Pre-AIDS erotica - pros and cons
‘My fat, ten foot cock pushed hard into the boy’s tight, virgin ass…’ ‘His boy-hole was moist already…’ ‘Without another word he leapt on top of me and I watched in wonder as my fat, hard ten-incher slipped easily inside his drooling asshole…’ ‘I strained to break free and felt his fat, hard purple helmet aimed right up against my crack. “Please,” I whimpered…’ You know the genre? Does it make you giggle, make you embarrassed, or does it make you hard?
A bit of each, possibly. There are only so many fat, hard, ten-inch cocks one can take, so to speak, before reality rears its rather more human sized head. Tales of rape, gang-bangs, barely legal paperboys brutally pounded to the point where they come back the next day for more… Pre-AIDS – and early liberation days – erotica, written now, can or would seem downright irresponsible, if not actually illegal – words by and large escaping the censorship reserved for images. But there’s something about it. It’s massively testosterone-driven, ferociously butch, though often based on traditional male insecurities, and comes as something of a blessed relief from the un-sexy 21st Century liberal modes of gay-identification, in which everyone’s fantasies are meant to be nice.
This does need saying: they’re fantasies. Okay, in real life, unsuspecting strangers in town get gang-banged, paperboys get raped – there’s a lot of unpleasantness out there. If you played out the fantasies in real life you’d wind up in jail and/or with HIV. But as fantasies… If you do start to visualise that grizzly ten-incher smoothly pushed into the tight, moist (like, how?) virgin hole, while his (frequently underage) pleas and screams dissolve into satisfied whimpers… The primal instincts might well be forgiven for beginning to respond, as the motorway route between reptile brain and throbbing dong fills with earlier evolutionary traffic.
We grow a little stronger, don’t we, get a little more real, if we slip down once in a while to the mental flip-side and let it play? If we’ve civilised ourselves beyond civilisation, as TS Eliot would have had us believe, there’s a lot to be said for taking some quality time (alone or otherwise) to bond with the viscera.
And yet there are more clearly social and historical determinants to (pre-AIDS) gay porn. Just what is it, for example, with that boy’s moist asshole? Okay, if he has just been righteously fucked, or he gets fucked regularly, then things can have a tendency to get a bit liquid and loose. But surely it’s more to do with the attempt to appropriate that charged and forbidden zone – forbidden to gay men – the vagina. And, surely, the suggestion of forceful penetration of the boy is mimicry – or parody – of a less than fully adequate straight male’s approach to the vagina. Is the boy being penetrated the fantasists’ equivalent of those women who exist to be slapped around and given what-for by aggressive straight men, such that those men can feel more manly, more like men? Is that what the gay fantasist requires, to feel more like a man?
It is inevitable, perhaps, that gay men’s sexuality and view of themselves will be heavily, if not entirely, shaped by the straight culture into which they are born and which continues to surround them, at whatever distance, all their lives. On some level, we will continue to reflect the weaknesses as well as the strengths of that straight culture. It would be difficult to cut ourselves off completely from that culture – and indeed, were one to succeed, his self-re-definition would have entailed a (largely hypothetical) excision of large and fundamental pieces of his self. We may doubt whether such an operation would be either desirable or possible. The bits of ourselves we push away from us, hide or repress have a habit of returning in more monstrous forms than the originals.
If, then, it is the case that to become more fully ourselves we must engage with the heterosexual sides of our personal origins – attitudes to manliness and the failings of masculinity included – we could do worse than enter into those fantasies which largely emerged in that more butch and aggressive period preceding HIV/AIDS. Since that time, we have been decimated. We have also grown. But let us not become civilised beyond the point of civilisation. It is a deeper evolutionary past that is reflected in pre-AIDS porn. It is also a recent, cultural past – a gay culture, since forced to change, which grew in response to a straight culture, which has since been freer to remain unchanged. Let’s not lose these reflections of who we were and who we are. While your cock doesn’t always know best, and would ideally be consigned to a backseat role in matters of, say, foreign policy, it would be churlish in matters sexual to refuse it its dream.
