by Tony Duvert
He began seeing a very old Frenchman who was enormous and terribly ugly, and he was hoping for a lot from him. It was said that he did to this appalling old man what no other boy would have agreed to do: for example, blowjobs. I talked to him about it without any unkindness, and he weakly denied it. His blind admiration for me no longer surprised me. He wouldn’t say anything bad about the old fellow, nor about anybody else. I don’t know if it was because of a naive moral sense, sensitivity about the malicious talk he himself had to endure, or fear that it would get back to the ears of the injured party. At any rate, if he was just as accommodating to that man as he was with me, he was preparing a happy death for him. From what I could see afterward, he got nothing out of it, and the old man is still alive.
Whereas Andrès looked at photos of men in secret, Francesco kept a diary. More bourgeois in terms of values, and more unusual, too, because he had very little education. But the inwardness homosexuality requires produces such miracles. He’d described this diary to me entertainingly, but with pride. He’d been keeping it for three years. Every day, he puts down what he’s seen and done. I would have liked to have read the story of his life at fourteen. When it came to his love life, he divided up the information: his encounters were written in words; what he did erotically in symbols. A cross if he got fucked, a circle if he was on top. Concerning the different ways of reaching an orgasm, he listed only penetrations; the rest was offensive or insignificant; he wasn’t as sexually uninhibited as Andrès. At the very end of our relations, he decided to blow me and take the come. Before that, some nights when he was drunk, he’d on occasion agree to sixty-nine, but not very wholeheartedly, and I’d only come in his hand. He tells me that once an old man made him suck him; he does an impression of himself as a child with his little head bending from the force, and he describes a forest of white and yellowish hairs that stink of urine. Also, he sticks a finger in and out of his mouth when he’s explaining that he’d like to suck a little boy. One night, he claims, he was in bed lying against his younger brother, who must have been around five; he felt him up, found out he was hard, put his mouth on it and masturbated while the kid was sleeping. He puts such nice details about touching and position into it that you’d believe it happened.
Our nights usually consisted of “fornicateries,” but combined with other kinds of stroking that got our come all over. It didn’t bother him, and when he spoke to me about his diary (we’d spent four or five months together), he merely counted out seventy-three crosses and four circles. Those figures surprised me; I’ve never shot my load so many times in the same hole, so it must have happened without my realizing it.
He was in late adolescence; his strong, slender, rather tall body wasn’t as thick or hairy as an adult’s, but he had nothing of what appeals to me about boys. I loved him as a friend; as a lover, I wasn’t too interested. On the other hand, the morals of the city and his anxieties made him fall back on me, a foreigner he could count on. I was more generous and less shabby than what he’d been able to come up with in the past; that was the reason for his immoderate interest in me. All in all, our natures that year were so similar that we synched without trying, or noticing, or saying.
I argued about the four circles in his diary; he made it clear that he’d fucked twice inside me and twice against me. I would have thought it was three times inside and a lot of times against. We discussed it heatedly. It became clear that he was only counting intercourse from which he’d come—and he’d break it off often. Mornings, I liked to feel him pressed against my back; he’d cram it against my rear end without penetrating and get aroused. When he was really hot, I’d turn around to fuck him. He rarely asked for the opposite; and when he went inside me, I’m the one who did all the work, sitting with difficulty on his erect cock. I didn’t keep a flexible enough hole for swallowing a member like his; I liked getting fucked, but when it came to big cocks, my eyes were bigger than my stomach. My resistance would make him go soft. I don’t like difficult anuses, either; and if the boy I’m inside doesn’t attract me enough, or if his rear end is a little hairy, I lose my hard-on quickly. Moreover, the end of my dick has always been more vulnerable than a little dog’s, so tensed assholes hurt too much; if I spot a condom to protect myself, I put it on; otherwise I forget about it. And I hate rubbers, as I’ve said. All these disabilities certainly are pathetic for a pornographer. Even so, I’m going to finish this book.
Sometimes Francesco comes between my thighs, without attaching any importance to it. Myself even less so, if I do it, because big boys’ thighs aren’t right for the cock. Children’s, on the other hand, are white and worthy of esteem, they feel a lot better to be inside than the tail of someone older. The skin of children’s crotches is smooth and humid, taut, smooth, elastic, it creates a velvety funnel below the anus when they lie on their side and press their thighs together while you stick it in from the back.
I stopped desiring Francesco quite rapidly. I’d fuck him like an old spouse, without thinking about it. I realized he was a handsome boy, pleasant to look at; I’d always grasp his large balls as I fucked him, like a kid taking hold of a teddy bear to sleep; but it was becoming abstract. I wasn’t having sex, I was stroking my cock less deftly than with my hand, and that was it.
A particular feature contributed to this dispassion. When I’d fuck Francesco, his physiognomy would change completely: that laughing, attractive, impertinent clear face would become an empty-headed star’s playing her big love scene. The boy I wanted to fuck would vanish and leave me alone with this Hollywood rubbish. It was such a complete metamorphosis that the first time it happened I thought the lighting was distorting his features. But no. That smile of faded elegance enticing a pretty boy, that slightly crooked mouth, that veiled glance of an aging streetwalker soaked in champagne—were actually his.
And he was doing this on purpose. If he’s on his side while I’m pounding him, he turns his back to me; and his face, which I see in half profile, doesn’t change. One morning he’s washing at the sink as I walk by; his backside gets me excited and I put it in right then and there. At first, his reflection in the mirror is unchanged, I’m admiring it and thrilled to be fucking Francesco in that way. Suddenly, he remembers the mirror, sees that I’m watching him in it; his face immediately transforms, starting with the mouth, going right back to that ghastly smile, and then the entire mask.
He showed me a color photo of him from about a year or two ago: he was stretched out in the sun, his arms behind his head, eyes closed, his face that same star’s with her false, doomed, dissolute, alcoholic smile. And yet, he adored it and thought it was the best portrait that had ever been taken of him. What films or magazines had furnished him with this model, and why did he identify with the mug of a vamp, a stupid cunt’s kisser—that I do not know. But his transformation into a parody of a woman as soon as he was being sodomized, the choice of a face that he thought matched the situation were deliberate. “I’m still beautiful and you’re what I need, my big darling stud,” that stale Hollywood mask would say again to me.
So I took Francesco by the back-end whenever he was willing. But he didn’t like it very much because he couldn’t get hard at the same time. His favorite position was flat on his back, with me curled next to him, my thighs under his, which were raised. It was simple and not tiring. When this was the way he was penetrated, he’d go into his routine full throttle. His face would be taken over by the proverbial I’heure exquise, his eyes veiled as he jerked himself off. He masturbates in large, calm strokes, kneads his cock with a lot of energy like heavy batter that has to be softened and shoots in several spasms all over his stomach and chest with thick, creamy, extremely white ooze that’s a bit sweet; his hole contracts to the same rhythms, as if it’s swallowing. It’s almost as if he’s sucking in with his buttocks what he’s discharging with his cock.
He told me a popular joke that expresses that notion of communicating vessels. If a boy boasts about having a big dick, the others an
swer, “When the grape is good, it’s because the vine is being watered.”
In other words, if you’ve got a lot in front, it’s because you’re getting a lot in back. Such a way of putting pretentious machos in their place is nice; but it’s also a reference to something that we’re taught not to take advantage of: the unity of cock and ass. As everyone knows, that area belongs to a single occupant; a cock isn’t an isolated piece of flesh that sticks out, but a long pipe that you straddle; it begins at the anus and goes all the way to the end of the prick; it has a small hole on one end, a big hole on the other. Every imaginable connection (muscular, nervous, spatial) links the rectal cavity to the penis, which makes the cavity serve as its own internal space. Root of member and hollow orifice are one and the same location, the anus. Thus, Nature, more mischievous than those who claim to reference her to impose their order of things, has given boys two sex organs, which are one.
She didn’t divide the two, but we’re obliged to. If they’re interested in belonging to the stronger sex and possessing, dominating, ruling females, males need one sex organ for display (the little pissy one) and another for elimination (a little shit). To become straight, you have to transform your cock into a phallus, that well-washed instrument of power. The asshole can remain dirty, but you’ve got to sew it up, forget the half of the penis that joins it, favor the external part and confine orgasm to that part.
Such a selective localization is accomplished at the price of endless training: years of frustration in love and of masturbation in families endured by children and adolescents. Their hand, which is repulsed as much as obstinate, and their fantasies of daddy-style intercourse accustom them to having flesh whose pleasure zones are limited to a few ounces of tubular meat that they can send out on an orgasmic mission, far away from them, without even having to strip their abstract body of the male subject. You forbid—and you’re forbidden—sensations, curiosities, experiences that would lead to discovering the twinned nature of the organs that make up your groin. Every possible method is used to suppress this “feminine” cavity, which is too closely combined with boys’ penises and the pleasure they receive from them—because its effect makes the male enjoy being penetrated and creates an intolerable similarity between the erotic possibilities of the two genders.
This is why we butcher this cock into two ends and two functions so that only the allowable fragment—the phallus—survives. Even many fags (because we receive heterosexual conditioning like anyone else) impose upon themselves the erotic divisions demanded by society. If a phallus has been manufactured for them, they keep their hole shut and refuse to let anyone bypass its stitching; if their anus is open, they refuse to penetrate anyone at all.
For Francesco, this division is expressed by a conflict between two attitudes. When he chooses the phallus, he condemns his habits and talks about going back to girls (to become the worst type of male and mgs ter). When he chooses his rear end, on the other hand, his cock is just a toy and he’s declaring himself to be homosexual, meaning liable to be penetrated. But being penetrable, enjoying orgasms thanks to another cock, turns him into a pariah; a sewn-up anus allows him to become part of the life of the collective and be protected from the fears, loneliness, persecution common to the other state.
The mechanics of his responses to social pressures are like a barometer to character; and every time that Francesco gets rid of one of these identities rather than the other, according to the days, pleasures, ordeals he has just experienced, I know that the one he claims to be eliminating is only being held at bay. The solution that would reconcile these opposites makes no sense. Individually, unity has already been accomplished, provided by the human body and the freedom to make use of it as it is. Socially, on the other hand, such a thing is impossible for Francesco: his only options are to remain whole but be excluded, or to be accepted but become mutilated. And yet, he doesn’t want to be deprived of the securities offered by the group any more than he wants to sacrifice the pleasures that his sexual honesty allows him.
In both cases, however, he is denying the part of his body that is taboo according to common law. If he’s with his straight friends, he has a phallus that has no ass; if he’s away from them and being penetrated, he has a hole without a cock. This latter denial seems superfluous. As is expected, Francesco emerges from it as a reproducer of social norms.
On occasion, he also becomes an intense top—but with boys who won’t fuck him; the situation is then merely a variation of hetero intercourse, because Francesco approaches it as a purely phallic partner, suppresses his other tastes and fucks a boy-eunuch. With me, on the other hand, he castrates himself and expresses no resentment about my reluctance to get fucked, no impatience, practically no initiative about it (despite the fact that he knows that other, more insistent boys do screw me). He prides himself on the number of times I’ve screwed him, and in bed he takes on that womans face, that horrible, fictitious mask; otherwise, he cultivates the most accurate boyish ways, and the effeminate is so strange to him that if he sees a mincing queen in a movie, he doesn’t understand that the hetero director is trying to portray a homosexual. I explain to him what it is, but he can’t absorb such a disconcerting code.
He lives his nonconformity through a maze of orthodoxies. He thinks he’s superior to women and children, pokes fun at the disabled, the physically ugly, morons, the insane, looks down on the poor, is racist, admires violence, wealth, weapons, religion, manufactured products, spitefully denounces queers who are less in the closet than he is, uses the word as an insult, even to refer to some decent man who’s gotten him out of a jam. He needs these ideas, wants them, believes in them, stands by them; they’re the only link he has to the group; if he rejects them he falls. Obviously, he’d have better judgment if he were less dependent upon others, less worried, less penniless. In his situation, any variance in opinion condemns him to being banished and destitute with no way out.
At times when his safety and situation are better than usual, his conformity disintegrates, he’s willing to learn what you want him to, to turn over a new leaf, and he becomes a good kid, as he is a good person. But such periods are too brief, and soon he has to go back to his island of poverty, where he clothes himself again with the savage values that he currently accepts.
Those days when he claims to be homosexual, the plans he comes up with convey the economic origin of the dilemma. He thinks of leaving his country, having a good job, getting rich; or he dreams of making do with me—a foreign enclave within arm’s reach—and he depicts the kind of married life he’d create for me, with him as the wife thinking obsessively of benefits and the care as prisoner he’d get from his top. But the days when he senses that these plans will never come to be, that he’ll remain in his city without funds, protection or a satisfactory occupation, at the mercy of his family and fellow countrymen, he’s gloomy, wants to get drunk, swears that he can go without boys, and anyway, girls really turn him on, he screwed one the other night, etc. An hour after, he’s flat on his belly in my bed, although I haven’t encouraged him to and only get minimal pleasure out of it. I tell myself that his life is so unengaged that it would be better for him to go straight. But he likes his body; and after all, his contradictions have only one source: homosexuality is an unlivable form of freedom in the poverty into which he was born.
I wasn’t used to a boy I was screwing being as selfish as he is. If he jerks off, he almost always comes before I do, and the atmosphere that results embarrasses me. One advantage of it is that his face becomes normal again; instead of the menopausal star he inflicts on me, I rediscover the boy I like so much. A rather arrogant kid, who’s waiting politely for me to finish, and who uses a finger to push back some sperm cooling on his stomach that has begun to trickle down his side. He doesn’t want to stain the sheets, he’s tidy. The amount of sperm is amazing; usually I want to drink some, lick it, but Francesco spurts too much of the stuff, even for smearing my cheeks with it.
If I fuck him f
lat on his stomach to protect myself from his hasty orgasms and the vamp’s expression, he turns around afterward and masturbates as he chomps on my dick by pumping his anus. He’s in too bad a mood to paste on the legends expression and becomes a thickset teenager playing with himself, a greedy one, with squashed, brutal features, like a dog during fucking, his ears straining backward, the eyes a bit glassy, the skin of his forehead taut. I get hard again.
One morning when we get up, he’s mildly challenging; I tell him that I want to jerk off by myself, and he can do the same. The first one to come wins. He claims he’ll shoot before me. I know him, and I’m sure it won’t happen, his brain isn’t uninhibited enough. We start our race and I leave him in the dust. Francesco keeps going, but for a crutch, he needs to toy with images and lose control of things outside of him, which he isn’t looking forward to. Impossible to be outside and inside at the same time. Finally, he decides to pull the sheet over his head; protected from my presence, he can get immersed in his thoughts. He comes quickly and reappears red and smiling, as satiated as if he were waking up from a siesta in hot weather.
The act of pulling over the sheet is another thing that proved to me that the vamp face is voluntary; it’s the one he chooses to hide behind when he’s being fucked; his features take on that expression with a tiny quaver or misfiring, as he luxuriates in the sensations in his “rich bowels.”
Talking about races. Francesco was at a man’s house with a friend. In bed and totally naked. The man looks, touches, sucks; their cocks are nice, but they won’t get hard. The man holds out a new watch and promises it to the first to get a hard-on. And at the very second Francesco sees the object, his cock gets rock hard. He gets the watch.