CHECKMATE Magazine
No 32 2000-08
MAPPING THE GENOME OF LEATHER S&M:
How Fisting and S&M Fringe Sex
Entered the Homomasculine Mainstream
Part 1: Hand Puppets of the Sex Gods
by Jack Fritscher, PhD
Life is a learning to surrender control. We are born believing the double Human Fallacy: we have control; we have free will. Only to a point this side of Maya. We are amazing hand puppets of the gods, the force, the cosmos. We learn, through the hard-knock lessons life visits upon us, or the lessons we seek. If we remain open, we realize, while maybe bored in a bar, that to mature is to learn detachment from things as well as from ideas drummed into our heads when we were little boys.
The trend among 21st-century men is to simplify. Unload possessions and middle-class values. Travel without baggage across the digital divide of our butt. Fly across the geography of the planet. Climb up the geography of our bodies. Rearrange our recombinant DNA! Map the Genome of S&M!
Sex pleasure teaches psychic wisdom. When Fisting Tops and Fistable Bottoms open assholes, then hearts and minds also open. Incoming new concepts destroy old cautions and old taboos. We learn The Way Out Is The Way In! This is the code of the West only gay men know. This is the secret language of Hand Puppets. It’s S&M Leather and Fetish. It’s why the tasty word orgasm ends with S-M.
ENDGAME: FIST OF THE GENOME
Ain’t there a hardon kick in purposely turning the opposite direction into a 1-way street and racing the Thrill Ride successfully to the next corner? You prove that the 1-way street can actually be a 2-way drive through a Sunday in the park with George, or Bob, or Bear. Maybe you’re a 20th-century fox still wanting to drive on into the geography of the 21st century going your own way.
Gays are a developing nation: a 4th-world subculture of eros. C21 gay men are sons of the Stonewall gay men. They liberated the 1960’s into the 1970’s Golden Age of Sexual Freedom that existed post-penicillin and pre-HIV. Vietnam ate men (including gay men) until the war ended in 1975. Threat of early death in war drove draft-age men into Fringe Heights of public sex. The more extravagantly gay a man was the less likely the Selective Service was to draft him for a killer or a victim in a useless war. You stand on the rich experience of those pioneer heroes.
You build your manstream future of rights, erotic vision, trust, and wisdom on the fraternal shoulders of previous generations. You affirm our wider-deeper-harder male history with the same insistence as women affirming female history. You keep on inventing the Brave New World of Homomasculinity.
Men’s hands traditionally are for shaking, making, hunting, and open-handed slapping of dick. Inside the long and coded history of gay culture, gay hands are everything straight hands are—and then some! All men use their hands for jerking off. Ancient men in caves knew the secret bond when one man slipped his hand—finger by knuckle by fist—into another man. Men’s hands know the sense of comradeship, of prisoner punishment-rape, of orgy, of ecstasy. Traditional initiation into the French Foreign Legion is a disciplined power-insert of fist-up-butt. “March or die!” starts with “Take it or leave!” I know, because in one of those nights at the Slot Hotel, South of Market in 1973, a former French Legionnaire told me so. (Gay wisdom teaches one to believe all stories told, because every man knows the stories he himself could tell, while true, would cause the naive to disbelieve.)
Beau Travail, directed by Claire Denis (2000), is probably the most sensual movie ever of the French Foreign Legion’s discipline, prisons, and soldiers’ bonding over biceps, helicopters, slow-motion male bodies exercising gymnastics and tai chi, “shaven-headed young giants”stripped nearly naked in the sun, helicopter rescues, and a sexually jealous sergeant stripped of his stripes in the military outpost. Beau Travail, actually, is Melville’s Billy Budd moved from a Navy ship to the desert post in the Gulf of Djibouti, as the narrating officer reminisces about how splendid life used to be, before it went all wrong. Sound familiar? (Like the “Titanic 1970s.” Like Bush.)
ONSCREEN FISTS IN THE CHUNNEL OF LOVE
On satellite dish, see A Clockwork Orange’s Malcolm MacDowell as the edgy Roman emperor in I, Claudius, a Bob Guccionne feature film produced for Penthouse. The plot revolves on Claudius’ lurid, deep, and cruel fisting of a juicy young bridegroom. In 1981, I, Claudius, projected into straight pop culture a fisting consciousness that had long been lifestyle among gay men.
In 1972, Born to Raise Hell, the first gay S&M movie featuring fisting, piss, leather, and fringe play was premiered in a San Francisco movie theater at the corner of Powell and Market by producer Terry LeGrand and director Roger Earl. Born to Raise Hell, with its appealing stars and its best-selling photo book, became an instant classic in the 1970s, the wonderful decade devoted to discovery of Actual Gay Personality. Its fisting scene, which seems to start out consensually, made it as famous as its star, Mr. Drummer, Val Martin.
Pornstar Fred Halsted thought Born’s fisting scene got too real and went beyond consensual. Fred, who also wrote for my Drummer, was a hunky LA stud expert in directing leather sex, fisting (butts and faces), and esthetics. Maybe he was jealous that Earl and LeGrand’s stars were so convincing. Earl-LeGrand are quite talented and they put “real” onscreen. In June 1989, in Europe, Mark Hemry and I, as Palm Drive Video, shot Earl-LeGrand’s first two-camera shoot. Together, we created six very intense and—we can swear—very, very real, yet consensual, S&M videos: The Argos Session (Amsterdam), Fit to Be Tied (Düsseldorf), Marks of Pleasure (Hamburg), Knast (Berlin), The Berlin Connection, Loose Ends of the Rope (Off the Autobahn). Halsted’s porno-art films, Sextool and L.A. Plays Itself are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1978, filmmaker Wakefield Poole, fresh from Boys in the Sand, made the first totally dedicated fisting film, Moving, starring San Franciscans Terry Weekly and Top fistpig Peter Fiske (not Peter Fisk, Whipmeister).
FIST-O-PHOBIA: U.S. SENATE vs MAPPLETHORPE
Fist-o-phobia from fundamentalist straights took legendary S&M photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, directly to the Supreme Court of free speech. Mapplethorpe’s classic black-and-white shots of 1) a whip up his own leather-chapped butthole, and 2) beautiful round buns penetrated by a fist-to-the-wrist drove Republican senators so righteously angry in 1989 that Mapplethorpe’s fist and other photographs became the media gay-scandal of the decade. Driven by a fist, the outraged Senate Republicans in the 1990s dared to defund the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and with it all gay-related works and fringe performances.
If rejection of fisting in art creates “censorship,” then acceptance of fisting in life must lead to a whole lot of “freedom.” Republican fundamentalists seem convinced that once a male learns the secret of his butt he’ll never again be obedient to authority. Actually, forbidden gay sex always had a special edge-play thrill back when we were all John Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw, because gay sex, down by law, was itself illegal.
FANTASY TRIP @ THE HOTEL ALABAMA
Isn’t it more fun now that Alabama has outlawed dildos to think about taking your vacation in Alabama just so you can do a performance, ironically and really, using dozens of dildos at one time in your hotel room, knowing that any minute the Alabama troopers can barge in like Serbs into Kosovo? Or the US into Baghdad? The famous Robert Mapplethorpe, who was incidentally my bi-coastal lover, was a great Fisting Top who after finally himself going bottom, wrote me from New York on May 21, 1978, “It’s midnight…I almost forgot to tell you. I let some creep stick his hand up my ass. I’ve been fisted—even came—but I think I prefer being the giver.” Earlier, on April 10, 1978, on “Hotel Boulderado” letterhead, bored while shooting Allen Ginsberg in Colorado, caro Roberto finished his long letter to me with these words: “I’m going to turn off the lights and…muster up enough energy to ‘Jack’ off. I’m going to think about having my fist up your asshole while you…[deleted]…Love, Robert.” When a genius wants to fist you, let him. Mapplethorpe Doppelganger twin, rocker Jim Morrison sang, “Ride the King Snake.”
NY FISTS: THE MINESHAFT
Robert Mapplethorpe was a keystone figure at Wally Wallace’s Mineshaft in New York’s West Village. In 1989, Wally gave me a definitive 3-hour video interview about the history of the Mineshaft from the beginning in 1976 to its end in 1985. Plus he handed over copies of nearly 100 rare photographs taken in the “no-cameras” Mineshaft where, on the dramatically arranged 2-stories of platforms, slings, and porcelain tubs, men performed all the Greatest Hits on the Gay Adventure Sex List: feces to piss to fisting. Rex’s famous black-and white drawing for the fist-o-rama of the Mineshaft featured a piss-thirsty leatherman with arms greased and ready.
The Mineshaft was, no doubt, the best public Fringe Pit devoted to fisting, S&M, scat-and-water sports in the whole history—no exaggeration—of the world: ancient to high tech to well into whatever comes in Century 21! The best Hollywood film featuring the Mineshaft culture was 1979’s Cruising, directed by William (The Boys in the Band, The Exorcist) Friedkin and starring Al Pacino as a straight cop who gets caught up in the “Mineshaft Mystique.” Friedkin actually cast the Cruising extras from the hottest Mineshaft regulars. A single-frame advance through the video of this once-highly-controversial film reveals an underlying gay documentary of many Night-Time Sex Stars and even some well-known pornstars lending themselves to the true feeling of those sweet Mineshaft nights. Wally Wallace cannot receive enough praise for his actual genius in creating the expressionist stage of the world-famous Mineshaft. He was the premier “performance producer” of Fringe Sex in the Golden Age when everyone was an erotic Performance Artist.
FISTING BALLET: CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT
When the canaries in the Mineshaft died, it was time to cut and run. Shortly, before the Mineshaft closed in 1985, before its slings and bath tubs and toilets disappeared into history, Wally gave permission to the heavy-duty S&M group, The Skulls of Akron, led by filmmaker Dave Masur, to come into the Shaft and, with very primitive video equipment, make an amazing handballing tape titled Fisting Ballet. While finally revealing on screen (and for history) the closed set of the Mineshaft interior itself, the underground tape featured a shaved nude man climbing posts and beams above the heads of some Mineshaft rats (regulars). He hangs from pipes, lowering himself, and his wind-tunnel asshole down on the untiring arm of badman Biker Rick who always proved the most incredible REAL TOP in the whole series of S&M documentary videos made by The Skulls of Akron. The Skulls’ fisting, fringe, and S&M videos disappeared through various kinds of censorship at the same time Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography underwent Federal investigation in 1989.