My asshole expands. I’m trying to remember the moment I became aware of the pleasure that can be had from its expansion. The asshole, I think is still largely a taboo: it is, after all, where shit escapes. The first scene in the first gay porn I ever saw showed a porn actor, all throughout wearing a black riding helmet, sit on an orange traffic cone. The accommodation was mesmerizing, slowly inch by inch the orange disappeared inside of him. Questions raced in my heady head: did it hurt? What pleasure did he derive from having his asshole stretched, did it, in the first place give him pleasure? This was for me a great giant leap in my sexual imagination that was first merely bound up in words; the fake tabloid epistolary of Xerex Xaviera can only hint at the act of insertion, only in a strict missionary capacity of the erect penis penetrating the as it seemed terribly uncomplicated vagina, with only slight variations on the descriptive satisfaction of hard and soft. While those that grazed on that other kind of penetration seemed to only replicate this duality: as a euphemistic proxy to the vagina, it is nothing but a non-descript hole with no other role than a cock’s sock puppet to use. To be the butt of the joke; ang mahuli may tae sa pwet. When we’re not making sense, we’re talking out of our ass, and also, we pass unto others when we pass gas. Somebody says something about Uranus and still, I laugh.
. . .
The first time I got fucked, it hurt, and so did the second time. It was because I had an idea that fucking was primarily initiated by the top because he was probably the more experienced one as he did the active duty of fucking—though eventually I had to forgive myself for this naïve, non-logical assertion deeply rooted in Filipino machismo that informs an unreality that because non-feminine boys have penis, they are automatically the source of sexual education because supposedly non-feminine boys are introduced to sex earlier than feminine boys and girls, and therefore become our teachers.
There was really no impetus to fuck, to be penetrated, as I recall, no self-doubt if I were ready, and the notion of I will only do it with the right guy has all but faded, like when I first had a cock in my mouth and it was intoxicating, how deliberate it was and unceremonious anyhow, a big let’s just get this over with. I suppose I did picture something else, but I felt something was fleeting, as if I had to be able to tell this story from this angle, a certain light, a distinct sound, how I spat and spat in the office sink after this older man came in my mouth. I want to think it was dirty, but it wasn’t, it was just that: I thought it was what faggots did, how they discovered sex, like mimicking a headlight’s shimmying window slant on the ceiling.
The first time I ever did enjoy fucking was with Jun. He was 20 years older than I was. We had unbelievably hot phone sex and he’d make slurping sounds to my ear, a promise that he would eat my ass—as another guy ate me at the back of his beauty salon somewhere in Cavite, and I thought, so that’s how it feels, the first time having something that you were told don’t belong together but in fact, at that specific moment fits like the slide of a furniture in a corner. The city began to spread itself for me; my body became the map, but it didn’t hold any truths of direction, no point of reference or stable desires, instead the cartographic distribution is uneven, a tentative blueprint of a blueprint that only sliver hints. We can make things up along the way.
If I am to connect this to a particular body, it will only scatter and disappoint. So I leave a version of my back on flea-infested carpets like the one Jun laid me on as he finally locates for me my prostate; John’s smile like the MRT’s imminent decay, or his purple curved cock, set nicely on the lounge chair in that lost spacious loft in Guadalupe. Here I read something about the reality of gay sex, that it is not shiny and slick like made up smut, there is real blood and shit and sheets to wash; but I also think there is tenderness. The guy who fed me rose petals once ditched me so I ended up watching Happy Together alone. It was cold in the movie house and there was only a smattering of heads propped up in the seats.
Fifi for some reason appeared and sat next to me; he was a giddy Physics major who spoke with a slight hairlip, one of the faggots who hung out in what used to be called Crayola House in Palma Hall, named so because the colour of the canteen’s façade seemed like it changed from week to week, day after day. I cried during the waterfall scene in the movie, and wondered, up to this day still wondering, why Fifi didn’t when I turned to him for some kind of recognition of pain, like the kind you were taught to postpone and endure, his blank face tattering white as the echo of the waterfall in the lamp obliterated the cascade of the grand thundering waterfall in the lover’s memory. But then I despise everything Wong Kar Wai now. I figured we can’t ever be that elegant when we are in our throes of passion, when we yearn.
. . .
I’m trying to determine here the logic of arousal: when is it about our firsts, and when is it as it is, revealing itself nameless as it unfolds? Do we run after it, or does it chase us in our most vulnerable and therefore calamitous present? Do we delay so we can strike upon it our loneliness, or do we act upon it in direct orgiastic terms? I stay in the fever pitch, and so I therefore conclude nothing. If I name you, then I must demand. Attributes become positions, because when we settle, we probably would never have to give anything up anymore, and I relinquish all my responsibilities to you.
Every time I go to bed with a new face, a new body, a new person, I feel like I’m one of those Japanese wooden mystery box that require patience to move the panels in their latches until it unlocks. There’s something inside of me that unlocks when I find the rhythm, your rhythm that pulsates to find mine that’s never the same, or when I’ve finally allowed my anal walls to ease and collapse and it can only resemble a non-terminating polyphony. It is not an exaggeration when I tell you that when I let you in, my gut flora welcomes you. But all this takes time, these conjectures, all this pastoral meanderings; the outer limits of storage capacity.
I remember putting on Grindr something like: enjoys bottom on bottom action. This prompted questions from curious tops, mostly, how does that work? I wonder if this is really a question of structural lack, the way one perceives structure as a ready extension of technology, like the absence of metal cranes is therefore the absence of any form of progress. Everyone’s looking for a signal in the forest. I feel as I continue to explore and chart the underground passages of queer urge, I’m beginning to understand more that nothing is set, and instead of matching my rhythm to the machination of easy random, location based setups, instead of repeating a set pattern of conditional desires that’s prescribed for me (position, attributes, preferences, certainties), I’ve come to nurture proximity with my own set of fuck buddies, instead of the more basic casual distance dependent on data usage. Recombination becomes boundless, it becomes play, anarchic, and not through repetition of prescriptive conditional models of desire but through repetition of intimacies that is never twice the same. Here I find queer play to be less about functional urgency, but satisfyingly more about pleasure that finally resists valuation from brutal market economy, that is, all that is solid melts into air, to borrow Marx’ loftier phrase.
. . .
I want to describe to you how it feels when my asshole expands; the popular belief is it begins when you let in a cock. Mine begins even before that: it is in knowing what it wants. I didn’t know I wanted to bottom at first because I only used to see gay sex for its function. But eventually I discovered sex is not momentous like how the movies cut it up for us either in rapid fire mock spontaneity or exaggerated sluggishness. It happens in successions beginning as an orifice, constricting at a touch then letting up when it feels like it can finally answer back; the asshole anticipates and forms theories, it is both coy and loud.
A young man asked me after he came if the pleasure of getting fucked was gradual, so if I understood it clearly, he meant, if it was something that I eventually learned to like. I say no, and now think I should’ve returned the question, have you always liked inserting your cock into holes? Once caught in traffic I saw a hole on the wall of a flyover, a small inconspicuous opening that for a second frightened me because it felt like it only appeared at the exact moment I turned; maybe I finally understood what Tony Perez meant in one of his weird tales. The development officials carved a hole, a passageway under a hill in the middle of a city to make an underpass, and it angered the encantos that lived there. But something here is reversed: once the hole was opened up, instead of reflecting hell, the opposite of a city that prided itself in utopian technological enterprise, the encantos whose position in the cosmological order is both polluted and damned returned the reflection back to the inhabitants of the city and revealed to them that they are in fact the polluted and the damned, and they have created their own special kind of hell. Filthy sewers, busted pipes, garbage strewn everywhere, a dog eating a scrappy bone, flood and fire.
How does that work then when two bottoms play, still a top inquires, and I answer, we finger each other and eat each other’s holes. There’s finesse. Rimming has been such a worthwhile endeavour as of late; it was believed that witches, concubines of the Devil, in order to commune with him, kiss a black goat’s asshole. The goat in the original roster of sin is the icon of lust, and so the asshole is seen as both a corruptive force and source of pollution. In 19th c. friar texts, Manila as a locus of intersecting commerce and knowledge was portrayed as pusalian, a literal cesspool, and so the friars warned anyone who thought of sending their children to study in Manila that they will be corrupted by vicío, vice or sin; the friars were not wrong because they’d know about that. A poem I read as a young queer has this for a last line: nobody wants to be bottom. If I remember right, it seemed like some half-ass meditation on the only two roles two men in bed can conceive, a duplication of sanctioned heterosexuality, one is the inserter and the other the insertee. The bottom has no other function but to give in, all his agency lost to the cock, and his resignation is, I perceived, a typified weakness. This kind of heteronormative prescription baffles me endlessly.
Because I know what my hole wants. It wants first to be slobbered, kissed like you’re kissing another set of lips, it wants to be teased, it wants to be fingered, massaged, kissed again, it wants to be loosened up. My hole is the one that signals when I am ready to be penetrated. It does not care if you come or not, all its anal wall wants is to be stretched. It doesn’t want to just accommodate you, it wants you to feel its smooth velvety warmth, for it’s already there, no coaxing, no waiting to be hard. My hole is not here for you, my hole is ever present, not an absence that only appears when something is inserted, as if it needs an acknowledgment. And when it gapes in contentment, it’s not because you made it so; it’s gaping because it’s my anus and it’s under my control.
. . .
Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant explains why they don’t bother cleaning up the dirt in their apartment because they say what’s the point, after you clean it, new dirt will only accumulate again, and so they just let the dirt pile up until it settles and resembles the rest of the household furniture. Dirt without is somewhat much easier to comprehend: it is dust, detritus, pollution, things that are left and surfeit. I’m often asked how do I clean my asshole, and I answer, like everything else it takes practice and hopefully experience. A douching bulb, Fleet enema, a one-time use only plastic syringe, and well, a bit of luck. Most guys don’t mind that there’s shit while we fuck, even if I warn them I haven’t cleaned down there, and some of them find that it’s part of the charm. To avoid accident, as if a child who can’t hold it, or an elderly who can’t hold it.
Shitting is dirt, shitting is pollution, it is better if it’s out of sight, that nobody talks about it: manners, dear, it’s called, delicadeza. I always laugh when I remember Nancy Botwin in Weeds when she mentioned something about not shitting where you eat and then following it up by rearranging the thought, or eating where you shit if you’re into that sort of thing (by which she meant, she doesn’t do her dirty deeds, her crime as a widowed drug peddler queen, out in the open; shitting like crime has to be hush-hush). You see, even in anal sex, or anything related to the anus, the practical lines of decorum is quite thin; an accident is acceptable because it’s part of the hazards of the anatomy, but when I say, if somebody asks me about my limits, that I am not into scat/shit play (coprophagia), it means, I don’t fetishize the thing itself, das Ding. Anus (apparatus) and shit (thing) are two separate entities that gets confused quite often with one another.
An American pornographer once mentioned something about the thing itself, that during the AIDS era in the 90s, and pornography buffed and shaved and made to glisten their porn actors to erase the images of gay bodies decimated by opportunistic infections in popular visuals of homosexuals, the thing itself, the semen, the logos from which the gay imagination retains its seductive, dangerous, and resistive marker was also erased even in fantasy by the act of having porn actors put on a condom. The semen as pollution, particularly semen produced in homosexual act, proposed lethal the dirt within; the good gays wear condom and don’t get sick, the bad gays bareback and get what they deserve. In British Victorian era, however, the semen was prized for its given moral lexicon, and masturbation was strictly forbidden and stigmatized: spilling the seed means to waste one’s energy on useless enterprise, because the moral enterprise of semen is strictly to impregnate or had to be seen as sign of virility that one is perpetually in motion and can produce. Useless enterprise during the expansion of capitalism in the Industrial age was viewed somewhat as a sin because it devalues what is precious in what will eventually be a destructive venture in mass production: time and productivity.
. . .
My asshole winks. Its generosity is quite unparalleled. It’s only recently, as in femme shaming, that I’ve confirmed there really is such a thing as bottom shaming. I was quick to account the phenomenon as a product of an application gloss that reinforces toxic masculinity, but I’ve found out it has very little to do with that. A man, and sometimes woman too, is considered to have toxic masculinity when the value they put in this attribution, namely the perception of other’s gender and gender expression, is filtered through the default assumption of masculine traits as being superior. Through toxic masculinity, a parlorista, for example, often referred to as baklang kanal (dirty faggot, faggot from the gutters, a poor faggot) is viewed as a scum, a low-life. They are shamed both for their class and gender, and because of their gender expression, they are punished. Nobody wants to be bottom, the poem laments; shaming is a form of punishment as a direct corollary of policing. Outside the rigidity of the perception of the masculine, anything outside macho is unnatural and perverse, the macho creates meaning for the other, and the other must accept this, or else they will be punished and shamed.
I had my phone checked up once and in the store there were two macho men talking boisterously. I wore ultra-short shorts and netted stockings with garter lace trimmings, and I was reading. And then I heard one of them say, pare, chicks. And they laughed. I was cat-called. Cat-calling is not new to me, and despite the fact that I find that as a femme queer being cat-called by macho men queers or disturbs our social positions because of the act’s minute eroticism, in my context this interruption on the sleight also immediately puts me in my position: to be cat-called by macho men as a femme queer denotes two things, 1) I am their negation, and 2) my economic position is nothing more than for sexual solicitations. I am a slut, and worst, I am fake-woman slut. Slut is a word used to shame bottoms, but this is slightly more nuanced than when a woman is called one, but still to the detriment of the bottom. Women incur sluthood by simple math of how many guys she has slept with; gay and queer bottoms on the other hand, don’t need to incur this, it is believed to be their raison d’être, no agency whatsoever, as if worst than a eunuch, because a eunuch’s position in the hierarchy is anatomical, while the bottom for their use-value, not even objects, but abstract non-entities. You want to know something: I’m a bottom pig slut and fuck you.
. . .
I have yet to try fisting. A fist in my asshole, it’s not for the faint of heart. I’m being turned on by a fisting instructional video by Axel Abysse where he slowly guides his “pup” (a term in the Master-slave S&M play relationship) wearing a leather dog mask to open up for his fist. Texts flash on the screen. Do it with someone you trust. More and more, as I embark in new-fangled erotic plays which I myself gather and seek, I understand what this means, you are entrusting not just your physical pleasure to another being but your full well-being, a full recognition of the other. The video progresses and Abysse intensifies the play until his pup’s asshole gives in, and he could go on and punch his fist in and out, the white cover of the sheet dripping in thick clear lubricant. There are specs of pink on it, and the following texts appear: Don’t worry if the liquid turns pink. An assurance. This is less for the pup than for the Master. It says something about care and mindfulness, but also a proclamation which I think doesn’t only apply to extreme consensual sexual acts but must be said across the spectrum of sexual play, that the body is nothing to be afraid of. The body is material. It produces fluids, produces smells, and produces wonderful endless recombination of sensations. It is a garden of earthly delights. So allow me to hijack Aquinas’ empirical approach to proving the existence of God; he inferred that since all earthly material things elicit a form of response from the human senses, and since all this earthly materials are created by God, God therefore appears in the happenstance of our immediate senses: when we enjoy the smell of flowers in bloom, enjoy a delicious meal, or find solace in the presence of a friend, there is God. He bends over, head down, and his ass cheeks part and there it is, a puckered rosebud. I savour his scent, then eat him.
Images: 1 detail from left panel of Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights; 2 osculum infame from Guazzo's Compendium maleficarum; 3 still from Arrabal's J'irai comme un cheval fou
Comments