by Tony Duvert
Except for my crotch. If I were thrown deep into the forest, I’d be happy and wouldn’t live differently than I do in the middle of a city. But they’d have to castrate me first. I need cities because of the boys. I only become civilized for their sake, it’s only to find them, have them over that I discipline my days, shave, wash my behind, fill my cupboards, buy and rent some comfort, think about money. I know how to survive when my pockets are nearly empty; but then, my bedroom, my bed, are also empty, and that’s the only deprivation I can’t stand for very long. In order to avoid it I inflict a lot of others on myself. For Puritans, sexual pleasure is a withered treat, separated from everything else in the world; but for me, it’s my social life and my nourishment. And this despite the state of my income, because I don’t have the budget of a minor wage earner, the kind established by government agencies or philanthropists. What good would it do to forgo an existence that makes me prefer being alive rather than dead? I’d just as soon be forced into being a panhandler or a manual laborer as long as I could satisfy my homosexuality. But in a society like China, for example, where apparently they now distribute manuals that go so far as to condemn masturbation in the name of Marxist-Leninism, I’d tell myself that I wasn’t human enough for such happiness and exchange my share of freedom for a rope to hang myself. And since I don’t have the wisdom of certain intellectuals—who come back from this country and marvel on the radio that our sexuality is “behind” theirs, then trot off to their usual gay bar to see what young French behinds there are to fondle—if I leave for China one day, I’ll just go to Hong Kong.
I like brooms, sponges, detergents, bubbles, wax, dust, grub, stains, hammers, pliers, saws, screwdrivers, paintbrushes, needles and thread, rakes, spades, cake molds, turpentine and plaster. As long as fairly fresh cocks are right there under my nose; they’re my carrots, without them I won’t keep going forward and you won’t get a thing from me, I just won’t budge, shiftlessness and grime will be enough for me. However, I’ve been better at fiddling with the fine mechanics of my bicycle than I am with the balls of any boy; I talk to it when I’m on the road; I even had a secret name for my first adult bike; and when
I’d put up my tent in the evening and hit the sack for the night, I was very unhappy about leaving my machine all alone outdoors. That was a long time ago, and with the second one I’m less sentimental; however, we still haven’t made any serious trips.
As far as Francesco is concerned, you only make yourself do manual tasks when you’re too poor to assign them to others. Obviously, when I become fat or old or burdened by visits, duties, national honors, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll have to say goodbye to myself, and I’ll miss the intimacy that we had. In the meantime, my hermitlike habits remain so stubborn that when I get sick, I curl up somewhere safe and don’t go to the doctor unless I’m really not getting better or until the pain is more than I can stand, which is a lot. And there’s still my habit of getting dressed only if I have to, meaning when I expect to be disturbed. If not, clothes feel too heavy. I always write completely nude, and I don’t wash myself before.
Don’t think that such nudity encourages me to question my penis about whether or not a passage that I write is any good. When my level of inspiration declines, it’s true that I sometimes fall back on my pubes; but it’s like a schoolboy staring dumbly at flies. I’m more apt to look to verify that the night before hasn’t left me with crabs, until I remember that my most recent partner was prepubescent and that the creepy crawlies could have only moved from one head to another.
I can’t get excited by what I write. I was very good at it at fourteen or fifteen, and the floor under my table was moldier with come than an old piece of wreckage eaten away by salt. My attraction to it didn’t last. The kind of texts I was writing without masturbating were what made me continue to write, and I composed them long before trying any others. They sucked all they could out of that novelty, but they didn’t cede their place to it. My jerk-off porn was only the way they lost their virginity.
Since that time, I’m only enthusiastic about pornography in pictures. The photos give me the freedom to see hundreds, thousands of desirable boys whom I’ll never be able to see in the flesh. I don’t get used to it any more than you grow bored with beautiful days, pleasant landscapes, the return of the seasons, the flavor of your food, repetitions with which we identify happiness. It brings to hand so many visions created near me, which is the opposite of the world moving through our streets, where human beauty always disappears, enclosed forever in bags. Films, on the other hand, frustrate me: they’re moving; they take back what they give and even what you must extract in the end from the perpetual movement that is yanking everything away from your eyes. It’s true that forms arouse me more than actions. So I hardly ever go to the movies; I come out of them depressed, famished as I am after some lousy walk among the shutdown figures, welded lips and fleeting bodies of the capital.
Pornographic images captivate me as does the sexual intercourse I have, which is another kind of experience. Boys, kids, the pleasures that they represent have a life with no material equivalent. The snapshots you take yourself never acquire enough autonomy, strangeness. The image has to come from nowhere. Nor is this kind of life based on photos one of fantasy; each of these unknown boys surpasses my imagination. It’s not comparable, in fact, to voyeurism, in which you spy on the ephemeral, the animate, the extensible, and where you choose completely on your own to have an orgasm only with your eyes. Our body slips between the feeling of reality procured by the photos and their conclusive unreality, their strict limits, the untouchable part of what they form. The irresolute permanency of photography, and nothing else, offers this experience.
Pornography adds to this what our society is organized to hide—yet which seems the least ugly among the images that humanity is able to show itself about what it is and what it does.
Those who, through some strange infantilism, see nothing but transgression deal with pornography puritanically, in an excited or censorious way, rather than being sensitive to its object—the faces, bodies, genitals. And transgression is a period coming before, which by itself has no value; pleasure doesn’t come from smashing prohibition but in inhabiting the territory that it was protecting, which is the most populated there is. Because the other world on which pornography opens is the one where we are, and it’s toward ourselves that it leads us.
I don’t reproach myself for my obsession with images. If I believe the arts in every continent, nothing has ever seduced man more than the look of his own species. But to get off, I have no need of any art. I don’t even approve of the fact that these photos try to be artistic: when they’re brutish, flat, ignorant, basic, done with a low level of skill, they are more faithful to their real power. I detest those geniuses of film who shove their fat back between us and the boys they’re photographing.
The puritans claim that pornography is tiresome, that it always shows the same thing. I fear they overestimate the variety of everything else. I open a magazine: every week I find mugs of the same politicians, scenes of the street, the office, school, factory, war. I read novels: couple, family, money, work, war. This diversity is accentuated by the originality of the literary approach. The bottle’s the nonreturnable packaging, the drunkenness filtered water. But an infinitesimal difference between two portraits of people in ties, two stories about marriage, is enough to satisfy the customer. Me, too: the littlest amount of posturing that differentiates one photo of the same cock from another seems like a universe to me. I imagine, then, that when puritans know how to look at crotches closely enough, they’ll be fewer weighty politicians and silver-haired castrates of the Church yapping against the resemblance that there is among human beings. Seen one seen them all is a maxim that even bigots who pass judgment on the hats of those around them at every mass don’t apply.
The ten thousandth kid who undresses under my eyes will shake me up as deeply as the first. The millionth photo I buy will be enriched
with the capacity for interpretation I developed by gazing at those that came before. The ten millionth boy’s fly I see buckled by the cock it’s crushing, like the cheek of a kid crooked with the piece of candy he’s stuffing down, will continue to seem to me the best thing worth opening your eyes for.
Pornography and the photo were born almost together. Now that today’s obscene images are no longer reserved for wealthy connoisseurs, there is quibbling, haggling, price-fixing, coughing up of coins, fighting. But I’m thinking of the only serious fact. Armies of acultural photographers have created what has never been seen on this planet: a gigantic academy of every form of beauty, and even ugliness, that human beings of every generation, every race have had at one age or another in their life. The earliest of these photos have become better than tempting, their evocative power, their aura, the ranges to which they carry us are even those of art. Like those objects of civilizations that had no “artists”—medieval, primitive, savage, prehistoric—their goal was short, to give pleasure, produce an effect, conform to an order, etc. Then time passes and they escape it. I’d find it amusing if, in a few centuries, the only thing that our descendents condescend to retain of our artistic production, the only thing in which they’ll see worlds to admire, to penetrate, the only thing that they’ll show off as precious in immense museums after having flushed down the toilet all our acknowledged masterpieces, the only thing that will give them nostalgia and love for us will be our porn.
Obscene art is made for anyone who comes across these images and consents to be compelled by a particular boy or girl who is now wrinkled or dead. The humble impishness of a lazy ball in the snapshot of a kid from 1900 already seems like an inspired, incongruous detail to me, as extraordinary as the rarest historical fact revealed to me. And the innumerable correspondences that are developed in the image of a boy—between his face and penis, for example, his eyes and erections, his radiant skin and retracted foreskin, his gesture of jerking off and the shape of his buttocks or edges of his lips—are so many silent, barbarous, complex, indecipherable and self-evident phrases that, ages after they have been written, will continue to move us.
But no one knows how to read the body; those of us who are less blind discover only that an unknown language has been traced on its surfaces that yards of mud have buried for such a long time.
This is also the reason that literary pornography doesn’t do much for me. Neither those texts nor mine reconstruct those who inspire them. A few suggestions, a few equivalencies, a tiny fragment that’s transmitted, drowned in the stammering of a language armed against the flesh and unable to reconnect with it. I won’t reproduce this nose, this chin, this texture of skin, this sphincter contraction forming a smile, this glazed globe moist with urine that produces looks, these glands, these casings dangling in front, and their vegetative life. I’ll recite them in common colors, and rambling on from cock to cock, I won’t even understand the confusion I’m feeling—just as we can’t understand why we’d call a head this dented tubercle punctured with holes, sullied by patches of hair, with its jutting skeleton, its flaccid meat, its unsavory, sticky cavities, bristling with misshapen, distorted appendages like an old sprouting spud, and that for us its numberless appearances on earth are an object of contemplation, analysis and love that no glance can wear out.
Smutty photos, as much as, and in conjunction with, smutty people, know how to say this, how to solicit and fulfill it, whereas literature is powerless in the face of it. That’s the reason why I don’t jerk off while writing and only get hard to it by chance. When I learn that my books sometimes have a less mediocre effect on others than they do on their author, that you can read them with one hand, stick together their pages a bit, I have trouble believing it and it would make me conceited.
Once Francesco took some new underwear I’d brought (we’re the same size). He left the dirty pair with me. A little dirty. I washed it with my stuff, without any reservation. I gave it back to him when he returned. He made such a strange face that I had the impression that I’d committed an error, an injustice.
Nevertheless, at my place he likes working, like Andrès. He wants to do everything, in fits and starts. He cooks the local dishes with patience, talent, an adroitness that’s surprising. Preparing fish, chicken, takes him three or four hours. His appetite is small, in just a few mouthfuls he’s done with his meal. He’s proud of his culinary aptitude; doesn’t exercise it often; never tries the same recipe twice; lets me eat without looking for compliments. These moments of married life enchant him. Last fall, I was out of money and none was coming. Francesco managed to borrow a very small sum for me from a friend who had a shabby shop near him. Then, since he knows things that I don’t, he went hunting in obscure marketplaces, wouldn’t let me go with him and day after day brought back a bag of food for a few francs. He prepares them, we eat, sleep, the next morning he does the housework and grits his teeth if I help him. Never has he seemed so happy, so hard-working, so friendly and attentive. He’ll often talk to me again about those five or six days as the best we’ve ever spent. I liked them a lot, too; but I would have liked them less if I hadn’t known that they’d be over. Kicking back together like this was like a cure for sleep, with wonderful, sluggish dreams. They refreshed me completely so that I could begin to live again.
I’d met Francesco before dinner the day after the first time I arrived. Night was falling. It was beside a park that I wanted to enter so that we could fondle each other. He said that the place was dangerous. He pretended to be in high school, played it shy and too docile. A few hours later, he gave up on that lie and burst out laughing at the idea that I’d believed it. The appealing thing about this laughter was that he was more familiar with it than he let on. His strategy was using the lie as the approach, the confession as an attack, and the laughter as the conquest.
From what people said, I knew that in this city you occasionally met boys like he seemed to be: curious about foreigners, appreciative of pocket money, tolerant of males without desiring them, able to fuck asses without being turned off or on. We’re walking under the trees of a side street and since he’s very easy, I push him into the darkness. He’s too timid to do anything outdoors; this will be the only time he has consented to doing it with me. He kisses me and feels my cock with such warmth for a straight kid, and he has such a nice cock that I very much regret our not being able to go somewhere private. I don’t yet know about what’s available in this city; he claims ignorance about it. However, after the meal, he takes me to a small hotel in the old quarter; it’s a cool, attractive house, with a patio and mosaics. We don’t have sex there either, but I want to live there and decide that I’ll move the next day. No one has explained to me that it’s a hotel for turning tricks.
When morning comes, I bring my possessions. Francesco comes over. I have a door and a bed, which we get into. Since I’ve thought about what I’d like from him, and that he himself is probably looking for, I expect to be plowed. But we’ve barely started to touch each other when Francesco, who is on his back, flips around to position himself just the right way against me, grabs my cock, spits, wets and pushes it into him. Or rather, gulps it in the blinking of an eye. It’s a relatively copious nourishment: neither a single course nor something from the land of plenty nor a fast, and it’s not very often that it’s gobbled up the way Francesco is doing, without any grimacing or effort. Yet his anus isn’t the distended type: it’s a novel hole, very active, small and muscular, which he knows how to open up as much as necessary. I’ll find that the other boys from this city who agree to take it have the same control and, rather than opposing pricks with a ring that needs forcing, they spare themselves any pain by opening up like a mouth. I was surprised that I myself was nearly incapable of the same mastery; an effect of my education that I figured was not irremediable but would require time.
Francesco, then, can actually rape someone with his ass. Then he eats: being pounded by a cock doesn’t make him move his loins, but squeez
e and relax his anus. Such gluttony is another talent I envied.
In fucking Francesco, I discovered I was a butt-boy to the last degree, a superstitious person who violently impaled himself on symbols. I’ve done a good job curing myself of that—as well as of an infinity of other things that, to simplify my life, I would call “bourgeois.” I reconstructed my own orgasm strategies on the customs of the boys of this city. I had an idealistic body, rotten with mythologies, padded with values. I stripped and recovered it another way. That peeling away of myself was so intense, so abrupt that for a time I felt I was being voided, eviscerated; I couldn’t even jerk off any more; my arsenal of images was barren, scattered with old fantasies gone flat. These shredded husks were my means of desire. Then slowly, a new kind of flesh was put in place, worked out, it covered my bones and a new system of images came into being. This regeneration is a strange thing to talk about, impossible to describe any better, perhaps difficult to believe. It is not, however, an illusion. Nothing was more concrete, more conscious. In talking with other queers in this place, I discovered, as well, that they’d experienced the same situation. They had felt the same corrosive power of popular morals on their desire, their fantasies, their fascinations, their pleasure apparatus. But they had reacted to it as a kind of frustration, a danger; they saw in it no opportunity for freedom, intended to keep themselves as they were and not allow themselves to be ravaged by these invaders. My attitude was the opposite: I wasn’t asking for anything better than the destruction that I was having so much trouble accomplishing on my own; and whereas the others were enduring attacks, I was receiving help. Now the change is so complete, so stable, that when I go back to France, the queers that I meet for sex seem like churches on legs, guarded by ferocious beagles, where an inquisitor is saying the mass in front of an audience of bailiffs, policemen and old devotees. And I don’t want to enter.