Meeting of the Minds

I was almost an hour late to meet Chuck and Musto at B Bar Tuesday night.

“You just missed Debbie Harry,” Chuck said. I guess that’s what I get.

In the cab on the way to Happy Valley Chuck was talking about how he wants to find a new place for him and Musto to go on Wednesday nights.

“You and Musto?”

“Yeah, he’s my new partner in crime.”

I kinda thought I was Chuck’s partner in crime.

“Fine, you can take Musto back to your hotel tonight.”

We got to Happy Valley just in time to grab a drink and squirm our way through the crowd, up to the balcony to watch Dita Von Teese do her boom-boom champagne glass burlesque strip tease thing. I don’t know what’s up with Happy Valley and all the burlesque acts they hire – Dita, Dirty Martini, Amanda – but I think I kinda like it.

I finally got to meet Rob Roth, the video artist who’s been emailing me ever since he read something I wrote on my MySpace page about Matthew Barney and gay porn.

“I love this song,” he said. “It’s perfect for seducing someone.” Then he tried to demonstrate his seduction method – sort of dancing close and putting his thigh between my legs like he was going to knee me in the groin – and was not entirely unsuccessful.

Upstairs, we were joined by an effusive drunken older gentleman who turned out to be Patrick McMullan. He kept asking if Chuck and the boy Chuck was flirting with and I were boyfriends. Then he grabbed me and shoved my face into Rob’s and took pictures while we made out.

“I kinda thought this would be a meeting of the minds,” I said.

“Well, there’s mind and body and spirit…” Rob said. I gave him my number.

Of course, I went home with Chuck and had blurry, four o’clock in the morning sex, which is a pattern neither of us seems capable of breaking.

Career Porn Stars

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The Heart is Deceitful

Asia Argento’s film adaptation of JT LeRoy’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things opened in New York last weekend. I saw it last night. It wasn’t bad. Actually, it was better than I expected. The only glaringly awful aspect of the film were all the celebrity cameos. It’s not that the actors themselves (all friends of LeRoy, all of whom now look like fools) did a bad job. It’s just that their presence in the film is incredibly distracting. People actually laughed at Marilyn Manson, Wynona Ryder, and Michael Pitt. Laughed at a film based on one of the most gut-wrenchingly depressing books of the past decade. Still, I’m actually pretty eager to see Argento’s other film, the semi-autobiographical Scarlet Diva. But that’s not what I was thinking about as I left the theater.

It’s only been a few months since articles in New York Magazine and The New York Times exposed LeRoy as a fraud. People have reacted in various ways, but the general consensus, as far as I can tell, is that the books should stand for themselves. I found this quote from the London Guardian on LeRoy’s own blog:

“But nothing has been taken from us. The books remain: as startling and disturbingly beautiful as they ever were. There is nothing that has sullied the New York Times's assertion that 'his language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt'. And what strikes me more than anything is that in this age of overblown celebrity, where people such as Paris Hilton can be famous purely for being Paris Hilton, mightn't JT LeRoy represent the precise inversion of this? The work is all. The identity is irrelevant.”

I disagree. The fact that JT LeRoy doesn’t exist actually does affect the work.

As a memoir, The Heart is Deceitful made sense. It was about catharsis, bloodletting. As a work of fiction, it’s just grotesque and more than a little absurd.

“JT LeRoy” was never a survivor’s story in the Oprah sense. It wasn’t about raising awareness or preventing the sort of abuses depicted in the stories. LeRoy never founded an organization or crisis hotline. He was more concerned with telling his story – over and over again – as a way to come to terms with the events of his past. It was about getting the poison out, examining it, dealing with it, and creating something beautiful and raw and honest out of it.

But now that we know it was all made up, that none of it ever happened, that JT LeRoy is a fiction, a mere character in these stories rather than someone who actually experienced the horrors they describe, it all just feels dirty. You have to wonder what kind of person imagines these sort of things. It’s not that I don’t realize that horrible things happen to children in this world. I’m not so naïve that I think there aren’t supremely fucked up people out there who torture their own kids. It happens. It’s awful, but it happens. What bothers me is that whoever has been writing as JT LeRoy – it’s now generally accepted that the real author is a 40-something woman named Laura Albert – has been exploiting these sort of tragedies in the name of fame, wealth, and the most obscene star-fucking in recent memory.

What’s worse is that we, the reading public, just lapped it up. It’s like Albert tapped into a sick voyeurism in all of us. Something in us wants to hear these kinds of stories. It’s the same thing that makes us salivate over the sensationalist evening news, the same thing that makes us lick our chops watching Judge Judy and Jerry Springer...only much, much worse.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read JT LeRoy the same way I used to. The stories are still beautifully, disturbingly written. But what used to be so emotionally searing now seems callous and perverse.

PRÉF: Other People's Sex Lives

My piece from the March/April issue of PRÉF. Names have been changed, 'cause I learned my lesson ages ago.

Other People's Sex Lives

Lately I’ve been irrationally afraid that everyone in the world is having better sex than me. The last few times I’ve done it have been amusing at best; the kind of sex I imagine people twice my age have when they’ve been married for 20 years and have run out of ideas. I’m not having bad sex, but I just cannot help feeling that it could be better, that I must be getting lazy or uninspired. Especially when compared with my friends’ tales of their sexual exploits.

I. James’s Thumb-Fuck
James and I dated in college. We had a terrible breakup, thought we’d never speak to each other again, and then, a few years later, became really good friends. I guess there’s the tiniest bit of sexual tension left between us, but that’s normal.

James, like every other gay guy in New York, likes to talk about sex over cocktails in the middle of the week. It was a Tuesday night, we were at Therapy in Hell’s Kitchen, and James was telling a bunch of friends about the date he’d been on the previous weekend.

The guy – Tom or Jack or Sam or something…we’ll just call him Fernando – was apparently loaded. He had an enormous ground floor apartment that opened onto a garden somewhere in Greenwich Village. He was also gorgeous, according to James. Washboard abs, great arms, tight butt. I don’t remember what they did on their date; that wasn’t the interesting part. Maybe they went to a movie or dinner or just took a romantic walk around the Village. Who cares, really? The part James wanted to tell us about, and the part we all wanted to hear, was what happened once they got back to Fernando’s fabulous apartment.

The way James described it, the sex was like something out of a steamy gay romance novel. He threw Fernando onto the bed and ripped off his shirt. Then they kissed, hard, and James began working his way down to Fernando’s chest, kissing his smooth tan skin as he went. He licked and suckled Fernando’s nipples, teasing them with his tongue and lightly biting them. He unbuckled Fernando’s belt and pulled off his jeans. Then he rolled him over onto his stomach and started fingering his ass.

Fernando was on his knees, his face buried in fluffy down pillows as James slipped his thumb into his ass. He let out a long, deep moan. James slid his thumb in and out slowly, working the muscles between Fernando’s ass and balls with his other fingers. Fernando started to rock back and forth on James’s thumb, moaning and stroking his cock. James pressed in deep and pulled out over and over. He spat in his free hand and grabbed Fernando’s cock and started stroking it. Fernando was gasping and moaning through clenched teeth, moving his ass around on James’s thumb.

“He came right in my hand,” James said. “He was so loud I had to cover his mouth with my hand. I got his own cum all over his face.”

“So, you just fucked him with your thumb?” I asked

“It was like I was holding his whole pelvis in my hand,” he said. “It was so hot.”

As we were finishing our drinks, James got a text message from Fernando. “If you’re that good with just your thumb, I can’t wait to see what your dick feels like.”

II. Neil’s Threesome
I’m not fond of Neil. He’s a sweetheart. He’s boyish and optimistic and completely guileless. Everyone loves him. But I can’t stand him. He annoys me for reasons even I don’t really understand. Maybe it’s the bully in me, but whenever he’s around, I tend to pick on him like you’d pick on a younger brother or the geeky kid in high school.

Neil looks like the geeky kid in a teen movie and he is possibly the world’s worst dancer. But somehow, he always manages to hook up with really hot guys. Maybe it’s because he’s so damned nice; maybe it’s his complete lack of self-consciousness. Whatever it is, it drives me crazy with jealousy. Guys like Neil are not supposed to get the hot guys. They’re not supposed to be having hot sex. They’re supposed to look on longingly as cuter, meaner, wilder guys do things they’re too scared to do.

Recently, I heard, from mutual friends, that Neil had had a threesome. It came as quite a shock to all of us. Neil is 22 and only started having sex a few months ago. He’s afraid of his own butt hole. How can such a person have had a threesome? Here I am trying to be the hard, sexy, cynical guy hanging out with DJs and porn stars, and this sugary sweet little twerp is showing me up. If my life were an 18th century French novel, I’d probably come up with some sort of twisted scheme to bring about Neil’s ruin. Alas, I am not the Vicomte de Valmont. I’m just a selfish, sexually frustrated boy who is far too concerned with other people’s sex lives.

III. My Own Business
I know I should mind my own business. I shouldn’t care so much what other people are doing. I shouldn’t try to compare their sex lives to mine. There are times, however, when the dirty stories my friends tell me about themselves and their lovers keep me up at night. It could be that they are exaggerating; that they really aren’t having better sex than me, or anyone else. That’s beside the point, really. Because once I’ve heard what they’ve done, or what they think they should have done, it takes on a life of its own. There’s a constant porno loop in my head at any given time. Lying in bed at night; at work; on the subway. I have a very dirty mind and quite often my friends and their stories are just fodder for it. When I slip my hands down my pants and grab my cock, I’m just as likely thinking of someone I know as some random porn star.

I think my friends secretly want me – and anyone else they talk to about sex – to fantasize about them. Maybe they get off on the idea that people are thinking about them, embellishing the scenarios they’ve discussed and creating new ones. It’s kind of like a perverted form of celebrity or even immortality. That amazing sex they had last month lives on in the dirty minds of others. Or maybe just my dirty mind.

Bathroom Interview: Tristan Taormino

Tristan Taormino should be the patron saint of anal sex. Seriously, someone call the pope. She’s built her own little empire – including her Village Voice sex column, several books, and two pornos – on the premise that more people should be taking it up the ass. She just released the newly revised second edition of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, and has returned to the world of porn with her new DVD, Tristan Taormino’s House of Ass. I found Taormino in the bathroom of Crash Mansion where we were celebrating the release of both the book and DVD.

John: It's been five years since The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women 2. Why so long between DVDs?
Tristan Taormino: The thing is, truthfully, there’s so much that I do. Things just come into focus. There are some years where the focus is on teaching and some years where the focus is on writing. And I just felt this year, in 2005, newly inspired to make cool porn. I’m not a fulltime pornographer and I don’t want to just do it to do it, or do it to cash the check. I only want to do it when I feel really jazzed about it.

J: How is House of Ass different from every other porno out there?
TT: Well, my whole thing is that I want to see a different kind of gonzo. Gonzo is porn without a plot, where the camera is acknowledged. Like cinema verite, sort of. I want to see gonzo where there isn’t stupid degradation, of both women and men. And I want to see porn where there’s no circus stunts. Cause that’s the thing. There are great things about gonzo, but then a lot of the stuff in gonzo is crappy. So, can you capture the spirit of gonzo, which is spontaneity and just raw hot sex? But can you take out some of these things that sort of dominate the genre?

J: Did you get to sample any of the talent before filming?
TT: (laughs) No.

J: During filming?
TT: Yes. In the video, you’ll see, Justine [Jolie] played with my boobs a little bit and pinched my nipples. There may be some lost footage, not on the DVD, of me with Mr. Marcus’s cock in my mouth. Enough said!

J: What is the best soundtrack for anal sex?
TT: The best soundtrack for anal sex…See that’s the thing. There is no one soundtrack. People make these assumptions, like it has to be rough and down and dirty. You can have anal sex to “fuck me like and animal” or you can have anal sex to, like, Everything But the Girl. It can be sweet and tender and intimate and really nice, or it can be rough and dirty and nasty and raunchy, and everything in between.

J: So what’s your favorite song to have anal sex to?
TT: I’m gonna go with anything on “Disintegration” by the Cure.

J: Who do you think is having anal sex tonight?
TT: I think that Rachel Kramer Bussel is gonna have anal sex tonight. I think that Bridget Everett is gonna have anal sex tonight. There were just so many couples who I don’t even really know, but who came up to me and were like, “You changed our sex life.” Which, you know, is my favorite thing in the whole world. So all those people, whose names I probably can’t even remember now, all those people are gonna have anal sex.

Aaron's Dream

Last night Aaron called to tell me that he’d had a sex dream about me the night before. We were in a house, but it wasn’t his house and it wasn’t my apartment. I was lying on my stomach and he was on top of me, with his hand wrapped around me, gripping my cock, which, according to him, was “really, really wide.”

That made me smile and I felt all warm and glowy, like there were Christmas lights all curled up in my stomach.

I like being dreamed about in the same way that I like it when I find out people have been talking about me behind my back. It makes me feel important, like the fact that someone has taken the time to actually discuss me means that I matter, that my legend is beginning to spread. It feels a little like immortality. The fact that Aaron had a dream about me means that I have entered his subconscious, and once you’re there you’re permanent. You’re with them forever, even if you have a falling out and you never speak to or see each other again. Someone can’t kick you out of their subconscious.

Years from now, Aaron might dream about something, a bank robbery, and someone will be telling him that he can’t set his watch at a time like this. And he’ll know that there’s someone out in the getaway car with video tapes that need to be returned, and that he loves this person very much, but he has no idea who it is, and that will be me. He’ll wake up feeling sort of embarassed and hopeful, like he has a crush on someone, and wondering who it was waiting out in the car.

I feel like a virus. I’m inside, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever been before. I’m in there, in Aaron, and I’m gestating.