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A Homosurreal Homage to
Poe, Kafka, Artaud,
Browning, Jodorowsky…
The Lords of Leather
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled — but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.” — Edgar Allen Poe, “The Casque of Amontillado”
Flashblinded like a deer buck caught in hunters’ headlights, the blond Bodybuilder with the dropdead looks breaks into a sweat. Champs and chumps know when the jig is up. He knows they’ve tracked him. Found him. Chased him down. The Lords of Leather. Caught up with him roaming too far too late at night down on Folsom Street from his sanctuary in the fluorescent doorway of the donut shop at 18th and Castro.
There he was a man among the Castronauts, meter running, Saturday and Sunday afternoons, a body artist exhibiting himself shirtless in the crowded sidewalk paseo, stripteasing, beguiling in the San Francisco sun. His beauty was his vocation. He was a titleholder. Mr 1978 This. Mr 1979 That. When not stripshaved for a California physique contest, thick blond hair matted across his hairy pecs, down his muscular abs, glossing his sturdy legs and golden forearms. The world was his stage and 18th and Castro was his posing platform. He was the strong silent type flashing an easy grin with his straight white teeth. He fingercombed his perfect blond hair to display his 20-inch biceps. Every move practiced. Muscles flexed, relaxed, flexing again. Big basket bulging in faded Levi’s, jockstrap under gray cotton gym shorts, dissembling decoy, intimating sexual promise. A master at butch-flirting.
Standing by the side of the slender man he called Lover, he used the man as a front, an excuse, to hold off other supplicants of the sex his seductive Look promised. He played the cruelest game in town: turn-on-and-turn-down. Muscle worshipers wished his Lover dead, as if he were the last obstacle between themselves and sexual paradise with the Bodybuilder. But it wasn’t the Lover who was petulant. It was the Bodybuilder who took sport in prick-teasing, smiling the smile that disarms men, tempting gentle men cruising by, accepting their court and gifts and suppers, and then announcing, “Not now. Understand? I don’t mean no. I mean not now.”
They think he means later.
He means never.
The Lords of Leather know.
They have watched, listened, wiped away the tears. Too many men have whispered to the godfather Lords about the ballbreaking heartbreaker. The Village is too small for so much hurt. Too many mellow men led on, defrauded, demeaned, violated: not their bodies, but their worth, their very hearts, souls, essences.
Tall and tan and young and handsome, the southern-fried Bodybuilder, who drove his red Corvette to California from nowhere, intimating his home was Texas, and before that Norway, and before that the Planet Krypton, has stayed too long at the fair. He’s stood once too often on the southeast corner of 18th and Castro, leaning against the Hibernia Bank, preening on the sunny sidewalk that the shirtless Castro clones, crewcut with chinstrap beards and pushbroom moustaches, call Hibernia Beach.
“I’m not responsible for your happiness,” he tells ordinary men as they come to him desperately gay, one by one, seeking in the false flag of his platonic ideal the solace of the mindfuck happiness they have prayed for during long late nights. He flexes his pecs. His muscles justify his existence.
His downy hand pocket-pools his cock like an invitation to the dance through his faded blue Levi’s. His blond hair shines with a Pacific shimmer from sea water he bottles in the surf at Ocean Beach where he cruises at Land’s End. His muscle sweat tastes of seasalt and steroids. His god’s body not built by God is science fiction. Designer drugs from outer space create the asteroid-steroid sheen of his golden calves worshiped by kneeling men who adore the beefcake perfection they expect from lucky genes, pumping iron, and protein smoothies.
Is the Bodybuilder an emotional hijacker? Has the con-artist stayed too long at the scene of his crimes? Once desired like a deluxe model from Colt Studio. Now a face on a Wanted Poster hanging in a hundred desert hearts. He hustled one man too many: the one he called with lying tongue, Lover.
Exposed by his Lover and cornered at night a half block off Folsom Street by vigilantes, he is captured cruising through the dark industrial zone behind a strip of leather bars, gallivanting his way down the blighted side track of Ringold Alley, his unbuttoned flannel shirt flaring open, hairy chest flashing flesh from his unzipped leather jacket, moseying that slow bodybuilder-walk muscle guys grind out to show they own the place.
Suddenly the tables turn. His attitude melts in the hot glare of Harley-Davidson headlights. He sweats, not the sweat of the victorious bodybuilder posing triumphant on a stage high above a cheering crowd, but the animal sweat of fear. Dropping his bodybuilder strut, he tries to run. Twenty gangfuckers gun their engines drowning a jukebox blaring “Hotel Californa” from the nearest biker bar. Blue exhaust roils up through the glare of headlights.
These are the Lords of Leather.
Through a bullhorn, a voice commands: “Halt. Hands up. This is no game. Tonight is your night.”
The Bodybuilder backs away from the approaching phalanxes of black-visored helmets. His wide lats and broad shoulders press his back and butt hard against the snub-nose grille of a new 1979 Chevy cargo van the Lords parked lying in wait, its high-beam headlights suddenly popping on flashing bright as prison-yard searchlights.
Caught. Targeted.
The whirring zap of a taser gun hits his oiled pecs. Barbed darts pierce his skin that bleeds red on blond. The electric shock stuns him. The Village approves the vigilante contract on him. The Lords of Leather are masters at attitude adjustment. His Lover for three years thought he was a saint. At first, the act seemed honestly no act at all. Sacred even. The Bodybuilder could have been one of the boys, one of the men, in fact, one of the Lords themselves, but in his heart as he grew unnaturally bigger and hotter he held them all in increasing contempt. No one is good enough for him, unless they match the generosity and open heart and open home of the man he calls Lover.
“No one is straight-acting enough,” the Bodybuilder says taking artful measure of his vascular forearms displaying big squared-off wrists idealized in men’s wristwatch ads making a fetish of virility. “Everyone is too gay.” The Lords of Leather know how to avenge a muscle-beach bully who in every comic book of their youth was advertised as a powerful real man kicking sand in the face of some scrawny runt.
The twelve-year-old little Boy Scout from Texas, Norway, and Krypton had clipped from Boys’ Life a coupon he mailed to Charles Atlas, “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.” Atlas promised him, “In 7 Days I Can Make You a Man!” The boy took himself in hand with “’Lessons in Manliness’ in a free thirty-two page booklet crammed with photographs, advice, and easy methods.” Atlas, posing stripped to his leopard-skin bikini, whispered from a closet, “You can use the booklet in the privacy of your own room.” The before-and-after muscle pictures made his head spin with the fetish of physique. “A real prize for any young fellow who wants a better build.” The pictures awakened his penis. “Exercise made me such a complete specimen of manhood people stopped laughing at me.” Atlas played to every bantam schoolboy’s anxiety. “Change your life as your scrawny chest and spindly arms begin to bulge. Thousands are becoming husky my way. This booklet is yours to keep.” Under the bed. Pages stuck together. “Check here for Booklet A if you are under fourteen years of age.”
In the middle of Ringold Alley, the panicking Bodybuilder reels on his feet. His big calves with their inverted heart shapes give out on him. He struggles against big arms powerful in black-leather jackets. Men of every size and type and look and age and perversatility. He punches at their visors that show no faces. They slam him against the van.
An SFPD motorcop riding with the Lords spreads the Bodybuilder palms-down for probable cause against the van, kicks his boots wide apart, and strips him of his fur-collared California Highway Patrol leather jacket.
Headlights hit the Bodybuilder’s vee-shaped back and batwing lats burning bright as any physique contest spot. He thinks they’re playing a prank. He tries to play along but April Fools’ Day is past and he’s the biggest fool at last. Turning under the cop’s hand into the bright spot light, he tries knocking them out with his best shots, a double-biceps pose, then a twisting chest shot displaying his right arm, and finally crunching down full force into the seductive most-muscular crab pose that always brought physique contest crowds cheering to their feet. Like the Saturday night in Oceanside he won the Mr. Southern California contest posing on stage like a straight body artist in front of an auditorium of cheering Marines from Camp Pendleton while his Lover filmed him in Super-8 color. The Lords’ silent scoffing, mocking him, surprises him. One sneering biker claps his hands with the heckling slow-clap of disdain. His packaged appeal fails to distract their performance of sarcasm.
The cop handcuffs his wrists behind his back. Other hands with other intentions pop open the gray metal button-fly on his 501s and pants him shackling his ankles. A buck knife rips sharp and quick through the denim shredding it to loose rags at his feet. From his slashed jeans pockets, his amber cocaine snifter rolls out to the curb. A gloved hand grabs it. His popper bottle falls and breaks, spewing a nimbus cloud of amyl nitrite that makes his head swim. His tin of toxic anabolic steroids, small Dianabol pills as sky-blue as his eyes, hits the pavement. An iron-heeled engineer boot crushes it. A slave of the Lords of Leather, learning the ropes, ties his steel-toe construction boots together.
They pick him up bodily. This time he’s no physique champion crowned with laurel riding shoulders in trophied triumph. Six bikers carry the side of steroid beef imported from Texas, Norway, and Krypton around to the back of the windowless van. Leather-gloved hands waiting inside strip off his blindfold and wrap his head in a black-leather hood cinching it tight, masking him as if his Look like Medusa’s face might turn them to stone.
The hood reduces him to an object. It has no eye or noseholes, only a round mouth hole for force-feeding a gag through his lips over his tongue past his teeth and down his throat. They pick him up, thrashing, and stuff his two hundred pounds into a 40x40x40-inch industrial shipping crate. He bangs against the wood, scraping his elbows, bloodying a knee. The cuffs cut into his wrists behind his back. Splinters chafe a new definition of endurance into his broad shoulders.
The joke, he shouts, has gone far enough.
No one can hear him over the hammers pounding the crate shut, nailing him in, boxing him, deafening him, even to his own pleading.
In two minutes flat, the exact duration of his prize-winning on-stage posing routine, he has been snatched, stripped, hooded, cuffed, shackled, gagged, and boxed for transport.
The black van turns out of Ringold Alley down Folsom Street. The gunning roar of the motorcade escort sounds muffled to him inside the van, inside the wooden vault of the crate, inside the rubber-contoured interior of the leather hood masking his face. Animal fear hardens his cock. He panics with the cosmic newsflash that bondage isn’t bondage until you want out. He wants the joke to end. Just last week, with his Lover, they had seen the movie….
A pair of jokers taking the upper hand push a dozen cigarette filters soaked in popper through a tube into the crate. Their breath control turns his breathing to huffing. His dilating mind rushes into a nitrite vortex of terror and pleasure as his traitor cock says yes while he screams no.
He is helpless as a patient etherized on a table. The cords of muscle. The ropes of his veins. The very bulk of bodybuilding. Being musclebound was his secret bondage trip. His head gooning with popper hardens his dick in the humiliation of public bondage. Only his Lover had known his secret fetish. Only his Lover had ever tied him into heroic bondage poses, worshiping him more than humiliating him, once after that triumph in Oceanside pissing on his muscles and his bed-full of five new physique trophies spread across the leather sheet. Pissing in his mouth. “There’s a difference,” he told his Lover, “between a first-class private toilet and a public urinal.”
Riding his amyl rush, the Bodybuilder realizes, suspects, fears, if this is no prank, if his Lover can’t protect him, that he is about to be forced, as sure as his muscle form is his erotic function, to perform in public exactly the way he’s built: like a brick shithouse. They won’t. They couldn’t. His Lover loves him. His Lover told him his love had no bounds. He shouldn’t have cruised out this soft October night leaving his Lover home alone.
The van pulls into an industrial warehouse in China Basin. A scrum of bikers offload the crate, shake it for laughs, drop it. He is yanked from the box, dragged naked across the oily cement floor. He can see nothing through the hood. He breathes the smells that internal combustion engines saturate into road-greased leather thighs cured in sweat. He is pinned spreadeagle to the cold floor by four, and then six, men. They stretch out his left arm. A leather belt tightens below his baseball bicep to tie off the veins in his forearm. Bigger hands than his roll his left hand into a fist, work it open and closed, pumping his veins up to full vascularity, then hold his closed fist down.
A big hand flattens his face. A black-rubber gag shaped like a thick-stubbed cock jams past his lips and teeth, over his silver-tongue, and back into his throat. The hands hold his left arm steady. He feels a needle prick his inner forearm. A crystal flow of irresistible energy shoots snake lightning up the crackling electric grid of his veins. He is in himself. Beside himself. Out of body. Against what will he has left, his self-reliant body goes limp.
The pressure of the big hand lifts off his face. The press of normal bodies pinning him to the floor climb off him. He wants to sit up, but he cannot.
They strap him into a leather sling slick with grease and grit from old juices. He is not the first toxic brother to betray the Village fraternity to become a body fascist, teasing and tempting and vamping, mocking regular guys with his extraordinary looks, making them feel small, as if he and his muscle buddies, and, of course, his Lover with the credit cards, and Charles Atlas with his booklet had the first and final vote on who was hot and who was not.
His smile was a benediction men took home to jerk off to like a consolation prize, never questioning who the hell ever said that the world’s most perfect man is a hairy blond bodybuilder.
Two men spread and shackle his wrists to the chains of the sling above his head. Fingers unsnap the lower half of the leather hood exposing his strong blond jaw and predatory teeth and lips and moustache and nose. Hands drop his half-hooded head back and down over the upper neck of the sling. If he could see the room, it would appear upside down. His proudly groomed moustache, bristles clipped to a regulation California Highway Patrol brush, runs wet with his own sweat and snot.
Indecent fingers slow pull the rubber gag from deep in his dry throat. A cock, raunchy with enormous foreskin, hangs over his mouth. Hands spread the foreskin wide. Its mouth is bigger than his own. The mask of foreskin stretches, tough as leather, cheesy with smegma. Its circumference covers his mouth and nose like a condom. The head of the dick, hanging inside the foreskin tent, pisses down his throat. He gasps for air, drinking not to choke. The piss is strong. He is suffocating, he is drowning when, finally, hands without mercy pull away the facemask of foreskin.
They hoist his legs. Spread his ankles wide. Rough hands lift his hips, pull the sculptured vee of his torso forward, and drop his ass off the edge of the sling.
The sling supports his neck and head. A huge dick climbs up on him, swings a leg around, straddles his piss-wet face, mounts his head again. Tobacco-stained fingers force-feed clots of cheese into the Bodybuilder’s mouth. He feels the biker dick deep in his throat grow hard. A hand slaps him across the side of his cheek.
Not the face. Not my face.
A hand slaps him again, laughter, again, ridicule, again. He sucks, drug-obedient, feeding a denied hunger, swallowing the hot piss streaming from rampant cocks. Blindfolded by the leather hood, he can see nothing, taste plenty, smell everything. The cock choke-fucks his throat. Long, slow, hard thrusts jabbed by a lean, mean body. Big balls slam against his square-jawed chin.
Other hands buckle a powerlifter’s belt across his washboard abs and cinch it hourglass tight around his waist. Cocks ram irresistible down his throat. He breathes what air he can. His muscular arms and legs start to cramp, stretched out spreadeagle so far from his torso.
His head is vulnerable. He is vulnerable. He does not know his Lover watches, laughing the last laugh: Mr. California, vulnerable.
His lips crack under the cockring mash of crotch after crotch mounting the famous mouth with the seductive smile. He sucks on the salt taste of his own blood. Alpha, beta, and omega men plug his face, schooling the Bodybuilder freak, teaching him a thing or two about male anguish.
The last of the cocks pulls back. Again the fleshmask of leatherlike foreskin is stretched like a condom across his face. He can breathe only so long as the air inside the foreskin lasts. His entire body flexes. Once, such a flex brought applause. Now it brings hard dicks flattening his tongue, stuffing his throat. Hot piss floods his mouth. He gulps to drink to keep from drowning. Going down once. His tight belly bloats and distends. Going down twice. He is near to passing out. Going down three times.
There was this one movie his Lover had liked so much….
Pairs of hands with pairs of pliers pinch his naked flesh making gladiator sport with random pain. Wet red shop rags wrap hot around his raw balls and hard cock. He screams inside his mouth muffled with cock. For an instant he grabs a breath when a cock pulls reaming from his throat. Sperm-loaded ball sacs drag over his handsome nose, and teabag his mouth, before an angry pucker of tight asshole sits bulls-eye over the target of his mouth. His tongue. searching for air, darts desperately at the sweet wet hole cutting cheese with a blowback he inhales to survive. Rimming juices fed him tell him all he needs to know about the feeders running a train, taking turns playing musical chairs on his face.
Other hands unwind the hot towels from his crotch. Time collapses. Everything happens at once. He feels the boar bristles of a shaving brush lathering up his dick and balls and ass. Then the scrape of the straight-edge razor in a hand yanking his hard cock straight up by his foreskin. He feels the straight edge shaving the blond pubic hair growing up the blue-veined shaft of his cock. The latex hand cups and stretches his balls for a hard-scraping shave.
A small cut on the ball sac.
A teardrop of blood.
A splash of alcohol.
His scream again blows air up a new ass covering his mouth and the ass blows back the echo of his shout.
There was this movie his Lover whom he had….
In bittersweet intervention, the Lords of Leather work him over. Take the body artist farther than he’s ever gone. Set him spinning. Body parts short-circuit. A scream becomes a fart; a fist becomes a dick. Latex hands work his stiff cock making his body come alive with a Judas pleasure whose thrill betrays his will. Fingers squeeze open the corona of his piss-slit. A hypodermic tube shoots lube, laced with lines of his dick-candy coke, deep down the interior core of his shaft to keep him hard and too numb to cum. A ribbed surgical steel rod, dipped in alcohol, probes his piss-slit, pushing its slow-burn revolve down his urethra. Hands pump the catheter rod up and down in his cock, sounding him, like a drill-rig pile-driving deeper down the shaft, penetrating to the root of his cock. A rubber tube from inside the spinning rod twirls deeper into his pulsing prostate.
Black rubber straps, an inch wide, wrap tighter than a tourniquet of elastic bandages around the base of his cock, winding their strangling way up the throat of his cock to its head, tightening, wrapping, noosing, cinching his cock tight around its metal-rod core, until the cock head, that always mushroomed so proud through his nylon posing briefs on contest platforms, bulges purple and swollen above his encased dick served up en brochette. On order from the Lord of the Lords, the top of the protruding metal catheter with its rubber tip is wired to a Tucker field telephone with a hand crank that sends jolts of electricity that turn screaming into long-distance calls for help.
Other hands, smooth in latex, rough in leather, spread his cheeks, the twin scoops of his bubblebutt, pumped proud to the gluteous max in nylon posing trunks, always thrust out behind him in his cotton gym shorts, always packed like a brown-bag lunch in his faded blue Levi’s, always paraded on Castro like a matched set of Colt-model haunches that one Sunday afternoon caused the lean-muscled Rudolf Nureyev, cruising by with his ballet coterie, to pivot into a grand jeté of passion that the hard-to-please Bodybuilder ignored. He moans as the hot bristled shaving brush lathers up his tight ass. He cries out as the straight razor scrapes his cheeks and crack and hole hairless.
Hard-knuckled bare fists of a Boxer tap his belly and cause the rimmer straddling his face to rise and dismount leaving skidmarks of asscrack on his tongue.
The Boxer snaps a couple practice jabs at the punching bag of his ass. The Bodybuilder knows the feel of a fighter’s thumb wrapped outside over four fingers to make a fist. He’s lusted after enough hard men the way he lusted after straight men in straight gyms pretending he’s straight, proud at passing for straight, because deep in his twisted blond heart he thinks straight is better.
He recognizes the grain of the brown fast-bag leather gloves the Boxer pulls on, Everlast printed in gold on the top outside of the wrist. He wraps his fingers around the small metal grip-rod sewn crossways into the palm of each glove. He smacks his tight fists together, spits on each glove, and throws his jabs fast, hard, fierce against the sculpted butt. The rhythm of the big fists driven by tattooed arms pounding on his cheeks sends shock waves to his hooded head. The sling rocks with the fast hard punches. He feels the sweat-spray from the heavyweight body splattering down like hot burning wax on his balls and belly. The rod catheterizing his dick, and the black rubber coiling around his shaft, the agony, the fear, the excitement keep him rockhard. Clear fuck-juice pearls up like tears from the eye of his piss-slit skewered on the steel catheter, then drools down the shaft wrapped inside the strips of black rubber.
The Lords of Leather use his shaved bubblebutt for another bare-knuckle bout with their human punching bag.
He hears a hawker spit. A hot glob of sweet chaw juice hits his hole.
There was that movie called….What the fuck was it?
The Bodybuilder has no idea where they will punish him next.
He knows they are marking his body: his flawless exhibition body.
If he is marked, he’ll lose contest points.
If he is marked, he might never compete again.
Alligator clamps bite sharp teeth into each nipple on his hard pecs. Chains pull his pinched tits up and away from his chest. The smell of isopropyl alcohol spraying fire on his crimson nipples burns his nostrils. Through the clamped flesh of each hard-squeezed tit, an attendant Lord, one fit to swell the progress of the scene, pushes a slow agony of large-gauge needles into his flesh. The dozen points pierce, cut, and slice through the nipples; the triangle shape of the needles making each edge a slicing blade, three cuts per insertion. The pressure of the nipple clamps causes thin lines of blood to ooze down his pecs, down his side, mixing with the fetish sweat men lick from his exposed armpits.
Hours pass in slow-motion minutes of dying and living and dying. He feels another needle, another injection. He is a past master at injecting himself. This stabbing penetration is not unlike the weekly steroid injections, the decadurabolin, he shoots into his own buttocks to build his muscular mass to manimal size. He recognizes the hit of ketamine that launches him into a psychedelic trajectory shooting the chutes up and down a long dark spiraling helix where he feels his body detached at a distance so far that he cannot distinguish the horizon between pain and pleasure.
The bikers slap hard dicks against his hungry asshole. They spit. They laugh. They roughfuck him. They seesaw a dildo across his washboard belly, pushing its silicone head into his navel, blowing his mind, inciting his tactile hallucinations of the bulbous head about to burrow into his guts like an alien sandworm undulating ripples under the six-percent bodyfat of his thin-skinned six-pack.
Electrical clamps nip his flesh in a twelve-point clockface circle of pinpoint pain around the closed lips of his asshole. A greased finger probes inside his virgin hole where no fist has gone before. Then two fingers. Three. Four. The twisting revolutions of hard knuckles, thumb tucked under fingers. He feels the nova-light snap of fist break the rind of his sphincter, unloosed from its tight discipline of heavy squats, stretching open, popping closed, tightening on the sliding downhill entry of the bony fist, feeling the elongated fingers reach inside the first chamber of his ass close down tight around the thumb. Classic fist and ass position: fist at rest, thumb wrapped inside four fingers.
Handsome is as handsome does, and he ain’t looking so good.
An iron fist pushes knuckle and bone into the velvet glove of his ass. Hands fist him through the circle of pinch-hot clamps with teeth biting around his hole. Plunge deep. Left. Right. Twist. Pull. Full-fisted exit. Fast hardpunch re-entry. Slow draw out. Sizes of hands. Styles of men.
He is screaming. He has never been treated this way. Two Lords lift his head and force it inside a square wooden box that closes around his neck and locks with a hinged steel strap. A coffin for his head. He hears the padlock click. He deafens himself in the soundproof box. His bound head detaches from his bound body.
Another sailor fallen from grace with the sea.
The fisting moves man after man lined up by glove size. Cruel hands of mysterious strangers hellbent for leather. The sworn Lords pleasuring themselves, tutoring his body with insane thrills, fisting the attitude out of his deep guts, initiating him, humbling him. You are one of us. You are one of us.
There always exist men who will fuck you up.
The last fist, forearm inserted halfway to the elbow, holds him by the sheer power of penetration in the ultimate act of bondage. He cannot escape off the fist. He cannot sweet talk. He cannot flex his golden body.
He can only grind his screams through his teeth, as the piercing pain of the clamps, each triggering a nerve-release, flares up ablaze in the ring of fire around his stretched hole with fists sump-pumping juices up and down inside the smooth sleeve into his deep belly.
Please. Please. Please.
His boxed head cannot see the tattooed forearms of the red-bearded Biker whose hands wipe his shaved crack and buttocks. His boxed head cannot hear the high zizz of the Biker’s tattooing gun. He can only imagine what he looks like as the Lords of Leather strap him down tighter, immobile in the sling, as the big, inked hands of the ruddy Biker begin to tattoo across his ass the hot lines that burn like slicing cuts from a red-hot razor blade. The needle etches in wet blacks and soylent yellows and blood reds, inking permanent flames blasting from the pout of his fisted pucker, spreading wildfire out and up and across the bubbles of his fresh white cheeks.
No posing trunks in the world can cover the Technicolor flames shooting six inches out the gas jet of his asshole. His boxed head swims. He is no longer in his precious body. Floating beyond thought, he can only suffer his humilation by men kicking sand in his face and laughing at him because he wasn’t gay enough. Charles Atlas lied. He has become the slave, the animal, the beast, the thing of the bully Lords of Leather.
He is bound, fisted, pierced, catheterized, tattooed. His perfect body displaying the real marks of his soul. He feels the cool steady hands of the tattooist writing burning script across the width of his broad chest. Pierced nipple to pierced nipple. He will never compete again. He sees the sports stage change to a freak-show stage in a carnival midway.
Step right up, folks, and see the Amazing Half-Man/Half-Beast!
People must look at him. He needs people to look at him.
No matter why. No matter how. But it matters. It really matters.
He screams and cries and screams some more deafened by the echo of his own voice, exposed as a gay freak of nature, shrieking himself hoarse, until no voice comes from his throat inside the rubber-lined head-coffin, until the red-bearded Biker finishes his scrolling needle work.
Hands reach inside the box and thread a funnel tube down through his gag. He cannot push it from his lips. He cannot lift its tongue depressor from its fit. Piss flows. This shit cannot be happening to him.
The spaced-out hero of his own dreams changes to a narcotized Narcissus looking into a pool of pain at the grotesque metamorphosis of florid script and scarlet letters inked across the body he loves, across his steroid pecs, reading shoulder to shoulder: “Remember My Name.”
It was the title of the last movie he and his Lover had watched at the Castro Theater. And something else. Something else was tattooed below the first tattoo. It was a rose tattoo spelling in black thorns the name of his Lover, nipple to nipple, across his chest.
If he could have figured why they did this, he would have learned a betrayed Lover may need revenge, but an unrequited Lover needs to give his beloved what he needs most to set him free. His Lover’s parting glass was the final toast of hospitality raised to a departing mate. Is an expected gift worth giving?
High-flying adored. Driven from the gay Village. Ridden out of town on a rail he thought was a parade. The perversity of perversity. The socially redeeming act of domination backfired. He liked it.
Don’t cry for him, San Francisco. The hero on his trip must suffer the killing pains of hell to be reborn. The body artist hungry for sex finally found the fast food he liked, driving off in his red Corvette to hustle steroids and checkbooks in Los Angeles, a new face predatory in a new town of cannibal freaks, happy in the magical thinking in his secret heart that what he was looking for had at long last found him, and made the unrepentent muscle-beast in him stronger.
“The Lords of Leather” was inspired by the homosurreal sadomasochistic story “Star Clone” written by British poet Thom Gunn for the special art issue, Son of Drummer, September 1978. “The Lords of Leather” was first printed by San Francisco publisher Anthony DeBlase who featured it on the celebratory cover of the landmark issue 100 of Drummer magazine, October 1986. In 1987, the story appeared in the fiction anthology, Stand by Your Man: 22 Stories from the Canon of Gay Eros. In 2007, editor Simon Sheppard published it in Homosex: Sixty Years of Gay Erotica which was nominated for a 2008 Lambda Literary Award. The term “Lords of Leather” and the action in this story in no way refers to the Mystic Krewe of the Lords of Leather group in New Orleans.