As I’ve written previously, I regularly get emails from men who want to be porn stars because I wrote this story a dozen years ago. So far this week, I’ve gotten two — no, three. Oftentimes they are from India or Pakistan.
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Mannequin with bow tie | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This fictional short story was written by me, published by Nerve in 2002, and republished in You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? in 2003.
She wondered if it was a good idea to date someone of whom there was a doll version. What if one of her girlfriends mailed the doll of him to her as a gag gift for her birthday? Maybe at some later point she would get mad and rip his head off and yank his clothes away and humiliate him in some obscene act of desperation. Then what?
She watched him on television. She watched him so much the show's theme song turned her on. When he came onscreen, she would smile at him and think, Oh, he is really funny, or, Wow, that is such a burden. She thought if she had the doll of him, he could sit on the couch right next to her, and by the end of the show his little plastic hand would be climbing up her shirt, headed straight for her boobs.
She told her girlfriend, who went to a bar he frequented, to invite her along one night. As it turned out, he must have liked her because he walked right up to her, and he said, Hey, do you want to go out with me sometime? She couldn't see his small eyes back behind his thick glasses, but she told him, Sure. Other men had told her, You are terribly intriguing, or, You are terrifically fascinating, but then couldn't think of anything else to say. This time, she thought, it would be different. With this one, the script had already been written.
For their first date, she went over to his house. He went off to the kitchen to get them a couple of beers, and she went to wait in the living room. There, she found four female sex dolls, sitting around on his furniture. She wasn't sure what to do, so she sat down next to one of them. She pulled at its rubber tongue, and it popped out in her hand. Luckily, she got the tongue back in before he came back in the room. Then, they drank the beer, and watched TV, and made out while the dolls sat around on the furniture, watching them.
Their relationship, such as it was, went on like that for a while. That was pretty much all they ever did. Once, they went bowling. After about a month like this, he broke down and told her what he really enjoyed was being beaten during sex. In his home-office, he showed her several oversized books filled with page after page of drawings of tall, angry women standing on top of men, beating them.
All of a sudden, before she knew it, he was naked down on the floor, and the bottom of her boot was across the back of his neck, and his tongue was on the top of her other boot, licking it, and she was shouting at him, You're licking my boot because that's the only thing that you're good enough to do! With one hand, she twisted his balls, hard. With the other hand, she smacked violently at his penis.
As she did it, it didn't turn her on, exactly. But the thought of someday standing next to his large swimming pool, holding the hand of his fat and round baby as it doddered around like a small and tiny version of him in its own pair of miniature glasses, while she staggered around half-drunk in high heels and a string-bikini with her lipstick smeared all over her frozen-on smile face, did turn her on. To her, that was a fantastic idea and everything she had ever wanted and a dream come true, all rolled into one.
Their relationship, such as it was, would involve him talking into his cellphone while they drove around, and him chatting with his agent as they dined out, and him laughing loudly with his friends across the back of the limousine they were riding in as, the whole entire time, she sat there right beside him, at his side. Living her life as if there was a camera broadcasting everything she did out to the world's peoples sitting bored in their homes metaphorically masturbating to her life would, surely, make her happy. Everything that had already taken place in her life before him would become like the blinding snow of a silent TV screen. It would be amazing what she could do when she lived on the other side of the fourth wall with him.
After things had been going along in this manner for about a month, they took a trip together to Las Vegas. At the airport, she watched as the crowds of people stood around staring at them like the people in Close Encounters of the Third Kind watching the aliens shuffle down off the spaceship. When they walked through the casino surrounded by the fleet of bodyguards, she knew that the people playing the slot-machines were jerking off their levers just for them.
But, late that night, in the privacy of their hotel room, when she looked up into the round mirror over the king-size bed in the Greco-Roman penthouse suite, the only thing she knew for sure was that he had just said to her, I do not like having intercourse, per se, all that very much, and within 4.6 seconds, she had thought, I can live with that, because that, she knew, was what the script had called for. There was, after all, no going back to auditions once you had won the part. It was hard, though, to know what to do when you found yourself hanging off the edge of the very page that you thought you had written.
The next morning, when she had finished hitting him for the umpteenth time, he looked up at her, and he said, Isn't this great? Behind him, The Mask of Zorro was playing on the TV, and Antonio Banderas was running back and forth in his black mask, waving his whip around wildly, raising his arched eyebrow up and down at her, as if in an erotic challenge. It was getting harder for her to upright her brain from the place it fell over when his bad edits in the reel of their life together knocked her over like a car that had gone off the road.
Back in the city, she found herself at the very last moment softening her blows to his erect penis. She discovered increasingly she could barely muster up enough energy to tighten his ball-gag as tight as he liked. She could hardly bring herself to raise the crop high enough above him to bring out the best welts on his pale bottom waiting below.
By the time her birthday came, he had stopped calling. Instead, a UPS man showed up at her front door with a brown box containing the doll version of him as a gag gift from her girlfriend. That night, she could hear the live-in studio audience in her head murmuring its displeasure, shuffling out the stage door, as she climbed in bed alone yet again.
When the phone had quit ringing entirely, she called her girlfriend, who had taken her to the bar that first night, and asked her to come over. Together, they made a collage out of pictures of him that they had cut from The National Enquirer. When it was done, he looked like a big, fat, crying baby. The next morning, when she looked at it again, she burst into tears, and then cancelled her cable TV service. The doll version of him, for its part, was already sitting headless in the back of one of her bathroom cupboards, the dust bunnies gathered all around it.
In the revised version of the story of her life, that she finally ended up writing, she never completely forgot that boyfriend or what he had meant to her or how hard she had been able to slap him across the face just to make him smile. But, eventually, she fell in love with another man, who was balding and who had never been on TV. With him, she learned how to pantomime true love to the degree that, sometimes, she thought she could hear a laugh-track playing in the background like applause while they had sex. And in the end, it turned out, that turned her on.
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This short story was originally published as part of the Significant Objects project in 2009/2010.
I reached my hand into the drawer, withdrew it, and looked at what lay in my palm. “ALL AMERICAN OFFICIAL NECKING TEAM,” the pin read. It was hard to reconcile the words with my father. At this point, he had been dead for nearly 15 years. After he had passed away, my mother and I had stood over the dining room table upon which sat a large box that contained what was left of him. Cremains, the man had called them. My father, I had longed to correct him. Thankfully, my mother had been willing to share what remained of him with me, his only son. My father was a skyscraper of a man — six-foot-five, Ozymandias hands, a brooding forehead — a great man, really — and so, he had left a great deal of himself behind. I dipped a teaspoon into the mound of his ashes and placed three or so tiny shovelfuls into a plastic bag. I fastened the bag with a twist-tie. I put the bag in a small wooden box that smelled faintly of the peach tea it had once held. Later, my mother handed me a bag of his things, which, to be perfectly honest, I had forgotten about — until today, when I spotted it in the back of the drawer, behind my wife’s underwear, and reached into the leather case and pulled the pin from it.
I imagined my father had won his place on the All-American Necking Team sometime during 1953, his senior year at Brooklyn Preparatory. I knew what he looked like back then from photographs: a young man with deep-set eyes undershadowed by dark circles, his long form gangly with the awkwardness of his youth, a thin tie knotted at the base of his bird-like neck. Once, my mother had told me about his penchant for drinking Zombies, about the time in the middle of a party, he had proclaimed, “I’m a tree,” and then fallen flat to the floor, how she had stolen him from another woman older than her, who had a child — and in the remembering, my mother had smiled. But that summer, his father, my grandfather, a frustrated CPA with a roaring temper fueled by an abiding love of Four Roses and the failures of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had fallen dead of a heart attack while taking the IRT subway to work one day, and my father’s life had changed forever. Instead of trundling off to some Ivy League college, he had stayed in Flatbush, enrolled at Brooklyn College, and dutifully taken care of his mother, a woman I’d never met, whose name was Rose.
Looking down at the pin staring up at me like a Cyclops, looking through this portal into a time wherein I was nothing but a flickering flash in one of my father’s constellation of neurons, I wondered who this all-star necker was: my father, a young man not unlike myself, or something else altogether — a man beyond my understanding now relegated to a past that lay on the other side of a bridge where the land was so dark that I could no longer see him.
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This short story was originally published by A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction in May 2010.
She had been waiting forever, it seemed, for a boy like this one, who wore his heart on his sleeve. Now, here he was, sitting across from her in this dimly lit restaurant, his arm on the table. The exposed, bloody organ was attached to his sleeve with what appeared to be a safety pin. Across the table, he was looking at her expectantly, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a dog listening for a sound only he could hear, the right side of his mouth pulling up slightly, as if he was unsure what she was thinking. Judging by the tangle of threads unraveling around the gaping hole in his blue sweater where his heart should have been, he had carved himself open to retrieve it. On his sleeve, the heart was shaking and shuddering, straining against the pin’s grasp. They had found each other on an online dating site three days previous and met for the first time 17 minutes ago. Now, here he was, looking eager and hopeful, and it was up to her to figure out what was she supposed to do next. She looked at the boy uncertainly and tried to hurry up and decide what she was going to do about this boy and his still-beating heart before the angry waitress returned and demanded to take their order. Is it too late? she said. The boy’s face dropped. Late? he said. Too late to put it back? She nodded her head at the heart. Oh, the boy said, looking down at it. Slowly, the blood was seeping into his napkin. Soon, it would spill off the table and pool on the floor, making a mess. I don’t know, he said. The boy had no idea if he could singlehandedly un-pin his heart, stuff it back into his chest, and darn up the sweater in such a way that no one would ever know that he had stood in his kitchen in the fading light and removed his heart from his chest with a serrated steak knife, all for a woman whom he had yet to meet, a glowing collection of pixels that was her smiling out at him from the computer screen. It was too late to pull his arm off the table and put it in his lap. She would know what he was doing, and he would bleed all over his trousers. From somewhere behind him, he could hear the hard clanging of pots in the kitchen, the frantic barking of the chef, the buzz of other couples in love cooing at one another in the candlelight. Shit, he said, under his breath but loud enough that the girl would hear it. All of a sudden, he decided he had had enough. He reached over with his left hand and unfastened the safety pin holding his heart to his sleeve. Here, he said, taking his heart in his right hand. Standing up slightly, he leaned across the table and deposited the heart on the plate in front of the girl sitting across from him. The girl poked at the heart with her fork. Interesting, she said, sounding like a forensic pathologist. He had no idea what she meant by that, but he knew at that moment that if she would continue saying things like this while stabbing at his heart with the tiny tines of the silver fork in her hand, he could be with her and stay happy forever. In that moment, it seemed anything was possible.
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This morning I saw an amazing Jean-Michel Basquiat show at Gagosian Beverly Hills: “Made on Market Street.”
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Since I have been writing about porn industry for nearly 30 years, I get emails from people who are trying to break into the porn business. The emails are always from men. Mostly these men aspire to be porn stars. (I would estimate I have received hundreds of those. [Scratch that. According to this 2016 post, at that time I had received approximately 700 emails from men wanting to be porn stars. That means by now that number must be over a thousand.]) Today’s query is from a guy who thinks I am a porn editor (like I edit porn movies) and wants to know how he, too, can become a porn editor. I am not, and I cannot help you with that, bro.
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I wrote something for HILOBROW: “Repo Your Enthusiasm (18): Man Bites Dog.” Give it a read and share it too.
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I watched “All of Us Strangers.” It’s a beautiful movie about ghosts, love, and loss. I highly recommend it.
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I bought this book because I was in Berkeley, my hometown, and I thought it would be funny to buy a book called I Hate Men in Berkeley. The book, authored by Pauline Harmange, is thin, both physically and in its content. I don’t know why the book got sort of attempted banned, since it’s mostly the not actually very radical or provocative musings of a woman not living the life she claims to exalt. Do not recommend.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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I wrote this short story, “E Is for Eunuch,” in the early 2000s. Originally, it was published in 3:AM Magazine. The story was part of a larger project I was doing: The Fetish Alphabet. This story also appears in my 2003 short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In any case, I’m resharing / republishing it here.
You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket, and he had, therefore, since become the ingestor of a multitude of hormone-filled pharmaceuticals, and turned into the personal curator of his own Johnson in a jar, and resultingly realized that he was now the type of individual who could silence an entire dinner-party full of people at the mere drop of a hat with the mere drop of his pants, and yet what he had discovered since this rather sudden change of life events was that while he had fantasized rapturously as a young man of chemical castration, and spent several years seriously considering moving to India to linger amongst the third-sexed there by the banks of the Katni River, it was actually only one year ago that his brain had become wholly overrun by words like “Elastrator,” and “Burdizzo,” and “Underground Doctors,” and it was only rather recently that he had found himself lying quite awake, because he had wanted it that way, on a cold kitchen table, because they had wanted it that way, praying to whomever looked over poor souls like him that someday someone would lean over him in some dark bed somewhere and be happy to find him so wonderfully smooth, but the problem was that now, today, at this very moment, in that imaginary bed he was truly lying, and he knew without a doubt, even with the lights off, that the person lying next to him was doing nothing but snoring, and coming down the back alleyways of his mind for him was his own terrible penis, and it was angry, and it was carrying at its side an entire suitcase filled to overflowing with his whole, long, lonely life that he had lived thus far, and, already, the suitcase was falling open and spilling its whole horrible mess out all over the floor of his mind, and he knew, with no reservations needed, thank you very much, that he would slip in it, and that this new smoothness of his, which had been intended to lubricate his life, would make it impossible for him to ever get back up again.
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A performer on the set of a bukkake shoot, early 2000s. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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This article was originally published on Forbes.com on October 18, 2018.
Dennis Hof was a pimp. Perhaps he would've preferred the term "brothel owner," for that he was, too, at the time of his death earlier this week at 72. He was found dead in bed at his Love Ranch Vegas brothel in Crystal, Nevada, on Tuesday morning by adult performer Ron Jeremy. An autopsy will be conducted to identify the cause of his death, but foul play wasn't suspected.
It was a busy time for Hof, who was in the midst of a campaign to get himself elected to the Nevada State Assembly. Ironically, he may well be elected, despite the fact that he's dead, because, according to the New York Times, in the 36th District in which he's running, 45% of those registered to vote are registered as Republicans, compared to 28% who are registered to vote as Democrats. His Trumpian political platform included lowering taxes and defending gun owners' rights.
In June of 2017, I interviewed Hof for an article I wrote for this website in the wake of a news report that former FBI director James Comey had used the term "hookers" in a Statement for the Record released one day prior to testifying in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Hookers" appears in Comey's summary of a March 30, 2017, call he received from Trump. "[Trump] said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia," Comey wrote. Was "hookers" Comey's word choice or Trump's? Interested to hear what sex workers and their minders thought of the high-profile disparagement, I reached out to Hof and his employees.
As it turned out, Hof had a Trump story of his own. "I met him 27 years ago," he told me. "I was in the timeshare business. He wanted to timeshare the [Trump] Taj Mahal, and he wanted me to come aboard to do that. I didn't do that. I said there's not enough money in the world to make me live in Atlantic City." It was hard to know whether or not to take Hof's claim seriously. Instead, Hof recounted, he became "the pimp master general of America," anointed as such by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. He'd voted for Trump and liked the guy—"We need a businessman," he said—but he preferred the term "working girls." Either way, Trump was good for business. "Business is humping," he told me. "We feel the difference with Trump in office."
It wasn't the first time I'd connected with Hof. Over the prior two decades, I'd encountered him at various events, from adult movie sets to X-rated conventions. The first time I'd met him was on the set of an adult movie being shot in the San Fernando Valley, the content of which was so outré that I won't detail it here. On another occasion, I talked with him at the Hustler Store in Hollywood. And he was a regular presence at the AVN Awards—the so-called "Oscars of porn"—in Las Vegas, Nevada.
He wasn't the first pimp that I met, and I'm sure he won't be the last, but he was like many pimps that I've encountered over the years. He was charismatic, likeable, friendly, a consummate showman, and the sort of person who could make you feel comfortable about anything, including, one presumed, showing up at one of his brothels in hopes of paying one of the women who worked for him a few hundred dollars, or more, to share some intimate time, in the parts of Nevada where that's legal.
In a way, he wasn't that different from sex workers I've known. For providing a service in demand across the country, they'd been publicly vilified and systematically ostracized. Hof was a larger-than-life character—a pimp, you bet—but he was also a businessman who knew well that if someone will pay for something, there's money to be made, and that's the American dream.
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Sex machine | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This article was originally published on Forbes.com on April 23, 2012.
You might think being a male porn star is easy. Have sex for a living? That's a piece of cake.
So, what can some of the biggest woodsmen in the porn business teach us about work?
As it turns out, guys who get it up for a paycheck have something to offer when it comes to career advice.
I heard from seven of Porn Valley's biggest studs via email and got the secrets to becoming a successful working stiff.
TIP #1: Get your coworkers to like you.
In the porn business, it's doubly important your coworkers like you.
According to Brandon Iron, star of "Perverted Planet 7" and director of "Sex Crazed," getting along with your costars is the key to getting ahead in porn.
"The hardest thing about being a male porn star is convincing your female co-workers that you are an interesting, well-rounded, fun guy who they might consider dating in a parallel universe after a few drinks," Iron says.
TIP #2: Don't confuse the professional with the personal.
For male porn stars, the line between professional and personal can get blurry. If you think keeping the professional professional and the personal personal is tricky in your line of work, you should talk to a male porn star, who may have a wife waiting at home for him to finish his latest scene with another woman.
Jeremy Steele, star of "Naughty Neighbors" and "M.I.L.F. Money," says the hardest thing is what happens when he's not working.
"[The hardest thing is] having a relationship with a significant other," Steele says. "The first time I told a girl I was in porn she disconnected her phone number the same night, and I never saw or heard from her again."
Not only that, changing career tracks can be tricky, especially if you leave the adult business and try to reinvent yourself.
"The second hardest thing is having a post-porn career that doesn't make you 'infamous' if or when it is discovered that you were a sex worker on film/video," Steele reports. "You can lose a job or not find one if you're too well known for having been a whore on camera, in spite of it being legal."
TIP #3: Be cognizant of how others perceive you.
Whether you're a twentysomething or fiftysomething, your age can impact how management perceives your abilities. Are you too young to be getting the salary you're negotiating for? Or are you perceived as too old to be promotable?
Dave Cummings may be the oldest working porn star on the planet. At 72, he's appeared in "The Sopornos 2" and directs his own series, "Sugar Daddy."
On the one hand, Cummings owns a niche market. On the other hand, his age can be an impediment.
Sometimes, Cumming says, he worries his coworkers would "prefer working with a younger guy than me."
TIP #4: Rise to the occasion.
Seymore Butts has had in his own Showtime reality series, "Family Business," and he's directed and starred in adult movies for years.
According to Butts, it's not the porn starlet, the director, the producer, the cameraman, or the production assistant who has the toughest job in porn. It's the guy who has to get wood -- or else.
Butts opines:
The most difficult part about being a male porn star is the hard-on. They have to get it up and off on cue essentially and all the while in between maintain [it] for two to three hours. This must be done under the most difficult of circumstances, including not being attracted to their female co-star, having sex in the most uncomfortable settings, i.e. on hard surfaces, cold/hot weather, etc., and/or having to stop frequently for direction or shot setups. They have to be in great shape in order to perform. It all adds up to being the most difficult job in porn, in my opinion.
TIP #5: Successful negotiations are key.
You may have seen Richard Mann in "Freaknic 2" and "Big Mann on Campus," but Mann says he and his brethren are getting stiffed when it comes to getting paid what they should.
"I'd say dealing with the fact that you don't get any royalties" is the hardest thing about his job, Mann says. "When you shoot, they pay you once, and that's it."
Will male porn stars unionize? Unlikely.
TIP #6: It's all about confidence.
Zak Smith is an artist, author, and male porn star. With his unique resume, he's found porn is a tricky industry because it breeds insecurity.
"Everything that happens [on a porn set] affects whether people will want to sleep with you," Smith says. "The stakes could not possibly be higher. Every other thing -- including things that might lead to losing the job -- are just subthings of that thing."
TIP #7: Perspective, perspective, perspective.
Arguably the most famous male porn star of the moment, James Deen's work can be seen in "This Ain't Ghostbusters XXX," "Simpsons: The XXX Parody," and "Batman XXX: A Porn Parody."
Deen's secret to success: a positive attitude.
"I guess the hardest thing about being a male performer is ... um ... I don't know," Deen says. "My job is pretty easy."
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Porn set, Canoga Park, CA | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
“Two of the [male porn stars] I interviewed have since died.” Read the rest of my latest Reverse Cowgirl newsletter: “The Hard Thing About Being a Male Porn Star.” Subscribe to get it Sundays in your inbox.
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This is part 6 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about Letters From Johns, a 2008 project in which, over the course of a year, I shared emails that men sent me about their experiences paying for sex. (As you can see on the project’s website, by submitting their letters, the letter writers were granting me permission to share their letters, anonymously, of course.) This letters project was part of what would become a five-year project I called The Letters Project, and which included Letters From Working Girls, Letters From Men Who Watch Pornography, Letters From Men Who Go To Strip Clubs, and Letters From Cheaters. The Letters Project as a whole got a fair amount of media attention, including coverage by Salon, CBC Radio, and Newsweek. In a weird coincidence, I launched Letters From Johns on January 3, 2008, and then New York governor Eliot Spitzer was entangled in a prostitution scandal a little over two months later, the latter bringing some attention to the former. (That’s timing for you, I guess?)
In August of 2013, as The Letters Project was winding down, I published an essay about the project: “You Were My Studs.” I wrote about how the whole project had started with a shot in the dark: I had put out a call on my blog, asking readers why they had paid for sex. Within a few hours, I had my first answer: “The Night I Drove a Call Girl to Her Next Stop”; it begins: “I am writing because I can’t tell this story to anyone I know and retain my dignity, but since your soliciting I figured I can get it off my chest.” There were more letters to come. As I wrote in my essay: “Over the following year, I heard from over 50 johns. Their letters came at all hours of the day and night. They were from young guys and old guys, white guys and black guys, military grunts and corporate drones. The letters were poignant, exhilarated, nostalgic, terrifying, revelatory. They were all confessions.”
One letter in particular, “I’m a State Investigator,” struck me:
“I keep a coded diary, in case it's discovered. 1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good/bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week."
As I wrote: “Of course, the letters weren't about sex, or prostitution, or johns. They were about love and loneliness, from guys who just wanted to be touched and men who had gotten dumped, stories in which call girls really had hearts of gold and mercenaries cruised foreign streets in search of bodhisattvas-for-hire.” After a year, each letters project was closed to submissions, and while I received many letters, I rarely responded: “I surmised the letters were not for me; they were for their authors.” But, as I recounted, I did reach out to one john: “I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done.” In an email, I asked him why he had written a letter to me (a woman).
His response, in part:
“By that, I mean I never considered that I was writing my letter to a woman. You're Ms. Breslin, with a blog about john experiences. Like my several john experiences, I was reaching out to no one in particular; I was, in hindsight, trying to find some elusive unidentifiable emotion. Although I gave you 'a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books,' you cannot take from me the liberating experience you elucidated from three simple questions. Thank you. And again, thank you, if only for a few brief moments of experiencing ... .... ..."
Looking over the letters now, I remembered a lot of them, and how I got a kind of thrill whenever I received a new one. It was fascinating to revisit them today.
Like Letters From Johns’ “I Am a Gentleman”:
“There are many who would maintain that my philandering disqualifies me from claiming to be a good person, and definitely from being a good husband. Frankly, I don't care what they believe. I have a hobby that is infinitely more interesting to me than travel or theme parks. The ladies I prefer can hold conversations and appreciate the occasional session just to stroke their bodies. They do not judge. They do not become angry at requests. They treat the experience as an encounter between equals. There is no power struggle. There is no drama. There is privacy, and usually conviviality. What we do behind closed doors remains there.”
Or Letters From Working Girls’ “I Am Just An Ordinary Woman With The Knack Of Making People Love And Trust Me”:
“I am just an ordinary woman with the knack of making people love and trust me. These were just men who needed to love somebody who would let them. It's all so simple. Not complicated in the least. There were no perversions too perverse to get in the way of the trusting bond that was needed. Women suffer out loud, and men suffer in silence. Until we allow men to suffer out loud, many a wife will wonder where her husband is during his lunch hour, and in my opinion, a lot of those wives deserve it. (Not all of those wives.)”
Or Letters From Men Who Watch Pornography’s “I Was a Geek”:
“I've come to accept pornography as my surrogate sexual lifestyle: devoid of complication, disease, and odoriferous unpleasantness, and heavily populated with a wide range of women to satisfy every craving, it is a hollow yet adequate solution to my otherwise celibate bachelor existence. And while I am still aware of the inherent pathetic quality of being a man alone at my age, I would much rather be the connoisseur of an under-appreciated form of entertainment continuing to transcend the aesthetic limits hitherto placed upon it by forces of official history than a harried everyman, harangued by the burdens of emotional turmoil, personality conflict, atrophying sexual energy, and ludicrously inexcusable asinine conversations and circular arguments.”
Or Letters From Men Who Go to Strip Clubs’ “I Am Gay”:
“All of that is uncomfortable to witness, because none of it can be commented on nor helped without becoming far too intimate far too fast. The club creates the illusion of heterosexual intimacy, a coy game of it, but it refuses to actually allow or engage the real thing. So long as everyone involved simply enjoys the game, all is well; but the moment someone needs more than the game, they absolutely cannot have it, and so they stand there, open and raw and unable to share. Most of the other dudes are too engaged to notice, but the detached strippers and the detached gay man notice.”
Or Letters From Cheaters’ “I Have Always Been a Cheater”:
“Eventually, this split life I was living took a toll on my relationship. One day I pulled the plug. I tried to reform myself. I took up a daily meditation practice. I tried my best to avoid massage parlours, prostitutes and gangbangs. About eighteen months ago I met another wonderful woman. We’re talking about building a house outside the city, starting a business and, of course, having a child. I’m happy. But… I still can’t stop myself from looking at the online ads; I’m still not quite there, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I worry that everything is really just work and performance.”
Sometimes when people ask me what I write about I say sex or porn or the business of sex. The real answer is probably closer to intimacy. That’s what these letters, the best of them, anyway, the most real and raw and revealing, are about. Every so often, I think of one of the Letters from Johns that’s stayed with me: “I Have a Physical Disability.”
Here’s his letter in full:
“I have a physical disability known as Cerebral Palsy and am in an electric wheelchair. I have always struggled in my own existence, largely because I rely on a lot of people to assist me with the most basic tasks, such as dressing, showering, getting in and out of bed, and other basic things that many people take for granted. Although I am verbal, and highly intelligent, having acquired two university degrees at the age of 24, people do tend to judge a book by its cover when it comes to things such as dating and sex.
My entire life I have been trapped inside a body that I hate. It never does what I want it to. It always conspires against me. Although I am confident in my intellectual ability, I do not have a very strong self-image. This is largely because every girl I have asked out on a date has rejected me. Some were even cruel enough to say, ‘Why would I ever go out with a cripple like you?’ Even now, I still have not yet had a girlfriend.
A few years back, I was hanging out with a few other disabled guys who were less physically able than I was. They mentioned that they regularly used a pro because it was the only way they could get the release they craved the most. Most of these guys couldn’t lift their heads up on their own, let alone have the ability to please a woman the way they wanted to. They would go to a brothel and get a hand-job once every few weeks. One of them described his first time with a pro in a way that will stick with me for the rest of my life; he said that ‘It was the first time I felt like a real man.’
Sometime later, I fell in love for the first time. After pursuing her for several months, I was rejected once more, but this time was much harder to swallow than the others that came before her. After several weeks of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to do something about it. Remembering the words of my friends, I decided I would visit a brothel. However, unlike my friends, I knew I wanted more than a hand-job. I wanted to lose my virginity.
I searched through the phone book, found a brothel I wanted and asked about the processes involved. I soon discovered that like most things in my life, this could not be a total secret. If I wanted to have sex, I would need somebody to help me shower before and after, as well as to lift me onto the bed. This would put most of my other disabled friends off immediately, but it did not deter me in the slightest. Without a moment's hesitation, I asked my older brother if he could help me. Although he was initially stunned, he reluctantly agreed.
On the night we turned up at the brothel, we were two completely different men. I was excited, nervously anticipating what would await me. My brother, in contrast, was absolutely petrified, afraid that someone he might know would walk in. After a short while, some girls made their way out and introduced themselves. I picked one and we followed her into the room. She stepped out while my brother helped me get organized. I told him to go for a walk, and I’d give him a call when I was ready.
The whole experience was everything I hoped it would be. She started by giving me a massage, which eased my muscles that are normally tight and non-compliant. As she completed the massage, my body felt like it could do anything I wanted, something I had never felt before. She went down on me, and we had sex. She made me feel safe and confident in myself. For that portion of time, having sex with her (even if I had to pay for it) made up for a lifetime of rejection.
It was the most enjoyable experience I have ever had in my life. I would put it down to two things. For once I had gained control over my body, and it felt like I was in control of my life. The worst thing about having a physical disability is the lack of control I have in life. Everything is very clinical, get up at this time, eat at this time, have a shower at this time, and go to bed at this time. I have no control over these things. This time, I got to do things on my own terms. Second, it was the first time I felt like I was being treated like a sexual being with desires and needs that were important. All my life I have been viewed as an asexual being whose desires should be avoided or neglected. The trip to the brothel taught me not to be afraid of my sexuality and not to push it into the background.
I am now a regular customer, although not as regular as I’d like to be. This is mostly because my brother has moved overseas, and it is hard to find people who will willingly accompany me. However, each time I go, I no longer feel like a cripple. I feel whole.”
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A tattooed mannequin in a Hollywood storefront. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.
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A detail from REPRESSIA (decline) at LACMA. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.
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All my life I want money and power
Respect my mind or die from lead shower
I pray my dick get big as the Eiffel Tower
So I can fuck the world for seventy-two hours
— Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle”
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