Buttmunching
Yes I got my Hole, Marilyn Manson, Monster Magnet tickets for their upcoming highly anticipated date at the Cow Palace and yes I waited in a long line early that rainy morning but I'm not going to talk about it at length as many of you might expect, because it seems that all I ever write about is Hole and Courtney Love these days, and I'll definitely have to review the show after the fact so lets not focus on the one I refer to as the last true rock star, who also has a movie 200 Cigarettes hitting the theaters this month, which looks to be an eighties adult comedy that traces one night in the lives of a bunch of thrill-seeking hormone-laden new wavers including Ben Afleck and Christina Ricci. With the current promotional push in high gear, the film looks to be a probable hit. It also features the return to form of Blondie in it's soundtrack, and their new song finds Debbie Harry in great voice, which is kind of exciting. But instead, I'm going to talk about rimming--analingus, eating butt, butt-munching. It was a topic that came up with a co-worker when someone approached the DJ booth and asked if I would play some Journey. I promptly stated, "No I won't." The person asking me to play it slurred back, "Do you even know Journey?"
Tension and emphasis fly from my eyes like daggers as I respond, "Yes I know Journey and I also know that I will never ever play them ever." He started to stammer out another retort which I cut off with a curt slam of the door, turning to Dan the bartender who was cashing out in the elevated office area shared with the DJ booth and I mumbled, "Eat my butt you shitbag." Seeing the somewhat shocked look on his face I asked, "Was I just really rude?"
"Well, I don't think he heard the 'eat my butt' part so..." "Well I didn't really mean it, you know, that's always been a very special activity that I reserve for the wedding night only, really-it's an intimacy I certainly don't share with most strangers, especially one's who like Journey. Funny thing, if he had heard it he would have considered it quite an insult, not an act of shared intimacy symbolic of devotion, but it was presented out of context this time. I did mean it as an insult."
"You better watch who you say that to around here, ya know." He said with a shiver of disgust.
"Oh believe me, I know."
I started to consider the act of rimming and how odd it seemed that an act so perilously close to scatological in it's basic origin (gross-fucking-ness!) could somehow rise above the foul thought of eating excrement and be regarded as a sensually charged arousing sexual act, even one to which a level of commitment may be equated. I started to think of when it was that I discovered this particular exploit for the first time, like the day i learned what felching was, or the time I came across a gay slang dictionary and discovered several dozen terms applying to varied and esoteric sexual feats or terms, like "tea-bagging" (to lay ones testicles on another person's eyes) or "skeet-shooting" (catching free flying sperm mid air with ones mouth) or "piss-queen" (one who reigns supreme in a urinal being pissed on and/or drinking urine), etc. Does anyone remember that book? Purple cover, Dictionary of Gay Slang, completely produced before the advent of AIDS, therefore terribly and completely non-politically correct in it's raunchy clique-y archaic flamboyance and frighteningly detailed from minute to monolithic proportions. It was a celebration of highly specialized and defined filth. When I first saw it, I was about 19 years old, new to the gay world in many ways, and It gave me an ominous feeling that lots of people had far too much time on their hands or something in this wild gay scene, to make up names for some of the unusual things they would do in bath houses and sex clubs after banging speed with dirty needles and disco-dancing non-stop for hours at the Trocadero. Oddly enough, in a few short years this dictionary would become a dated relic of a wild era that time and a certain virus would march over and change the face of forever. But back to the issue of discussion that night, rimming.
"Well, I didn't realize at all, ever, that this was something that people actually did. It just never occurred to me until someone did it to me.
I was most intrigued. When I tried it myself on some wedding night soon after, it was one of the most intensely mind-blowing sexual activities I'd had to date. I'll never forget it," I said in a dreamy, faraway fashion. "Of course, these days it's best to steer clear of such acts--too high risk. Rimming, unprotected anal sex, anything having to do with live chickens, etc.
You could contract a number of nasty or debilitating things like amoebas, or all three kinds of hepatitis or a host of other bad things, especially if you are immune compromised. You can only rim safely if you are truly in love!"
"Yeah, but you know that people really want to do it so bad," Dan replied.
"I know, I even have straight friends who just love doing it. I was kind of shocked but pleased when she told me," I added. "I've even met guys who were freakishly disturbed enough to cling to that "straight-acting" mode of sub-gayness, who when it came down to it, couldn't get off unless they were fully eating some boys butt, the twisted fucks! Sometimes the things people do sexually, the behaviors they tend towards, can be so revealing about how bent they are and why, from killing their partners afterwards to rolling the eyes up and getting really disassociative while getting pounded, to which side of safe one dances on more at the 90's Sex Ball, to not being able to come unless their tongue is buried up some hot punk boys ass, all kinds of things."
I then swung the door to the DJ booth open and looked out on the crowd, sweeping the faces for a particularly uptight looking, ill-at-ease-with-his-sexuality sort of macho type. I found one and pointed him out to Dan and said, "See that guy, he's miserable because he really wants to eat butt and hates himself for it."
Dan looked also and nodded in agreement.
"He wants to so much but he doesn't so he's bitter."
"yep."
Unless you've had your head buried up someone's ass 24-7 you undoubtedly have noticed the gay press has finally focussed on the issue of bare-backing/unprotected sex, a growing sort of renegade movement of mostly HIV+ men going against the established safe sex guidelines imposed upon the community as a preventative measure against the spread of AIDS. It's been almost two decades and some individuals have made the conscious decision to have all the unprotected sex they want-mainly with others who have made the same choice. Here in SF this movement had a figurehead or culmination in the form of weekly bareback parties in the Castro. Recently the issue has been intelligently reported on in Bay Times, Poz magazine made it into a cover-story, and other gay publications have explored and reported on the issue, and everything that I've read eventually ends up focussing on the Castro bareback parties. I learned the other day that after all the media attention received, the City of San Francisco put an end to the Castro bareback party.
This however is not by far the end of the overall issue. I assume it's just a matter of time before the Family Values Coalition and Falwell and all those fundamental Christian monster groups make it the focus of more anti-gay hate-breeding, fear instilling, taken-out-of-context horror topics to prompt more mush-minded idiots to do things like picket Matthew Shephards funeral with signs suggesting that his brutal murder was a good thing. The bareback issue is indeed a very complex one that drives a wedge into the beliefs and the congruity of the gay community who have faced the AIDS epidemic for so many years. To the average American citizen, the concept of a bareback party of gay men sounds like the most hedonistically suicidal ugly disease-infested bit of imaginable evil and turgid sickness in the world.
And, most importantly for the fundamentalist scheme, a threat. While we work through accepting the choices of some of our community and getting on with life as we know it, barebacking seems like a sexual backlash that most likely has occurred because of the single-mindedness of the move to close all of the bath-houses all those years ago and remove the possibly best forums we had for extensive safe-sex education, which placed the notion of all gay sex into such a dismal, life-threatening cloud of danger and shame that it essentially was forced underground, from where it now is finally rearing it's head as a sort of dark movement. At the point in time when Falwell has to stoop to levels of such ridiculousness as proclaiming one of the teletubbies as a dangerous gay role model, you figure they must be really scraping bottom of the barrel for ideas to lash out at gays and turn the mindless flocks even more towards fear and satanic conspiracy. Barebacking is a ripe apple waiting to be picked. Just perfect for their purposes. As for that new icon of gay shame Tinky Wink or Winky Tink (which would make him a piss queen actually) or whatever he's called, I heard he's been to the bareback parties plenty. Don't even need a sling for that one, just a simple hook on the ceiling and his gay triangular antennae and you're in business, no noisy chains to disturb the neighbors and the bottom bitch gets pumped full of hot Poz loads all night.
