CHECKMATE Magazine
No 33 2000-11
MAPPING THE GENOME OF LEATHER S&M:
How Fisting and S&M Fringe Sex
Entered the Homomasculine Mainstream
Part 2: First Fists
by Jack Fritscher, PhD
FIRST-FIST INITIATION
Q. How do gaymen learn?
A. We all travel the same journey.
On May 14, 1970, my first night as an adult in San Francisco, two very handsome men invited my lover, David Sparrow, and me out of the Tool Box, the Fister’s Paradise created in 1964 by legendary artist/fister, Chuck Arnett. (See Lifemagazine, June 26, 1964–almost five years to the day before Stonewall, June 29, 1969.) We went to their apartment two or three doors up 17th Street from the “Corner of It All” at Market and Castro. They hit on David and me because we were new kids in town, fresh faces, fresh meat, and fresh fingers/knuckles/fists/wrists. Oooo, baby! In what seemed like five minutes, David and I were faced by these two handsome men’s four cheeks, kneeling on their knees, butts puckering, inviting, eager.
“It winked at me,” David whispered.
We looked at each other. We looked at our hands that the two men had coated with thick globs of Crisco. We had just fallen off the turnip truck. We bounced a reality-check look at each other, smiled like should we or shouldn’t we, then shrugged like we’d been invited to the center ring of the Big Top. At that time, all gay sex was new sex. Every night something original, unique, bizarre was revealed. There were no gay magazines per se. Gay journalism had yet to invent itself.
Everything gay men learned was by 1) oral tradition or by 2) actual hands-on instruction. Most advice involved breaking straight (and gay) taboos about sex thoughts and erotic actions. If straight sex is powerful enough to change virgins, then what is the outlaw power of change in actual gay sex? One act of gay sex can make your straight reputation gay. A million acts of hetero sex can never make your gay reputation straight. Then what is the actual transforming power of Fringe Sex?
In 1968, before Stonewall, natural gay sex drives were defined in both straight and queer pre-lib culture as anti-social behavior. What seems natural in 2000 to a man born gay, once seemed unnatural, criminal, arrestable stuff. Unenlightened straights put “deviates” away into mental hospitals where many gay men-who were being and doing only what came naturally–did a stretch in the 1950s and early 60s, in straight-jackets and padded restraints, shackled and handcuffed in padded cells, gagged, left in their own waste, with breaks for electroshock. (Don’t go there. You’ll jerk off to everything!).
David Sparrow and I had never even heard of fisting, but we had natural erotic desires we wanted to express. We were devoutly interested in expanding our erotic repertoire westward, having played for a couple years in New York with Super Tops like Don Morrison, the rollerball rollerskate champ, and with leather photographer Lou Thomas, co-founder of Colt, who split to start the darker side of Colt, Target Studios. We had come to San Francisco to be initiated into gay sex, hippie drugs, and “California consciousness.” Yeah. Sure. Whatever gets you laid. In fact, we had driven our U-Haul from conservative Chicago where guys who actually fucked butt were accused of “browning.” Eek! “Don’t have sex with them. They’re browners!” Imagine what those shy Chi boys would have thought of fisting! That “attitude” changed with the glorious bloom of 1970’s sex to liberate gaymen from their inner attitudes about themselves and about male/male sex codes. Suddenly, gay men understood the pierced pecs/nipples of “the Sundance Ritual,” sometimes with fist inserted, as one of the defining acts of man-hood.
THE “RAISIN” OR THE “ROSE”
“Honey,” I said to myself when the 1970’s crashed, “even after the Fall of Rome, you never apologize for the glory that was the Roman Empire.” People, who deny the infinite good the 70’s Golden Age of Liberation actually accomplished, are victims of the 80’s rise–and 90’s fascism—of the Marxist left-wing known as the “Politically Correct” who have done more actual harm to the lesbigay world than any right-wing fundamentalist preacher ever. The fundamentalist PC world hates Mapplethorpe, gaymen’s mags/videos/art, fisting, and men who read Checkmate as much as any right-wing senator whose “Politically Corrupt” campaigns are funded by any tobacco state in the South. Come on, people! Say it slow: “Communism and Marxism didn’t work. They officially ended when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989!” If you depended on a Marxist commune to get you fistfucked, your ass would be a raisin not a rose. They’d still be sitting in a circle discussing how to fist you “correctly” while singing their millionth chorus of “Kumbaya.”
THE AWAKENING
Meanwhile, back at that first night in San Francisco, coached by two experts, David and I dived into two butts that blew our minds. The feel of hot warm flesh gloving our hands, sleeving our arms, turned on a crystal clear light I never want to forget, because the first time of anything erotic, especially of handballing, focuses the senses and through them the mind in ways that is everything from real physical revelation to actual intellectual, psychic, and spiritual transfiguration. Fisting was the first time that I saw gay sex could be something mystical, transcendent, sublime. The second lesson came when we all learned to play our nipples. All of it, of course, was leather. All of it was SM.
GLOVE SIZE MEASURES MAN
David Sparrow, a great show of a young leatherman at 24, 6’2″, and 190 furry nonfat pounds upholstered with powerful brown-red hair and freckles, had a glove size of 10. My glove size was 8.5. We were perfect lovers for eight years, and the pair of us, goateed, were maybe perfect that night for our hosts.
They called out the Fister’s chant: “In. Easy. Okay. Back out a little. Now in. Turn 180 degrees. In. Slow. In. Yes. More. More. MORE!”
That basic Gregorian chant, straight from the guts of monks ancient/medieval/ modern/ extraterrestrial, has never changed. David and I switched butts. I felt where his size-10 hand had pushed deep into the first chamber of the ravenous hole: velvet goldmine, wet, sucking, come alive like the Asshole of Frankenstein.
“It’s ALIVE. It’s ALIVE!”
(Good sex is always comedy. Ask any leather guru running a demonstration.)
The room spun with the glow flooding in from the street lights, spun from the screeching rhythms of Creedence and Janis and Jimi turning on the big reels of the tape deck, and spun still more from the primal animal cries of the two men, who had turned dervish, spinning 360 degrees on our fists. Like Linda Blair. Suddenly David jumped up, needed to go pee. The man he was servicing turned and looked at me and winked. He wanted more fist in his hungry hole. The idea was thrilling: fisting two guys at once. I slid in, worked them in unison. First chamber. Turn. Second chamber. Slide. One energy driving two beings, feeling the absolute thrill, the total energy rush, of penetrating two men at once. Suddenly I realized I was not fisting them. I was caught in a suctioning twin vortex of double Butt Tornado. My elbows were disappearing. I jammed the soles of my boots into the floor searching for traction.
They were pulling me in to them, into their ass-puckers hoovering my fingers, knuckles, wrists, forearms, and elbows into them. They were hot, wet, deep, carnivorous flowers of rosy flesh. I could feel both their hearts beating together. I was not in control. They were. They rode up my arms whoopyteeyiyo! It was wild, erotic, and very personal among the three of us. Going “in” through the “out” door made this the most personal of revolutionary sexual encounters. I may not have remembered their names at that moment, but in the triangulated force field of the three of us, I knew everything about them and quite a cosmic lot more about myself.
We slowed to a break, because they didn’t want to cum yet. I went to check on David who had not returned. I found him kneeling in the bathroom gagging over the toilet.
“What’s the matter?” I touched his face. “Are you okay?”
He looked at me and said, “I’m okay. I’ll get used to it. I could feel his heart beating.”
“I could too.”
“I feel like an Aztec.”
“This is why we came to San Francisco.”
“This,” he said, “is how you leave your heart in San Francisco.”
FUCK THE SHIT OUT OF HIM!
Big David Sparrow and his size-10 hands, with freckles, quickly became a popular handballing top. Rarely a fisting bottom himself, David, like so many men in the Experimental 70’s, left no taboo untried. He dared open all the forbidden mysteries of ancient cults. As a top, he sniffed out the scatology factor, which, frankly, at the first, for many was the main draw of handballing. Maybe it was a necessary phase of toilet training in the infancy of liberated gay identity. In the Great Gay Bermuda Triangle, NY/LA/SF, John Waters and Divine were not the only one playing “scratch and sniff.”
Edge-players reached up inside a handsome man who had not cleaned out, so they could literally handfuck the shit out of him. Check out the scatological/ fist/fetish art work of “Scat Master” Martin of Holland or the solid fist/toilet drawings the legendary Chuck Arnett made for the Red Star Saloon and the Ambush.(In the 21st century, you can visit the copraphage drawing of E. Röhm at www.pboy.com/art/) There is no denying this symbiotic appeal of fisting and caca. Breaking the taboo of the fist demanded iconoclasm of all other SM taboos.
See the Arthur Tress photograph in Drummer 25, June 1979, existentially titled “Confession de Kafka Caca,” as well as the 1977 book, End Product: The First Taboo, by Dan Sabbath and Mandell Hall, Preface by Abby Rockefeller, Urizen Books, New York, reviewed in Drummer #22, May 1978. The DNA of SM Culture was exposed in Drummer twenty-five years ago when the dearly departed Drummer in its dead-tree version was great and golden and tuned true in writing and graphics to what its readers/players actually were about and wanted to know.
DIRTY DANCING
So what, if in this millennium you actually like some of the primal scat contact and douching required by fisting etiquette and safety. From 1972-1982, satyr Thom Morrison hosted dirty-fisting parties at his edgy San Francisco house which drew an international elite of wealth, power, and talent into fisting and coprophagy. One of the most talented, Gerhard Pohl, was art director of a prestigious German magazine. In 1976, he shot the first commercial-grade, but very private, 8mm films of fisting and scat. I first viewed the footage when David Sparrow sent along Gerhard with his Technicolor reels to Drummer. Even though I was creating an archetypal fetish identity for Drummer, even very-lib Gay Lib was not ready for the gay world’s second best-kept secret. (The first best-kept secret was the needle.) Drummer turned many fringe fetishes mainstream, publishing the world’s first mainstream FFA articles (Fist Fuckers of America) and first fist-related photographs along with articles on TT, VA, SM, WS, BD, CBT, CP, SCAT and other sex-coded secrets.
COMING OUT: ONCE! TWICE!
First: The historical point of “coming out” is “coming out” personally to what turns YOU on. Second: You “come out” to confront the totems/taboos of society, because totems and taboos by their reflexive nature usually repress personality. (Personally Correct is the opposite of Politically Correct.) What is “coming out” if it’s not the “coming out” to be the person you are, doing what you really prefer and like. I wrote originally in 1977 in Drummer that men have a “First Coming Out” into sex, and then, surprise, a “Second Coming Out” into kinky sex. In 1972, SM needed a wider definition which I conceptualized to mean “Sensual” and “Mutual” to free it from the selfish polarities of Top and Bottom. Every year the evolution of Fringe Sex into manners, psychology, and spirituality requires new vocabulary.
As a journalist, I approached every “coming out” SM Fringe Secret with a gonzo eye, participatory (to a point), figuring what gay culture wanted to
know must be written about, photographed, and published if gay culture were ever going to “come out” from the middle ages of the Eisenhower 50’s and the early 60’s, before assassination, the Beatles, and Hippies changed everything. Only in the Stonewall Year of 1969 did the U.S. Postal Department finally make it legal to show frontal male nudity. This victory against the Fig Leaf of government censorship created the New Heart of gay publishing, and, therefore, gay culture. The champions who fought the good fight were Chuck Renslow, the leather/muscle mogul of Chicago, and Bob Mizer, the Hollywood genius behind Physique Pictorial magazine and AMG movies. Check out PP’s coded hieroglyph drawings revealing the secret sex tastes of the models of Mizer’sAthletic Model Guild/AMG Studios. (Hieroglyph means literally “sacred, holy, consecrated writing.”)
STEVE’S OWN PRIVATE CATACOMBS
On May 5, 1975, the Irish Steve McEachern founded his own private “Catacombs.” And what a premiere “opening” party it was! The name was a pointedly religious term, spun sarcastically, to reflect the Catholic cultural roots of sexual transubstantiation through fisting and SM fringe sex. He made the basement of his Victorian on 21st Street the hottest “invitation only” party in the world. If Steve didn’t personally know you, then you had to know somebody who knew somebody. His fisting buddies were his lover, Michael Shapley, who had moved to San Francisco in the Fall of 1973; his master of ceremonies, George Delaney, a tall rogue Irishman from Chicago; and his mentor,Tony Tavarossi, the legendary sex guru born in The Mission. My 1977 interview with Steve McEachern was published in Drummer, because to know the daily life of the past is as important to one’s future as to know how physical sex is the gateway to the stars. At Y2K, beginners could check conveniently into whatever Gay Chat Line and find a community dying to tell them everything. In the 70s, it was every man for himself. Hands-on Adventure was king.
FRENCH-FRIED FRINGE: FOUCAULT
Serious students of SM can also thumb through the highly respected writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Edge-Player Foucault lived a magical mystery tour. He polished quite a bit of his transforming philosophy in the 70’s and early 80’s during his Nietzschean Fringe Play on his knees, fisted, South of Market, at the Cauldron, the Slot, and other clubs where SM, torture, piss, scat, and, mai oui, fisting taught him everything he knew about polymorphous perversions that transform the Tribe of Queer Boys through dramatic extremities of Fringe Sex. If the strip-shaved X-treme Foucault could have starred in Pasolini’s Fascist sex fantasy, Salo, he would have, but then, seeking the sexual transcendence of the Marquis de Sade himself, wouldn’t we all?
SM PLAYERS BEGIN INCESTUOUSLY
A few days after our virginal first night of fisting, one of our hosts, who, of course, turned out to be Steve McEachern, introduced David Sparrow and me to Walt Jebe who owned the first camera shop in the 60’s in the Castro, long before Harvey Milk came to town. In July 1970, Jebe hired the pair of us as leather SM models for two black-and-white shoots of 200-300 photographs which were turned into one of the first 1-issue leather magazines, Whipcrack (1971). When publisher John Embry hired his founding San Francisco editorin-chief of Drummer, I brought–again the pair of us—David Sparrow along as photographer. Under the names “Spitting Image” and “David A. Sparrow,” we together shot most of the photographs in Drummer issues 20-30, including the first-ever “coded” Fisting Cover on Drummer 30, featuring in color Val Martin and Bob Hyslop who both modeled for Colt, Target, and Palm Drive. Steve McEachern’s transcribing business, run from the Catacombs, did all the transcribing of the editor’s interviews for Drummer which was the third magazine founded after Stonewall. Every masculine-identified gay male magazine that followed owes its identity, erotic themes, and fetish culture to the “Daddy of All Leather/Power Journalism,” Drummer itself, which became an entity bigger than any editor, writer, photographer, artist, or publisher.
In the human genome of 80,000 genes, we are all so alike (99.9% of genes) that there is only 1 in 1,000 genome letters’ difference between Woody Allen and Arnold Schwarzenetc and you. You have the genome of SM naturally. Also, what allows you to be a SM Leather Player reading about SM has a long bright cultural history. Your heritage goes back many years to a throng of players who yanked gay power from our endorphin-enriched bodies. They saw our bodies as temples. They jacked physical sex up into art, politics, and erotic freedom. Sex has become a valid kind of spiritual self-actualization. Actually your history testifies you’re not just a cocksucker or fistfucker or whipmeister. Your Freudian gaysex DNA has a Jungian archetypal identity. It creates you, aura and being, through your erotic stimulation. Robert Mapplethorpe said, “Intelligent sex is the best sex.” Geoff Mains, author of Urban Aboriginals, said, “Intuitive sex leads to joy.” Michael Rosen said, “SM is Sex Magic.” Sex can make you a human being with a soul. Read Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which is one tradition of homosex: the sunny Billy Budd. The other is the dark existential French tradition of homosex from Rimbaud: Captain Vere who ties up and hangs Billy Budd.
You’re lucky. Before you were born, men experiencing fists and SM, began thinking about fisting and SM, creating prose and art and photography and films of fisting and SM. Even though some people say fisting isn’t SM, it’s still a debate. The truth is you live in a fully realized fist and SM culture of advice and consent that is its own best invention.
SOMEBODY HAS TO DO THE PAPERWORK
Highly recommended for men interested in the concept “Where Fringe Sex Came From” is former Advocate-editor Mark Thompson’s brilliantly eclectic Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, 328 pages, $12.95, Alyson Press, 1991.
You’ll learn the names of SM Fringe Pioneers like Geoff Mains (Urban Aboriginals); artist Chuck Arnett; GMSMA’s David Stein; former Drummer/ Brush Creek editor Joseph W. Bean; Gayle Rubin (detailed, human history of The Catacombs); my mentor, Sam Steward; Mr. Patrick Califia; Purusha; Steve McEachern; psychotherapist Guy Baldwin; the Monk of True North, Fakir Musafar who shows us all what mystic transcendence is really all about; and many others who have contributed to the culture of sexual self-realization, and transformative body chemistry, particularly through the endgame culture of the fist.
As a self-actualizing gonzo journalist, Mark Thompson, who also wrote Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, has de-programed the once popular mid-70’s Advocate-version of Werner Erhard’s EST. Once quite SM virginal, Thompson has dared extend himself intellectually into actual physical scenes that have sophisticated his transformative writing. While not traditional “Trad Leather,” he has incorporated Christian, pagan, new age, and Native American wisdom into the gay cosmic mix. His personal gonzo journey seems seeded with reflexive ideas from his longtime life partner the priest, Father Malcolm Boyd, who wrote the best-seller, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? To which we always irreverently added: “…Or Just Breathing Hard?”
At first, SM, fisting, scat, and drugs were, like venereal disease and death, verboten/forbidden topics even in the rebellious, newly founded gay press. Times change people. Queers never used to die, except as suicides at the end of novels, films, and plays. Death was so unnatural to the gay psyche it was a taboo subject. For a long time. Until Harvey Milk’s assassination. Until AIDS obituaries. Until the cafes of empty chairs and empty tables.
Death itself turned fisting around. Many handballers died fast in huge numbers as the Plague passed over some houses and killed in other houses it did not pass over.These deaths-by-virus caused many passed-over handballers to tune into something, well, cosmic, spiritual, mystical, and very, very physical. Early on, the morning after Stonewall, it truly was the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” But then…Who knew? Who ever knows? We’re all on a flight over Locherbie anyway, so we might as well get fisted in the Mile-High First Class Toilet.
“It wasn’t fisting what done ’em in. It wasn’t sex what killed ’em. It was the needle. It was intravenous drugs.” Never go there.
DIRTY NEEDLES
The most beautiful people, the “Hot Men,” the “A-Group” models/film stars of that first generation of fisters were all hoisted on their own petards (needles) and swept from the streets of San Francisco, LA, and New York. Men died of HIV in the mid-70’s. The “look,” later identified, usually sent them back to the towns and families they came from. They disappeared from the gay radar, because illness–except for amoeba cocktails of Flagel–was considered the least tasteful thing a gayman could do during the world-wide orgy. Many survivors of the 70’s had received gamma globulin shots every six weeks to survive the known erotic dangers. Sometimes those globulin shots, often administered on runs and at parties, came from shared needles. Ironic.
Quitting drugs. That was spiritually the best thing that happened to SM and handballing, because without drugs masking sensation, actual sensation became approachable through erotic hypnosis, zen meditation, and mutual conversations of deep TRUST between top and bottom.
Robert Frost wrote about “building stone walls” that we learn from our hands to our head. He means you can’t understand something in your head unless it’s brought to your unclouded brain through your hands, that is, your physical body.
So it is that we learn from our sexual bodies to our heads/spirits/souls.
FROM HERE TO FRATERNITY
“Leather stands apart,” Geoff Mains writes, “in exploring sexual capacities in terms of ecstatic experience. To its participants leather sex [such as fisting] brings release and revelation. And to the world leather becomes at once a symbol and a culture. A black and animal side of the soul has been rediscovered and let out.” –“The Molecular Anatomy of Leather” in Leatherfolk; see also Geoff Mains, Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leather Sexuality, Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, 1984. Mains, a scientist, presaged with his molecular theory the current genome theory. Brilliant!
In the SM short fiction anthology, Rainbow County, “Peter Eton-Cox, hanging bound upside down, wearing only black leather chaps and boots, had never felt his body to be more of a sacred vessel than at this whipping. If grace existed in the universe, then he was hanging suspended and open to the flow. The harder the Cowboys whipped him, the less nay-saying he felt, until transcended beyond all negativity, on the edge of Total Yes, he heard the crack of the bullwhip across the barn….Peter no longer cared about dick. This game had progressed beyond genital sex. He wondered which whiplash had taken the energy from his dick and shot it to his head. Maybe it was endorphins. Maybe it was God. He knew the Cowboys had dared to go beyond games, turning his body into a medium for conjuring something so raw and primitive it had no name….They had left civilization now….This rush defined rush….He didn’t know if he wanted more whipping or not. Cowboy Dogg Katz was a legend. This moment might never come again. He sensed it. He embraced it. He loved himself, yeah, finally, and he loved these men, whoever they really were, and he loved this whiphand Dogg Katz more than he had ever loved or felt anything in his life.
“…The bullwhip cracked and sang louder, faster, heavier. Peter felt everything. He felt nothing. He was inside himself. He was outside himself. He was one with them. He could feel the energy of the Whiphand Cowboy, Dogg Katz, flowing down into him. His blood ran down his back toward his shoulders. The clock stopped. He was screaming. The clock was running backwards. He was in ecstasy. The clock melted down. His body was quivering. The men were untying him, taking him down, lowering him, laying him flat out on the floor, standing him up to see their work on his butt, walking him to the mattress, all hands laying him back, sitting together with him, and him with them, and all of them together….The bullwhip had opened him up: head and body. There was no resistance left in him. Even if they had taken him out to the four-holer outhouse, where men were kept tied to bondage boards in the cesspit in the broiling desert heat, he would not have objected….Dogg Katz, licking his lips, was greasing up his fist.” –From “SM Ranch” by Jack Fritscher reprinted from MAN2MAN #2, December 1980, and Powerplay #19, 1998, based on a 1978 scene with Top Shaman, Peter Fisk, Whipmeister.
WHEN DISCO MET CRISCO IN FRISCO
Handballing is an exercise in “learning to let go” of what we perceive to be the primary point of control. Our butts. The anus is so way protected. Straight men’s biggest fear is anal penetration. Understand why Marines tattoo their butts with “Death before Dishonor.” Fisting connects radically–by its roots— not only to scatology but to other SM Fringe Sex like bondage and Extreme Tits.
Initially, bondage preceded fisting. Ropes heightened focus. Leather controlled wild movements of a bottom-in-training. Bondage of yet-flexible wrists, ankles, and torso is the underlying concept of the “SLING” which at first was invented for SM torture and for ease of butt penetration by a topfucker’s dick. In a sling, the bottom’s body transcends gravity. Push cums to shove. Afist–“Simple logic, Captain”–becomes an inevitability.A w/hole new world opens up!
By spring 1975, the handballing sling officially had entered gay culture through two legendary fisting pits: the Catacombs and the Slot, a “bath” South of Market. The Barracks, on Folsom at Hallam Mews was fronted by Chuck Arnett’s fisty Red Dog Saloon. The Barracks was the A-List’s #1 hot-sex bath where acid + orgy combined in early 1972 to change the face of polite suck/ fuck sex forever, particularly with rooms dedicated to SM and fisting. The acid jug, like bathtub gin, stood in a pot in the lobby. Men ‘dusted” the hallways. The Barracks got so hot, the crowd boiled over the to the fist-focused Slot. Finally, the Barracks got so ultra hot it burned up in licks of flame in August 1981, about the same time Steve McEachern, quite famously, checked out with a heart attack impaled on the arm of his lover in a private scene at the Catacombs.
THE SLOT HOTEL IN SOMA
In this way the former blue-collar hotel, the Slot, 979 Folsom, South of Market, was the place where SM and fisting broke out of men’s own homes into a successful and very accommodating environment. The sexy hired help cleaned up the mess after you and your 13 partners went home smelling of beer, pot, tobacco, poppers, shit, piss, and Crisco. And that was just the air! A square inch of the hall carpet at the Slot could have caused any plague, but the Slot was slag hot! Even if you didn’t use drugs. The Slot’s great blue poster, drawn by fister Bill Tellman in 1971, promised three-floors of hot guys/hot fists/hot butts.
On more than one night you could share some handshaking time with each one of the three-man cast of the classic 1976 Technicolor epic film, Erotic Hands, starring Richard Trask, a hot blond named Billy, and some other guy with a beard who liked to give you plenty of elbow room…but, wow, that’s another story of the glorious Slot, where the coolest of the cool every year booked a room for New Year’s Eve to date the international talent trawling the hallways. (Collectors: Copies of vintage films and videos, as well as back issues of nearly all gay magazines from even before Stonewall, can be found at good prices at the store called “The Magazine,” 920 Larkin, San Francisco 94109.) All movies of gay culture before 1982 were silent films. Video arrived almost as the same time as the virus. I had to explain this once to a very young film student who demanded I show her my videotapes of Stonewall for her college Communication Arts course. Duh.
TONY TAVAROSSI: THE SM LORD OF THE FIST
At the Slot, in 1975, with the Slot’s cooperation, I shot in Room 226 at the left of the stairs, in the room with stocks, three silent reels of fisting movies, with heavy bondage. This Super-8 Technicolor epic starred the best and first fister in San Francisco, Tony Tavarossi. That was the official film start of what became Palm Drive Video. (Palm Drive is an erotic pun, not a street address.)
Tony Tavarossi, “The SM Lord of the Fist,” grew up in the Mission District. He came out at age twelve under the tables of the South China Café at 18th and Castro. He was first fistfucked in 1957 by a sailor in an Oceanside motel while hanging up side down, tied by his feet to the showerhead. He was an ethnic Italian who literally invented the red-light/black paint ambience of the leather bars in New York, The Anvil, and San Francisco, including Chuck Arnett’s Tool Box. He worked at the Slot and was always the Guest of Honor at the Catacombs.
Tony had equipped his own apartment with a sling, a douche bath with bondage, music, and the most inventive ass and tit torture toys this side of heaven. Tony said he was “a slave born to serve masters who needed some balance from always being tops.” Tony was a god and the world beat a path to his fist in his SM harem. All he asked in return from any man was an affectionate fist once in awhile. In August 1981 in the ICU of San Francisco General, I held his sweet hand. I told him that the Barracks had burned down two nights before. He could not speak, but he wrote: “Good.” I asked the doctor, “What’s wrong with him?” She said, “We don’t know. We’ve never seen a patient so distressed.” Tony died the next day. Again, it wasn’t the fisting; it was the needle. Everyone in San Francisco arrived at his huge funeral. No one of us had ever really died in 1981. But Tony couldn’t go away to another town to die. He was born at San Francisco General. At his huge funeral, every top in town got to see every other top who had secretly bottomed to Tony Tavarossi’s Lordly Fist!
A LITTLE FIST MUSIC
By 1976, the Handball Express baths, 975 Harrison, and the Waiting Arms International Hotel, 1188 Folsom, and the Mineshaft in New York, and Man Space in Los Angeles cashed in on the rage of fisting, the new religion buzzed by rhythms of drug-and-fist anthems. Singer Grace Slick drove the “Bolero” out of “White Rabbit.” Red-hot guitarist Tim Buckley sang virtually about the open w/holiness of butthole-to-fist in “Sweet, Sweet Surrender.” Grace Jones ruled the night with “La Vie en Rose.” The soundtrack at the baths was an incredible tape mix of albums created by several different DJs. Prime among them in taste and popularity was shit-fister Thom Morrison. Music drove fisting up to a higher level. Disco per se finally became a joke, but at first it was as “hot, cool, and in” as any thing is at any given time. Addicted to the rhythm, many a gayman gladly gave up his fist-hole while a gorgeous black woman, singing conjure-obeah, clued him into what it was to really, Really, REALLY “need a man.”
Tennessee Williams wrote, “Suddenly there’s God so quickly.” Tenn could have been describing what men learned in late nights of fisting when, handballed into ecstasy, they saw down into the sacred “Tunnel of Purple Poppered Divine Light” even though they knew nothing about tantric yoga, energy chakras, or how monks in the Middle Ages achieved mysticism through disciplines of fasting, scourging, sleep deprivation, and fisting. “You say Apollo. I say Dionysius. Let’s call the w/hole thing off!” Like people on TV talking about their near-death experiences and how they saw the light and decided not to go, many men saw down that Purple Tunnel and decided not to go. I know.
In 1981, a former Benedictine monk, Peter Larkin, indulged by his wealthy parents who loved him, self-published a cornerstone book which he wrote mapping out the physical and mystical geography of fisting. The hard-bound, richly printed volume, The Divine Androgyne, was actually titled, The Divine Androgyne according to Purusha: Adventures in Cosmic Erotic Ecstasy and Androgyne Bodyconsciousness (all one word). Because there was no gay press to actually print books, especially a cult book about fisting, Peter Larkin created Sanctuary Publications named for his San Diego Sanctuary of men pursuing spiritual enlightenment through a brotherhood of fisting, meditation, discipline, piercing, tattoos, as well as study of Christian and Asian theology. He lavishly illustrated the gospel of his words in The Divine Androgyne with his art, paintings, and photographs.
In 1981, I was able to interview “Purusha” and experience his earthy presence. Familiar with the writings of mystics and monks and the Fathers of the Church, I found Peter Larkin, who called himself “Purusha,” to be well within the global mainstream of spiritual enlightenment in both his intellectual thought and his physical mortification of the body which lead to genuine spiritual life.
TODAY’S HIGH: IN THE 70’S
Purusha was a spiritual pioneer at a time when A-Group fisters, like Colt model, Jim Graham, were inviting good FFA tops and TT tops to fly down to Los Angeles where we were then flown by helicopter some distance out into the desert to the top of snow-covered mountains. The deluxe, catered weekend, opulent as a harem in a chalet, was closed from Friday entrance to Sunday afternoon exit when the helicopters returned. The Colt-type handsome men at this prodigal mountain retreat may or may not have gotten into a yin mystical consciousness. They certainly got a yang high off the fisting, the drugs, and the partying with men so ideally masculine they could make a straight man go gay. Yet these sexual athletes, understanding the physical pleasure of fisting, were not so far a cry from Purusha’s balanced yinyang Sanctuary of pierced, fisted men in San Diego where drugs were a more integrated part of training the w/hole person.
Frankly, it is impossible to discuss fisting without mentioning drugs: Midol to crystal. Only in the mid-80’s did drugfree fisting, like drugfree bodybuilding, become like, uh, a reality. Mmmm, yeah, whatever.
THE NEW UNREPRESSED, UNCLOSETED SELF
Time has proven Purusha to be one of the Pioneer Patron Saints of Male Ecstasy. Born near St. Louis, he had the world’s best education about sex. He studied literature, creative writing, philosophy, and theology at Rollins College in Florida. He then spent ten years in Roman Catholic monastic life, first with the Congregation of Holy Cross at Notre Dame, Indiana, and then as a Benedictine monk at Saint Bernard Abbey in Alabama and Mount Savior Monastery in New York. He earned a BA in philosophy from Notre Dame University, and a Master of Arts in theology from Saint Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. He was a religious counselor at Yale University, and in 1974 produced, co-authored, and directed one of the first feature movies of gay liberation to go mainstream on theater screens, A Very Natural Thing, which, as a video rental, may give an easier introduction to Purusha’s headspace than diving first thing into his book.
He early on picked up on the “closeted spirituality” inherent in gay culture. Ultimately, for everyone, “uncloseted gay spirit” arose through sex…and, for some, through priest-shaman drugs used in the anthropological yin fashion of cultures alternative to American male yang consciousness.
Purusha said, “About my new unrepressed self, I can only say that it emerges inside me, blooms inside me, each minute, hour, day and night. The unrepressed me feels like a new me, reawakened, more original, natural, primitive, mythic. I can now fall in love with my self the way I once fell so in love with strangers, and that way I can love these other strangers all the more….I look for the taboos in American culture and I try to break them to free myself from them and awaken my body, my full eroticism, my real feelings and true emotion so I can respond to Nature Itself and to the Universe Itself as I find the Universal Nature within myself and within other men. That is why I invite like-minded men to my Sanctuary.”
Purusha’s Chapter 4 is the heart of his book. Its title reveals its guts: “Advanced Male Androgyne: Eroticism and Tantra–1) Psycho-Sexual Androgyny, 2) Erotic Pain and Piercing, 3) Fistfucking: Yoga of Cosmic Erotic Ecstasy.” If you’re gay, you don’t need to live in new-age Granola, California, to figure out there’s a deep message here to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see and butts to fist. Actually, at either side of this Y2K cusp, The Divine Androgyne may be an informative guide to anyone pursuing the meaning, the sensuality, and the spirituality of bodies and minds.
THE ART OF THE FIST
The cover of The Divine Androgyne is a very sexy color drawing of thirteen multicultural men each one fisting the other arranged in a daisy-chain circle of
fist-up-butt to fist-up-another-butt, until all thirteen, like Christ and the twelve Apostles, are connected, fisted and fisting in a perfect energy circle. This original Sanctuary mandala was drawn by Purusha and then illustrated by Robert Uyvari for the cover as well as for a very popular poster sold by Los Angeles’ Eons Gallery. Eons also represented original Tom of Finland on his first trip to the US in 1977, as well as the Leathermaster/Fistmaster/Bearmaster drawings by JAKAL, another artist/player obsessed with the fantasy arms and fists of godlike Fisting Tops.
The peerless L.A. artist and FFATop, Skipper, has drawn many gutsy fisting fantasy pictures of which one of his best, “Football Fisting,” which is here printed for the first time. Skipper draws driven by operatic masturbation. He cums only when the drawing is finished. Or vice versa. Look at these fisting images; stare at them till your eyes cross and you fall into the frame and feel the powerful mystique all these artists draw from their actual handballing experience into images created by their fisting hands.
NO SISSY BOYS, NO BUTCH GIRLS
All these artists and photographers emphasize the manly homomasculinity inherent in the ritual of fisting. In these days of gender equality, fisting seems to remain its own original recipe. In fact, in these days when many kinky straight people run classified ads in gay mags, because our gay culture is so open to everyone, and we provide the only base where they might find partners matching their kink, one must consider the nature of kinky partnering across gender.
For instance, women advertising they want to fist men are setting up a straight scene, kinky, yes, but straight. If you’re a man who prefers men, then consider the psychological overtones and social reality of what fisting a woman, or being fisted by a woman means. Actually, in the wisdom of the world, that’s heterosexuality. Do you want heterosex in any way shape or form to get inside you? As much as I respect her person and gender, I’d rather not date Sigourney (Alien) Weaver! Internal massage? Hey! Even cross-gender external massage on a table short-circuits to weird hetero energy. Whatever. You decide. Psychotherapist Guy Baldwin writes, “A hardon is not politically correct.”
Question the psychic truth of that premise. How would you define a man fisting another man?
No one alive would call a man fisting another man anything but homosexual no matter how straight both men said they were. Cross-gender fisting? Anything is possible at astral levels, but let’s keep it simple, literal, and cool. We can reconsider this much later, in the 22nd century, because in 2100 A.D. everyone will be so much, uh, more enlightened.
DOES YIN TRUMP YANG?
For now, be careful psychically how you position gender in your kinky play. No gay man has ever gone straight. The transcendental point is to respect the difference of actual gender yin (females) from actual gender yang (males) in order to not confuse the psycho-erotic yin and the psycho-erotic yang combined in one person. Both strict homosexuality and strict heterosexuality are equally noble when natural to the persona. But so is, some say, bisexuality. Nothing trumps anything in the song of your self.
By Perusha’s definition, his sense of androgyny definitely does not justify effeminate males or butch females. (The fascist pig!) His “androgyne” refers only to persons interested in harmonizing their active, aggressive, rational yang energies with their own receptive, yielding, intuitive yin energies inside one human personality. Gosh! Fisting and mysticism that make you more of an integrated human inside your self. And you thought you were only having sex! What a concept!
TOILET TRAINING, IMPALEMENT, & TRUST
Fisting has always been an exercise in learning to let go of what we perceive to be the most controllable thing in our body: our butts. As children in toilet training, once we got control of our peeing and pooping, our parents freed us up to go anywhere.
To learn, Grasshopper, that the butt is The Way Out is first step to learning that the butt is also The Way In.
To learn this active passivity, even in a mondo-sleazo game room, is growth. To be impaled on another human male’s hand/fist/arm/foot grabs your attention and yanks your focus.
Impalement is a kind of bondage.
When a hand is up your rectum, you ain’t going anywhere, nor do most people want to go. Handballing, like bondage, is worthwhile, the way a monk’s contemplative life is worthwhile as a human lesson in will, in power, in sweetsweet surrender of will and power, in life itself. Handball is a yoga-like yinyang unifying experience.
Check this out: A man breaks western taboo about the anus. He finally submits to total and complete penetration. He relaxes into it and feels it from the inside out. He even cums to the otherworldly wildness of such pleasure. He learns a radical/root lesson of cosmic discipline and cosmic truth. He detaches. He learns how to detach. He experiences how to sweetly surrender control,
how to get off on the lack of control, knowing that control is not gone, but just transferred from the self to another, in trust, absolute trust.
STRONG MAN WITH A SLOW HAND
When, by sliding down a hand/wrist/arm/elbow, your body gives up the control it thinks/you think it has/you have, then your mind can finally begin to relax and trust. Impaled, floating in a sling, you are above gravity and out of the world, regressed to comfortable womb memories. There is no distraction. There is only your physical body, sweaty under the hot lights or steaming in candle glow. When your consciousness comes down out of your head and goes to the perfect circle of your butt, then emerges your self, your inner self, your ego. Your astral body becomes free as in sleep, but better than sleep, because your conscious mind is awake, is experiencing the other side of your self, is recording what it is to be body-made-flesh with all defenses and attitude dropped.
You drift internally, down through all the incredible movement inside your own hide, (no longer living in solitary confinement in your own skin), penetrated by another being, down to the chakra of your belly, your guts (the energy center behind your navel). You begin to find your center that has nothing to do with the car you drive, or the job you have, or the rent you pay. Your center is also not in your head as you were taught, and not in your dick as you thought. Your energy is throughout your whole body. Your energy is not in your head alone. When you live in your head alone, or follow only your dick around, you become disturbed. Massage of ass-lips, prostate, colon, and chakras can bring you to your senses. You need a strong man with a slow hand deep in your Tunnel of Love!
THE MAN WHO FELLTO EARTH
Wisely, William Wordsworth said, “The world is too much with us late and soon, getting and spending.” Let a trusted hand break through that world’s clocks and cash values. Mirrors reflect only surfaces. A mirror say you, strangling in your tie and suit, are in control. A playroom mirror says you, all spread out in a sling, are in control. Then the Hand-Mirror of the Inserted Fist reflects your exact place in the universe. You are a Hand Puppet of the Universe. You understand the spiritual yin of what your daily yang is really about. Penetrated, relaxing, surrendering, dropping all your energy out your hungry hole, you begin to learn on your sensual monk’s journey that “Earth is but a rest-stop with playrooms.” This planet, like the house of your body, is not the end of your self’s journey. Earth is a way station for your internal existential consciousness that knows deep down, right now, in this time, in this moment, in this flesh, on this planet, twirling on a fist, your real soul is about to be spun out beyond the universe!
Out-of-the-body experiences, short of hallucinogens, are rare. Be careful what sex games you play.
Never fisted, you may live all your life not knowing what knowledge this way comes.
Once fisted, you may experience what monks and mystics have known for ages.
Like Adam and Eve, once you bite whatever apple you were forbidden, you may find that you have gained knowledge you can never forget.
Drink deep or drink not at all from the energy locked up in the ring of your ass.
Be good humored. Geoff Mains wrote that the Patroness of Fisting is Miss Piggy.
FISTING YOUR ZYGOTE, DUDE!
Did you know that when you are a zygote, in the first moments of your conception, that the zygote is a small two-or-three-celled womb creature shaped like the letter C? Life’s energy at this quick stage runs like electricity along the backbone of the C-shaped zygote trying to determine which leg of the C will become the mouth and which will become the anus. The lifeforce energy speeds back and forth, end to end, until nature decides which end is top and which is bottom.
You may know, as I have known, several people who in their adult life have had pains in their butt which could only be cured by having the teeth impacted around their tail bones removed. They could not floss these unknown teeth near their butt. This proves that nature can be momentarily ambiguous top to bottom. If either leg of the C could be the brain, then maybe you’ve got a Smart Ass. Like a Smart Bomb. Assplay can reveal the imbalance of being trapped up in a rational head. That zygote thing can also explain why some people can’t tell their head from their ass.
Actually, if either end of your spine could be your butt or your brain, then maybe biology itself teaches we should all respect a bit more the capacity for thinking and insight that is the butt’s own wisdom. The dick/nipples/balls/butt are cello strings of the body that, as a very physical instrument, can be put between the legs and played, say, through actual stroking and physical penetration and piercing, to transcend up the physical scale to metaphysical insight, to the astral way. The Romans had a saying: “Per aspera ad astra. Through tough discipline to the stars.”
Transcendence is the pure conjuring of the astral body of the spirit that comes in through your fleshbody, and then blooms deep inside you. If you are a man in pursuit of the pure essence of your self, varieties of sexplay, such as fisting, can help guide and teach you and introduce you to your Self.
Trust me. By now I’m up to my wrist inside you. If you were a genetically straight male, none of this would be happening to you. It’s your gift from the gods.
“Perhaps,” as Andrew Sullivan writes in Virtually Normal, “this is a homosexual privilege…the [gay] human personality begins to develop differently. (Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality, p. 92, Knopf, 1995.)
JUMP FROM GENITAL TO FULL-BODY ORGASM
Cuming, any cuming, fisted or unfisted, no matter how you get your orgasm is the only transcendent freedom finite men can ever know. While you’re cuming, nothing matters: not rent, not food, not loved ones, not even physical life itself. Any man who has ridden his own orgasm, riding a fist the way a good cowboy rides his horse, knows that during his cuming, he could die, would, in fact, willingly die, because anything else on this planet has got to be less than this. Through fisting, whole body orgasm is achievable. In short, a man who has only felt his dick cum, could, through the liberating wisdom of fine-tuning his butthole, enjoy his whole body cuming, much the way as women totally cum, but yet different from women, different in the way that men and women are analogs of each other.
So DIGITize me, Baby, with those Five Fingers of Love!
The French, wise in the psychology of sex, call orgasm “le petite morte,” the little death. If there is a Heaven (and orgasm, again, by analog, suggests there must be), then Heaven, at the least, better be an eternal orgasm. If it’s not, then it’s just another fucking shuck, and the so-called Religious Right (not to be confused with actual mainstream Christians) are welcome to it all by their loathsome lonesome.
Modern life, as we live it, mostly working, etc., is simply what you do on this planet between cumings. What we do, occupations, recreation, friends, everything, is just filler to rest on between the high energy conjurations of cumings. Orgasm is ALL, some/most feel. Too bad it doesn’t last longer. Perhaps the next best thing is foreplay, with the yin of tits and butthole, that works both longer and on a lot of levels more than the yang sex of whambam.
Perhaps it is such psychic re-wiring that best explains 21st-century men’s increasing manstream interest in formerly fringe sex like fisting, bondage, titwork, piercing, pain, tattooing, and whipping.
The insight here is that Y2K gaymen are the new versions of ancient monks. An insightful book is Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics: Lifestyles for Self-Discovery, Marsha Sinetar, 183 pages, $7.95, Paulist Press, 1986.
Maybe, just maybe–and all the words above may be just a hunk of crap–to surrender completely to other hands and other intentions in total handballing, bondage, whipping, and tit/cock/ball torture is a wholesome, balanced, yinyang discipline, necessary in these mad, mad, mad, mad millennial times. Also, as Desiderata counsels: “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.” You decide. How much. How far. How deep. How often. All this is up to you. At your own risk. Listen to no one. However, sent out already as a Gay Man in the Galaxy, can you afford not to risk everything to make your finite self infinite? Conan the Barbarian challenged: “Do you want to live forever?” Who doesn’t? So live long. Prosper.Auntie Mame said, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!”
Fisting may be a very sophisticated sex-game that could keep your ass and your act together. Guys who haven’t tried it, shouldn’t maybe knock it. Most of fisting’s critics don’t need fisting, because they already have their heads stuffed up their butts. Whatever. A man leading an active sex life of external skin-sex often needs the alternative balance of a long, quiet, contemplative sub-skin fisting scene. All he has to do is find an excellent partner to Top him. Relax into his Inner Zygote. Get off on where he goes when he takes the Offramp to Alpha-Centauri, and grow more human, more his own Self, from the experience.
Fisting, because maybe of the circular clock of the ass-ring, has traditionally been used to mark time. All those New Year’s Eves at the Slot. The July 4, 1976, Bicentennial Party at the Catacombs where, by plan, 50 tops mutualized 50 bottoms simultaneously as the United States Marine Corps Band played live on TV “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Maybe the ideal way to have ushered in Y2K would have been to get fistfucked at the stroke of midnight on the high altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris!
Consider yourself lucky to be a Hand Puppet of the Sex Gods. Remember: You can never be your Self until you’re turned Inside Out!
© 2006 Jack Fritscher