagers get sucked into black magic and human sacrifice by the temptations of Dungeons and Dragons or Christian rock bands, and the Catholic Church lurks behind endless conspiracies ranging from the Holocaust to the rise of Islam.

While Chick has used the format to plead with his readers to turn from earthly sin and embrace Jesus, the world of the Tijuana bibles vigorously indulged carnal pleasures in every combination that could possibly be squeezed into eight narrow pages. The characters in those pages were invariably familiar, even if their behavior wasn’t. Every icon of popular culture—from comic strip characters to movie stars and even politicians—ultimately found themselves starring in at least one of the bibles. Within the pages of the Tijuana bibles, Mickey and Minnie’s relationship was finally consummated; Josef Stalin serviced the proletariat in ways Marx never imagined; and Jimmy Cagney fellated Pat O’Brien. As well as being the predecessors of today’s slash fiction, the Tijuana bibles provide a secret history of popular culture at the time. Every well-loved comic character, every movie star who made hearts throb and laps moist, at some time found their corporate-enforced chastity peeled away to expose inelegant and insatiable lusts.

The sexuality the Tijuana bibles depicted was not beautiful. It wasn’t nuanced enough to be considered “erotic.” It was frequently not only crude but also hateful and ugly. Reading the bibles today, one can’t help but be impressed by how they are so obviously a product of a sexually repressive society, where discussion of sexuality—and especially sexuality’s pleasures—was all but excluded from the public square. The erotic charge of the bibles seems to depend on the sexual naïveté of the reader; underlying all of them is a sense of amazement that such a thing as sex
even exists. To captivate their audience, they had to do little more that simply acknowledge cocks, tits, cunts and asses.

But, of course, there was more to the bibles. After all, it wasn’t just anyone’s genitalia on display in those pages. By the 1930s, newspaper comics were already big business. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought near-epic struggles over the strips and creators, and the decades-long war between the two helped elevate the art form to its creative and commercial zenith. The most popular characters were merchandised as toys and on clothing and found new life in other media. E. C. Segar’s salty, spinach-eating sailor Popeye virtually became a cottage industry after he debuted in 1929; starting in the 1930s, Popeye gave his stamp of approval to almost everything that could be sold, and starred in many classic animated shorts by the Fleischer Brothers studio. Chic Young’s
Blondie
and Chester Gould’s
Dick Tracy
were not only iconic in their print forms but also thrived in their adaptations to radio and film. The characters from all three strips—and others—quickly became shorthand for very specific traits and personalities. Americans knew them. When the country was first being crushed by economic depression followed by the destruction of war, they
were
America, in the best sense we could imagine.

And then they were stripped naked in the pages of the Tijuana bibles. Looking through the bibles has the same forbidden kick as if you happened to wander past the window of a beloved neighbor just in time to see her hungrily sucking off Pastor Ted and getting rimmed by your Aunt Sally. It’s not just anyone in these comic books. If it were, it’s hard to imagine that they’d get anything more than cursory attention by a few comics historians known for being die-hard completists.

Look, for example, at the mix of class and sexual anxieties
in the Blondie and Dagwood eight-pager “Fired!” In terms of art quality and storytelling skill, this one represents the bibles at their very lowest. Dagwood’s cantankerous boss, Mr. Dithers (here called Smithers), is barely recognizable, and the spelling and layout are elementary at best. The sex scenes look like they were drawn by a boy still wondering what girls look like under their dresses. It’s exactly the sort of thing that you probably drew in the back of your fifth-grade English class.

But despite the distorted art and the crudely pornographic story, “Fired!” doesn’t seem that far removed from Chic Young’s daily strip. Right in the first panel, Dagwood once again gets his lazy ass canned by Smithers, a gag that even the most casual reader of the original knows. He goes home and rants to Blondie about “that prick Smithers,” but instead of being merely passive and comforting, by page three Blondie is in Smithers’ office demanding Dagwood’s job back. Almost immediately, Smithers starts groping Blondie’s twat despite her protests. By page five, sexual assault is transformed into impassioned demands for Smithers to fuck her harder and deeper. At last, Dagwood appears on the scene; looking more put out than outraged, he jerks his cock while watching his boss screw his wife, petulantly complaining, “At least you could let me get in.” Smithers keeps pumping away, responding nastily, “Shut up Bumstead you got your job back what more do you want.” The narration observes without pity, “Looks like Dag-woods the on who got fucked.” [
sic
]