Thursday, March 16, 2023

7:00 AM | The Darkness We Don’t Talk About

In 2008, a sort of funny thing happened. It was the second year of the Man Asian Literary Prize, the now defunct literature award given to the best novel in the English language [or in translation] by an author in Asia—and four Filipino authors were longlisted for the award: yours truly, Lakambini Sitoy, Alfred Yuson, and Miguel Syjuco, with the latter ending up winning the prize [and the Palanca Award for the novel at that time].

It was an amazing harvest of Philippine literature, and being thrust personally in the middle of that was surreal. [It tickled me to see my name in print on the New York Times book section, for example.] Part of it was the allure of the prize being given by the same body that was sponsoring the Booker Prize, and thus the Man Asian Literary Prize was being seen in many quarters as the “Asian Booker.” Another part of the allure was also the fact that we were the sophomore follow-up to a stellar first crop: in 2007, the Chinese writer Jiang Rong won the inaugural prize with his novel Wolf Totel, with the short list consisting of Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay Jr. [another Filipino writer], Families at Home by India’s Reeti Gadekar, Smile As They Bow by Myanmar’s Nu Nu Yi, and Habit of a Foreign Sky by Hong Kong’s Xu Xi. [The longlist was even more formidable, and included Mo Yan, the future Nobel Prize winner for literature.]

But what struck me the most about the 2008 longlist was the fact that two Dumaguete writers made it in: there’s of course me, with the other one being Lakambini Sitoy. And ours were two novels whose premises are anchored on the dark soul of Dumaguete [and Negros Oriental as a whole].

My [still unpublished] novel is titled Sugar Land, and its drama springs from the infamous serial killings of young women by a landed Spanish mestizo that had rattled Dumaguete in the 1970s to the 1980s, ending in a tragic shoot-out near St. Paul’s in the early 1990s. Bing’s novel is Sweet Haven, where she renames Dumaguete as “Donostia” [and Silliman as “Sweet Haven University”], and follows the fall-out of a sex scandal, tailored after the infamous “Dumaguete sex scandal” in the mid-2000s, where several coeds were secretly filmed while engaging in sex, with the footage eventually leaked to pirates and jumpstarted the trend of amateur porn videos being titled after specific places [“Bacolod Sex Scandal,” etc.].

I joked then to Bing: “It’s funny how we are putting Dumaguete in a very negative light in our novels, with real life sex scandals and serial killers.”

But I know it was not easy for both of us to proceed with these projects, and we took pains fictionalizing the general information, although our details were culled from what reportage we could research from. She renamed the city to something else, and when we launched the novel at Silliman sometime in 2013, she understandably took pains to obfuscate the similarities. But anyone who knows Dumaguete/Silliman can read between the lines in her descriptions of Sweet Haven University, and her rightful condemnation of the misplaced moral lynching that can sometimes erupt in its hallowed halls. [In her novel, a young coed’s reputation has been tarnished because of the video, with her name gleefully dragged through the mud by the moralistic people of the town—but she has a secret she’s keeping: the man who raped and filmed her is the privileged son of a high-ranking university administrator.] In my novel, I did not hesitate from using the name “Dumaguete,” but I had to create another name for the alleged serial killer—simply because I knew his family [and I liked them!], and I did not feel it was right of me to have their name besmirched once more, even after so many years after their predecessor’s horrifying demise.

In a way, Bing and I were trading our tales using the subterfuges of secrets that Dumaguete traffics in. The truth is, you will never find concrete accounts of the serial killing or the video sex scandal on the Internet anymore, and the newspaper accounts are sketchy [if you can actually gain access to them]. But trust me, these accounts are alive in the private recollections and conversations among Dumaguetnons, gossiping as we do while in a party, while doing household chores, while drinking among friends. Nobody writes of these dark stuff in community newspapers. Nobody posts about these things on social media. But among ourselves, we talk.

People gossip. People have theories. People have emotional investments in the oral unraveling of these local misfortunes. But these discourses will never see print—except perhaps in the private chatgroups of Dumaguete Facebook. And if you notice, I have never referred to a specific name at all in this article so far. This is the Dumaguete way.

Which explains why nobody in Dumaguete [and Negros Oriental] really puts out comments about the recent Pamplona massacre out there, especially on social media. Someone, obviously a langyaw [a stranger or newbie], had wondered about the silence. No one talks and no one names names! Which is strange because everyone certainly knows the name of the alleged perpetrators. It’s just probably very anti-Dumaguete to name names, and perhaps we are right to do so, mostly for fear of our lives. I wish I could list down past instances of this happening—but all of Dumaguete knows why I can’t.

Everyone here knows never to utter names, and if we really had to, we borrow a device from the Harry Potter books, and call the specter as He/They Who Must Not Be Named. Which is why it astonishes me no end to hear non-Oriental Negrenses uttering the name so clearly and blatantly in their social media posts and in their interviews. You really have to be from somewhere else to truly be able to do that. A few days ago, I was asked to facilitate the sourcing of potential interviewees for a podcast about the recent violence in Negros Oriental by a major media outlet. The producers seemed to be aware of the communal bind we were in regarding talking openly about these matters, and they hastily assured me: “We won’t be specific, we will speak only generally about the violence in the community.” And then also this: “If we can’t find locals to interview, perhaps you know of people who are willing to talk who are in the U.S.?” That buffer of generality and geographic distance is perfectly indicative of the paralyzing conundrum locals have about the occasional violence that erupt in our midst.

What does this say about the Dumaguetnon? Is this cowardice, or is this just a mechanism for survival? My friend, the theater artist Lu Decenteceo, tries to give an explanation: “We are as human as you get them. Our persons run the whole range even if we have been raised to admire the good and gentle. So we try to live the life we would like ourselves to be. The dark side, we recognize, but we would rather keep them in the shadows as they are not how we would like ourselves to be. [We in Dumaguete] are a genteel breed. Politeness and courtesy reigns — on the surface [at least]. And it is impolite and uncivil(ized) to be otherwise. As a society that is [was?] not so mobile, [we have] generations [who had to learn] to live with each other [because] we are [were] a small [closed] community. Or at least, even if we have our langyaw, we still have a core members of the community who see and have to deal with each other. We have to have a modus vivendi.”

It begs another question: are we really a city of gentle people, given this recent descent into hell?

I found a photo on Twitter many days ago. It shows an ordinary shot of Hibbard Avenue traversing Silliman campus, but what struck me was a painted sign attached to the base of a streetlamp that says: “None of you are gentle.” I don’t know who took it, or who made this sign, but it made me pause. I’ve written about this before: the title we have given Dumaguete, that it is a “city of gentle people,” is something we inherited from the creative ploys of a popular local radio personality in the 1960s/1970s [Philidore Quingco of DYSR/DYRM] who brandished it so frequently we just adopted it through osmosis, until it finally became a kind of a brand. Some people then actually thought it was corny, but it stuck. I think of it more as bullshit marketing tag, the way most cities in the Philippines have something going on: Cebu as the “Queen City of the South,” Bacolod as the “City of Smiles,” Cagayan de Oro as the “City of Golden Friendship,” etc. They mean nothing, to be honest, just a tag to pat ourselves by.

So, are we no longer the city of “gentle” people, given recent circumstances?

But then again … were we ever “gentle”? 

Nostalgia is nice [“Ahhh, mas tsada katong sa unang panahon...”] but it is unreliable and warps memories, and if you can only go back in time to the very past you think is great, you’ll encounter people who will bemoan the same kind of problems we hate today. What comes to mind easily is the 1951 murder of Magallon town politician Moises Padilla, who dared run for town mayor against the wishes of then Negros Occidental Governor Rafael Lacson—and for that disobedience, the governor had cohorts of his private army kidnap and torture Padilla, and then had his body dragged around through several towns as an explicit warning to the locals about the dangers of earning the ire of an all-powerful politician. President Ramon Magsaysay, angered by the murder, personally saw to it that justice would be served—and Lacson ended up incarcerated. [But because he was rich and influential, Lacson was quietly released under the presidency of Diosdado Macapagal some years later, and returned to live out the rest of his days in his hometown in peace.] The lesson to be gained is this: the past has never been innocent. [And the powerful will try to bend justice their way, whenever they can.]

This is not a Negros problem. The same kind of injustice and crime and killings that have been happening here in our island also occur everywhere else. [Think of Calauan, Laguna Mayor Antonio Sanchez and his rape/killings of two UP Los Baños students in 1993. Think of the Ampatuan massacre in Maguindanao in 2009. But what is it with murderous politicians, no?] We just feel ours more strongly now because they are within intimate reach.

I’d still like to believe Dumaguetnons and Oriental Negrenses are good people on the whole, gentle even. I know many of these folks. But evil does exist. Even among us.

And until we allow ourselves to articulate that evil, we will forever be victims of it, because it is a cancer that will not stop spreading until we name it. Any takers?

Maybe I’ll write a novel about it. [But most likely not, hahaha.]



P.S.

Since I just wrote about it, if you’re wondering where you can get a copy of Lakambini Sitoy’s Sweet Haven in Dumaguete, Tara De Leon just sent me this photo. It’s available at Caballes Bookstore! [And apparently also, Ichi Batacan’s Smaller and Smaller Circles.] Get them!

Labels: crime, dumaguete, history, literature, negros, philippine literature, politics, sex, true crime

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Tuesday, June 08, 2021

8:46 AM | You Only Live Once

On Grindr, a friend of mine—who will not be named—goes on a hunt. He takes on an avatar for this. On the pick-up app, he’s “David Ezra,” the theatre actor and singer and son of Dulce, complete with a few other candid snapshots of the man ready to send when a prospect asks for more pictures to seal the deal.

“It cushions the blows of rejection,” he tells me. “Before, without the avatar, they rejected me. Now it’s the avatar they reject—but me they accept, if they accept. I call it reverse catfishing.”

And then, after a while, he admits: “David Ezra gives me courage.”

He has been on Grindr with a passion equal to an obsession since February 2021, prodded by a mix of midlife crisis and pandemic anxieties—which snowballed to a kind of marathon of sexual conquests without inhibition, that even he has come to terms with it by philosophizing his need.

By June 6th, he tells me he’s on conquest #261, in a kind of race to accumulate numbers, of which he only has some vague reasons (“midlife crisis and pandemic anxieties”) for reaching. But the accumulation has become a personal goal. “I want to make it to 1,000 by December,” he says. “At the rate I’m going, it’s kaya ra.”

When he tells me this, I am not shocked—but I ask for elaboration. The fact that he is readily giving me his story means he is in need for someone to talk to, perhaps to even clarify for himself why it is something he has to do.

He tells me he has just gotten over his ex-boyfriend, the one he shared years of togetherness before they broke up almost a decade ago when the ex-boyfriend asked for firmer commitment and my friend was not ready to settle for a fully domesticated life regardless of love. They continued living together for sometime, until the ex-boyfriend moved abroad, and met another man—sending my friend to a tailspin of recriminations and regrets, and pushing him to midlife worries that did not seem to dissipate with the years.

But now he tells me he has gone past that.

And also this: “I realized I never whored around my entire life—all 42 years of it. Then on [my adopted son’s] birthday, I had sex with a guy who reminded me of me. Like me, he was young, Chinese, and closeted. And then I decided to get a haircut, after a year of not having one. Then, boom, something clicked. I looked at myself in the mirror, and said, ‘Hey, I’m actually cute. Actually gwapo. And a daddy. And Tsinoy. What stopped me before was all my restrictive social and intellectual filters. I decided right then and there to throw precautions away. I went to have sex. That’s my answer now to things. Damn the pandemic and midlife crisis: just go have sex.”

After Grindr, when the connection is made, he picks them up in his car. “Having a car is having power,” he tells me. The encounter is mostly what he calls “car fun.” Sometimes they go to a hotel. Often he takes them to a friend’s condominium, which is just right near his neighborhood. The friend is a former lover but now based somewhere else in the Philippines. He has given my friend the key to his apartment—and now it serves as a rendezvous for his Grindr pick-ups. But he likes doing the deed in his car. He takes them to different places—beside churches, on side streets, on mall parking lots, even on busy streets, and at different times, too, but mostly early morning or night. Most of the time, he uses a car that’s super-tinted. But he likes using another car that’s only medium-tinted car. “The medium tint is fun and dangerous,” he confesses, “because people can see.”

There are no real names exchanged in these encounters. When asked, he gives them an alias: he’s “Michael Tan,” whose mother is from Taiwan. (Sometimes, when he likes the guy, he does tell them his real name.)

“Are you happy with these encounters?” I ask him.

“Oh, yes,” he answers. “Very much so. I can tell you the stories. Grabe. I like listening to them. I like finding out what they do, where they’re from. I like listening to their love stories.”

There is this local singer he had crushed on for so long, but never had the courage to ask out on a date. “My avatar, David Ezra, made it possible,” he says. “When I finally unmasked myself, he knew who I was, of course. When I kissed him, it felt like one of those moments straight from YA novels.” The encounter, he tells me, was one for the books—they parked beside a church, and when they almost got caught, opted to go to a hotel. “It felt like young and careless sex, or love,” he says. “Wild abandon.”

Then there’s the muscled twink, a model. “One of the best bodies I’ve had partnered with. Iron abs,” he tells me. “He taught me about ‘vibe,’ that it’s not really how you looked—not a matter of being gwapo or panget—but all about your vibe. That was what he was looking for when he asked for photos over Grindr. I sent him three David Ezra photos. After we had sex, I dropped him at his mother’s place. And then he messaged me, that he had fun but was wondering why I didn’t send him my real pictures. He would have had sex with me anyway, because we vibed. I said my apologies and changed the topic.”

Then there’s the triathlete whose real name my friend does not want to know. He calls him “Runtime Error” instead. “He’s very memorable because he’s very gentle, very real—and we have the most intimate sex. He’s probably the person I’ve had sex with the most these days. Usually it’s just once or twice with most people—but this one made it past three. I don’t know his name. And he doesn’t bring a wallet so I can’t peek into it and get the name. And he doesn’t ask me as well. But I do know some details. Like I know he has a girlfriend in Manila, and that he wants to marry—but he is going to tell her that he’s bisexual before he proposes.”

There are so many others. He has a litany of names. “This one is the most beautiful of them all. This one is a staffer of a friend who blocked me on Facebook. This one is an events host and pageant boy. So many stories,” he says. There’s the banker who lives in a posh subdivision. There’s the guy who loves to sing Hamilton and who lives in Danao. There’s the guy who helped push his car when it ran out of gas. There’s the valedictorian from Negros who works for a car company. There’s the freediver. So many stories indeed.

“I like it when they are intelligent,” he tells me. “I don’t have to dumb down my language. I can be as verbose as I am with you.”

Are the boys different because of the pandemic?

“I don’t know,” he answers. “A lot of them are like me, emerging from hibernation. A lot of them haven’t had sex in a long time.”

I ask him why he thinks this sexual marathon is pandemic-related.

“Of course it’s the pandemic. It’s YOLO. You only live once,” he says. “I’ve never felt more YOLO in my life than now. And accepting of fate and magic.”

He is not that deathly afraid anymore of contracting COVID-19 from all these encounters—although aside from sex he is still very paranoid, demanding face masks, social distancing, and open-air spaces only. “I make an exception only for sex,” he says. “I’m not worried because we take lianhua in my family like vitamins. It’s traditional Chinese medicine for respiratory ails, worth about 200 pesos a box. We take it onset pa lang of any symptoms—cough, fever, chest pains, others.”

Any regrets so far?

“That maybe I may have overexposed myself—especially those who have recognized or may recognize me in the future. And that I’m not Michael Tan. Syaro wala’y mo-cross paths nako ani in the future. I wonder how I would handle myself when that happens. It will be awkward.”

I wish him well, “as long as you know what you’re doing,” I tell him.

“No, I don’t actually,” he says. “And that’s fine. YOLO, after all.” Then he quotes a line from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George: “There are only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world of ours: children and art.”

“You have your books,” he tells me. “I have my son. That’s all that matters.”

It’s a profound take on his rush to have all these encounters, all in the name of YOLO, all in the name of banishing away the fears of contagion in pandemic times.


What is the craziest thing you’ve done in the name of YOLO—“you only live once”—in the time of the pandemic?

The rush to risky behavior in (or after) stressful time is, in many ways, to be expected. Think of the Roaring 20s when the world burst into excess and the pursuit of hedonistic pleasures right after the Spanish flu and World War I ravaged the world. Today, many people are not even waiting for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic to pursue the crazy and the wild without filter. More than a year into the longest lockdown in the world, many people are too ready to party away their worries—with or without repercussions. On June 6, someone posted on social media a video of young people partying, sans masks and sans social distancing, in a Cebu bar. The backlash was intense, and the very next day, the Department of Health banned partying all over the country.

But YOLO is not just about partying. YOLO is doing something unique in your arsenal of experiences because tomorrow is not assured—and the riskier the experience, the better the high. Although for many others, YOLO is also as simple as gorging themselves on food, heedless of long-held diets, and gaining several pounds in the process. For others, it is becoming and pursuing something else entirely outside their old comfort zones.

Labels: coronavirus, friends, life, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Sunday, January 31, 2021

4:26 PM | Pinay Vixens

A few days ago, I decided to finally do something about my not having seen a single Russ Meyer movie—and watched three: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! [1966], Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [1970], and The Seven Minutes [1971], the latter as a kind of corrective where you can find Meyer going beyond his usual B-movie schlock of boobs and guns and drugs by actually delving into “serious” stuff: a court case about a book accused of being obscene. I liked it, but it does pale in comparison to his acknowledged masterpieces. One surprise I found regarding Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!—his extravaganza about three go-go dancers making trouble in the desert—is that two of its vixens are of Filipino descent: the glorious Tura Satana [as Varla] is half-Japanese and half-Filipino, and Haji [as Rosie] is Canadian-born of British and Filipino descent.

Pinoy pride? You betcha!

Labels: celebrity, film, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Saturday, July 18, 2020

10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 84

[84th of 100]. If I must remain truthful to this list as a very personal take on movies with impact, I cannot be prudish and excise from it films of more ... salacious fare. Take it from the co-author of Don't Tell Anyone: Literary Smut. It's hard to write sex scenes in fiction well, and I'm sure depicting it for film is even more challenging. Sex in film has always been a fascination -- not just because it makes the pulse race but also because it is so difficult to capture and still make the film ... artistic, that is to say, more than "mere pornography." And yet there are so many good films out there which transgress that line, things like Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses or Peque Gallaga's Scorpio Nights or Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris or Gaspar Noe's Love or Lars Von Trier's Nymphonamiac or Alain Guiraudie's Stranger By the Lake or Frank Ripploh's Taxi zum Klo, all of which are brazen and do not apologise for the explicit or unsimulated copulations they have. And yet they remain undeniably artistic. Maybe its depth, maybe its context, maybe its form informing the show and action of genitalia -- but films of this kind somehow do not make me feel ashamed for wanting to see them, because there is so much more in the film than just a focus on lovemaking. The carnal content becomes a metaphor, and you cannot strip away the boldness of its depictions without marring the intent and the wholeness of the material. They're necessary, in other words. One of my favorite sex films is John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, which revolves around a sexually diverse ensemble of New Yorkers desperate for connection, often meeting in an artistic, sexual salon in Brooklyn, where they make sense of their neuroses while getting their kicks. I love this film, I love specifically the gay threesome in it that involves a spirited rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." It is the most heartfelt film I have ever seen with a lot of sex going on in it, and I do believe it should be on Netflix for everyone to see. Which gave me the idea that beholding frank carnality onscreen does not have to be a clandestine endeavor. It can be enjoyed openly as artistic expression the same way we can't our secret trips to PornHub or alter Twitter. Which brings me to this anime from 2003, rightfully a gay hentai or sexually explicit Japanese animation, with no director to its name but with a writing credit going to Ashika Sakura, a popular [female] Japanese manga writer known for her yaoi and shotacon stories. The film itself is short, only 30 minutes long, and even with that slim running time, it is divided into two episodes. The first part details a developing affair between two manga artists, derailed slightly by rumours of past infidelities -- generally giving us a humorous, romantic story about trust and the irresistibility of pure attraction. The second part gives us a more challenging fare: a college student goes to do his parttime job as a pet-sitter for a rabbit, only to find out that said "pet" is really a naked boy tied up in a closet in an ongoing BDSM game -- and then something clicks between them. Needless to say both episodes contain acts of explicit sex that it can be amusing to see it all displayed in animated form, if not for the genuineness of the surprise and affection we get from the characters. The second episode for example limns a darker and very disturbing side to sexuality, but the unfolding interaction between "pet" and "pet-sitter" shows a complexity I probably would not get if this was a live action film. The sex is indeed hot in this film, but what remains with me are the humanity of the characters of this OVA. It's -- in the long and short of it -- quite unexpectedly sweet and complex, and you don't get to say that about a lot of porn, or even plain ordinary films, out there. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

Labels: cartoons, film, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Monday, November 20, 2017

2:10 AM | A Review of 'Don't Tell Anyone'

Patrick Limcaco of Pat Sessions reviews Don’t Tell Anyone: Literary Smut, and has wonderful recommendations. Link here. Thank you for reading, Patrick!

Labels: books, erotica, philippine literature, queer, review, sex, writers

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Monday, September 18, 2017

5:01 AM | Ian and Kia Tell Dirty Stories

My latest short story collection, DON'T TELL ANYONE: LITERARY SMUT, co-authored with Shakira Andrea Sison, is now out from Anvil Publishing, under its new imprint Pride Press, and should be in National Bookstore soon. Below is the inside cover, featuring the enigmatically hidden face of Albert Saspa, of Hanging Out fame.



And just a little warning: the book's very sexually graphic.

Here's Esquire Philippines' Kristine Fonacier blurb for it: "Smart is sexy. Faced with a collection that calls itself 'literary smut,' it's a real pleasure to be reminded just how true that can be. We're lucky to have arrived at a time when both the realities and our imaginations of sex are being challenged every day, and this collection of stories—with its varied viewpoints, tones, textures—does its part in pushing boundaries and buttons. But is it hot? The reader might ask. This book turns on that most primal of sex organs—the brain. And then it turns on everything else."

Order online!

Labels: books, fiction, philippine literature, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Thursday, June 16, 2016

2:37 PM | Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and All the Pictures to Look At [NSFW]

This is Robert Mapplethorpe's Man in Polyester Suit, a 1980 photo of Milton Moore, the artist's then lover, wearing a three-piece suit with his penis blatantly exposed. It made history for commanding $478,000 at an auction in Sotheby's New York. It is a controversial photographic work for some -- but it doesn't even come close to the rest of Mapplethorpe's body of work, a posthumous exhibition of which prompted Republicans in Congress to demand censorship and threatened to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave the show an exhibition grant. (The entire story of that firecracker that begat the current Culture Wars -- as well as a thorough depiction of the tumultuous life of the artist -- is laid out in the exacting documentary Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.



I like the title of that film, which comes from Senator Jesse Helms' famous rant in Congress, where he was exhorting his colleagues to scrutinise the photographs of Mapplethorpe and call them "pornography," and not art.

Indeed most of the erotically charged photography I love demand very much that everyone should look at the pictures intently, to feel the charge from the sight of mostly naked bodies -- and then see the fine artistry behind it. While there has always been the nude in art, photography has made it all the more immediate (and dangerously so) because of the "realism" that takes away the traditional distance or remove afforded by, say, painting.

The male nude, too, has not exactly been a favourite subject in the curation of many exhibits, for one reason or other. Writer and artist Abigail Ekue once attempted to fill the gap when she put up an exhibit titled Bare Men, and reasoned that the exhibit was important "because we are [already] bombarded with the female nude": "The female nude is considered more acceptable and desired and it is usually thought that the public only wants to view female nudes. But there are people who want to see male nudes and not just for the gay male audience or for strictly anatomical purposes. Male nudes shouldn’t be rare – the stigma that naked men are 'ugly' or the myth that a penis is threatening or only sexual should be dispelled."

Suspicions of perversion may also be a culprit.

In reviewing Pierre Borhan's Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography, a gorgeously illustrated book that is the first of its kind dealing with the subject matter, John Ibson writes: "It is crucial to Borhan, sensibly so, to recall that the earlier photographs were produced when sexual activity between men was widely considered a crime and a sign of mental disorder, while the more recent images were made in a very different cultural climate. In Borhan’s telling, as social scorn and constraints lessened, photographers became increasingly forthright about their own sexual selves, producing correspondingly bolder and more imaginative portrayals of male sexuality."

My first encounter with a photograph that struck me as crackling with such homoerotic charge was in Tokyo in 1997 where I saw an exhibit of the works of Sakiko Nomura and saw this...



It was beautiful and mysterious and sad and sensual: just a monochrome photo of a Japanese man lying naked in bed and holding a cigarette, while his other hand grasps the hand of a companion hidden and blurry in the shadows and background -- yet the blurry figure is distinctly male, and it adds to the homoerotic charge of the narrative.

Since then, I began collecting photographic male nudes/semi-nudes, and these are some of my favourites, by some of the world's finest photographers...



Boris Ignatovitch's The Showers (1935)

  

Andres Serrano's A History of Sex (1997) and Bruce Weber for Calvin Klein (1991)



Greg Gorman's As I See It (2000)



Herb Ritts's Justin Timberlake (2002)



Bardo Wu's Lessons in Body Language (2015)



Giovanni Paolo di Mola's Renaissance Men (2001)

  

Kiu Meireles' "Renan Rocha" from Bedroom (2013) and Joseph Bleu's Patrick Rukai (2010)



Joe Lally's Someone is Watching You in Your Undies (2009)



Benno Thoma's Absolute Sweden (2001)

  

Mark Morrisroe's Collected Works (1959-1989) and Marc Bessange's French Affair (2002)



Neil Lucente and Claudine Sia's Piolo Pascual (2002)

  

Ondrea Barbe's Couple (2009) and David Sprigle's Snap (1999)



Walter Pfeiffer's East of My Youth  (2012)



Terry Richardson for Sisley (2001)


#PrideMonth2016

Labels: erotica, photography, queer, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

7:50 PM | Lustful Literary Men

Eventually you get to the pornography. It must have been both catharsis and shock for me the first time I saw porn -- and how much more the first time I saw the gay variety. All other arguments aside, there is nothing like porn to strip you to your most basic parameters of desire, especially your first encounter with it. Beholding an embodiment of what turns you on is a rush -- and when I was a very young teenager, I remember distinctly a French number in Betamax, labeled very discreetly, my older brother [also gay] had rented from some clandestine shop all the way in Tanjay town, hundreds of kilometres away from where we lived. This gave me then a measure of gay porn's contraband nature: this was not anything you could get from your friendly neighbourhood video store. The video, seen in haste after midnight when everyone else in the family was asleep, sent a shockwave through me. But I'm not here to talk about porn really. I'm here to talk about literary men who just happened to do gay pornography -- and did it in a very groundbreaking way.

The first one is Samuel Morris Steward. I first came across him when The New York Times ["Sexual Outlaw on the Gay Frontier"] reviewed a biography written by Justin Spring, which attempted to exhaust the fascinating -- if slightly iffy -- life led by Mr. Steward, who was -- in various evolutions -- a university professor, a poet and novelist, a tattoo artist, a pornographer, and a consummate cataloguer of his sexual conquests, which included many literary men, including Thornton Wilder, Lord Alfred Douglas (the lover of Oscar Wilde), Thomas Mann, and André Gide. Among his literary mentors included the great Gertrude Stein. He wrote many literary titles, but it is his books of erotica -- written under the name of Phil Andros -- that I actually came to know him best. And I actually read many of the books by Phil Andros -- The Motorcyclist (1953), $tud (1966), The Joy Spot (1969), My Brother, the Hustler (1970), The Boys in Blue (1970), Roman Conquests (1971), Shuttlecock (1972), Below the Belt and Other Stories (1975), Greek Ways (1975), and Different Strokes (1984) -- look before I realised Phil Andros was a pseudonym, and that he was in fact Samuel Steward. A copy of Mr. Spring's book soon came to my possession, and I embarked on devouring its pages -- but I never finished: after a while the sexual escapades -- graphic and relentless -- that peppered the pages of the biography just became a little too predictable and stale, unnerving me of how it made me reach my saturation point so fast that I was plainly bored by all the detailing of every imaginable sexual act possible. Not to say it wasn't fascinating; it was. But like any sort of porn, the first viewing of anything is enough; a repeat is just overstroking it. [It was nominated for the 2010 National Book Award.] Mr. Steward died in 1993.



And then of course there is Scott O'Hara, prince among gay porn stars in the 1980s -- known in the industry as "Spunk" or "The Man With The Biggest Dick in San Francisco" -- came to prominence as a sex performer of such enthusiasm in such flicks as Winner Takes All (1982), California Blue (1983), Ramcharger (1984), Slaves for Sale 2 (1984), The Joys of Self-Abuse (1985), The Other Side Of Aspen 2 (1985), Sgt. Swann's Private Files (1985), Sighs (1985), Advocate Men Live! 1 (1986), Below the Belt (1986), The Guy Next Door (1986), Hung and Horny (1986), Oversized Load (1986), Sex-Hunt (1986), Stick Shift (1986), In Your Wildest Dreams (1987), Switch Hitters 2 (1987), Advocate Men Live! 4 (1988), Double Standards (1988), Head Over Heels 1 (1988), New Recruits (1988), and The Sex Party (1992). But he has always had a literary bent. In a 1999 essay titled "A Dick by Any Other Name", O'Hara once wrote: "I knew from an early age that I was a changeling. I spent the next eighteen years looking for my real name, and since I found it I have not pretended to be anyone else."



When O'Hara was diagnosed with HIV, he decided to move to Wisconsin where he devoted the rest of his life to writing, soon publishing books such as SeXplorers: The Guide to Doing It on the Road, Do It Yourself Piston Polishing (for Non-Mechanics), Autopornography: A Memoir of Life in the Lust Lane, and Rarely Pure and Never Simple: Selected Essays of Scott O'Hara. He also edited and published a quarterly men's sex journal named Steam, as well as the magazine Wilde. He died in 1998. [O'Hara has an interview with Owen Keenen about his autobiography Autopornography (1997) here.]

I've Googled around and it is quite difficult to find any story by Samuel Steward (as Phil Andros) or Scott O'Hara online, and I find that quite sad and surprising. So I'm putting up one erotic story by O'Hara below -- and let me warn you that the content crosses the border quickly from literary to pornographic, right from the very first sentence. But I like this story, if only for the wit it has been composed in, and for giving us a distinct voice from a world we might see a lot in our midnight fidgetings but a world that we nonetheless barely know (or care to know)...


Social Relations

By Scott O’Hara


Fuck. Pull out. Beat it to get it hard again. Re-insert. Fuck. This time after a minute or two, it slips out on its own. Beat it. Re-insert. Fuck. This time the director calls a halt. “Let’s do some dialogue and reaction shots,” he says, wearily. “Then we can get back to this after you’ve had a rest.”

Believe me, the process of shooting a pornflick is nothing like the product.

Tommy and I were actually hitting it off rather well: he was an enthusiastic bottom, and I was in a relatively toppish mood, so my dick had twice managed to achieve that up-curved-banana look that is so riveting to viewers. Nice. Fact is, I think they’d already gotten plenty of useable footage, but directors always want extra to play with. My first director told me they liked to work with a three-to-one ratio—three minutes shot for every one used in the video. Mind you, I’ve seen some of his subsequent videos that looked like they were one-to-one but I understand about ideals not always being the same as results. And hey, I’m a performer. (“Talent,” they try to call us, a term that makes me shudder.) I know how difficult it can be to get useable footage.

So Tommy and I got to relax awhile; when we spontaneously started playing with each other’s tits, the director knew it was time to get back to shooting. And this time, for some reason, I was really into it, I guess, because it felt like we’d initiated the sex ourselves instead of being directed; and my dick got really super-hard, and I managed to plow him from every angle for about twenty minutes before the director finally asked his cameraman, “How much tape do we have left?” A good director always asks that before he tells the performers to give him a cumshot. And there was plenty of tape, so he nodded to us, and we both started working up to shoot our loads. Tommy, as I said, was enthusiastic: he was one of the few bottoms I know who really stayed rockhard during the whole fuck. Didn’t have to beat off or anything. Fact is, he should’ve been a top. So I rolled him over on his back, bent over and went down on him: directors always like that number, and it turns me on, too. And he went wild and stared bucking up and down, fucking himself on my dick and fucking my mouth, and within about thirty seconds he started moaning that he was gonna shoot, and at the appropriate moment I pulled off and let him spray all over his stomach, while I was ramming against his prostate. And then a few seconds later l pulled out and mixed my load with his. Perfect double-cumshot.

And then, while we were still in position, it was time for reaction shots—all those “oh, fuck, yeah” and “aw, shit, I’m gonna come’s!” and grunts and groans and moans and facial contortions, while I’m pretending that my dick is still hard and that I’m still fucking him. And then finally, five minutes later, we could move. I just slumped down on top of Tommy, and kissed him, real deep. He didn’t seem to mind in the least. Far too many of my co-stars, once the work is over, just want to get into the shower and get outta there. Tommy seemed to share my love of the work. I think he was really just doing it because it ensured a steady supply of big dicks up his ass. I can understand the feeling, even though I don’t share his obsession with size.

So we lay there smooching, and got comfortable on the dingy old ripped mattress (we were supposed to be in a back alley somewhere, and there were trash cans on both sides of us), while the techies took down the lights and reflectors and other equipment, moving it all into the next room for another see-up; and we talked. He asked me, curiously enough about my faintly.

“They’re Mormons. Nothing much more to say about them. Haven’t seen them in years. Lots of brothers and sisters, teeming hordes of nephews and nieces. When I told them I was doing porn, Mom told me I was going to hell. And yours?”

“Oh, about as opposite as you can get. My mom collects my videos. Dad died when I was a kid, Mom got a great life-insurance settlement and decided to spend the rest of her life having fun. I swear, every time I go home, she’s got a new young stud hanging around the house. Nowadays, some of them are younger than me. She writes, too. Romance novels.”

This rang a bell, somehow. “Where did you grow up?”

He looked at me funny.

“Southern Illinois. Why?”

“Like, in Cairo, by any chance?” And I pronounced it right: Kay-ro.

“Yeah…”

“I think you lived just a couple blocks from me. You were two years younger, we never saw each other at school, but I remember my mother spewing fire and brimstone about that terrible loose woman down the street, how she ought to have her child taken away from her, all that noise. I guess she never succeeded.”

The light was dawning in his face. “I remember you now! And I remember one summer at the city pool, when you and I were the last ones out of the shower, and you...”

I’d been hoping he’d forgotten that particular episode; I found it a little embarrassing, in retrospect. But he obviously didn’t; he described it in excruciating, and lascivious, detail. Hey, we were—what, maybe nine and eleven? I’d just shot my first load of cum a few months before, and I was eager to show my new-found talent to anyone who I was sure wouldn’t tell my parents. And Tommy (I don’t think I even knew his name, but I’d seen him around, knew where he lived), given his background, seemed like a good candidate. To my surprise, however, he proved way ahead of me. “I always wondered why you never wanted to play with me again, after that.” There was a slightly vulnerable, childlike look on his face, now; I guess I’d penetrated one of his earliest insecurities.

“And I, well, I guess I felt guilty about ‘seducing’ a kid as young as you. I thought about you a lot. But then, you know, we moved West the next summer.”

“Yeah, I know.” Tommy was looking at me with a semi-worshipful gaze, which then turned thoughtful. “Did you ever do anything with Buddy?” Buddy was my younger brother, Tommy’s age in fact, and when I was growing up he was just a pest to me; I never much thought about him even having cock and balls until suddenly, on one of my visits home during my college years, I saw him come out of the shower—I shared his bedroom on these visits. And he was…well, stunning. I didn’t put the make on him or anything. I didn’t have that sort of self-confidence, and he was a butch bruiser who could easily have decked me by that time, but I did spend the rest of the visit watching him pretty closely. And that was the visit, right at the end, when I came out to my family. They weren’t thrilled. They didn’t quite kick me out of the house, but that night they suggested that Buddy go sleep over with one of his friends, and he seemed quite eager to leave. I left early the next morning, and haven’t been back since. I’d like to see what Buddy’s developed into—he’s the only one of my siblings still unmarried, so he probably hasn’t developed a potbelly yet—but I don’t feel tike braving the fires of hell just to find out. I assume he’s away at college somewhere—he was always an intellectual sort—but I don’t know where.

I told all this to Tommy. A smile hit his lips. “You know, I played with him. The same summer you and I met in the showers. We used to meet out behind those sheds, down by the river, and beat off together. And he’s the one who taught me how to suck cock.” Now he was grinning broadly, perhaps at the open look of shock on my face. “Of course, I don’t know if he turned out queer, but he sure liked playing with my dick.”

Suddenly I realized that I was humping my quickly stiffening dick against Tommy’s thigh. A wave of lust surged through me. I kissed him, hard, sucking his tongue into my mouth, and he responded with a moan deep in his throat. I pulled back. “So, get down there and suck his big brother’s dick, cocksucker,” I growled in his face, and pushed his head down.

Tommy was, without a doubt, the most eager cocksucker I’d ever met. He didn’t poke around, licking and kissing and teasing. He dove for the whole banana, taking it right down his throat. Even when, as was the case right now, the dick was too hard to bend down his throat, he still forced it right down there. I suspected he might have sprained it, but at the moment I didn’t care. I just started fucking his throat, holding onto the back of his head and slamming it home. Suddenly I wasn’t exhausted anymore. You’d never think that I’d shot a load just half an hour previously. Imagining him down on his knees, doing this to Buddy—when he and Buddy were just nine years old, yet!—had really awakened something in me that I’d effectively suppressed for years, and suddenly I wanted to plant a load where my brother’s had gone. (Had he been able to shoot yet, I wondered?)

Tommy forestalled me. After a couple of minutes of serious cock-diving, when he was wheezing and gasping and his eyes were running with tears, he pulled off and looked up at me with a half-wild, half-mean expression on his face. Guess I’d aroused something in him, too. “You know, I didn’t just suck Buddy off,” he said, in a knowing way, his voice suddenly huskier, deeper. (Was it so obvious what I was fantasizing? I guess it was.) “I fucked him, too. We had a blanket that we’d spread out on the riverbank, and he’d lie down on his stomach and stick his ass up in the air,” and Tommy was stroking my upstanding dick while he was relating this, and with his other hand he was rubbing my asshole, which suddenly, unexplainably, felt empty, “and I’d lick his asshole until he begged me to put my dick inside him. I bet I shot about fifty loads of cum up his ass that summer. Sometimes I’d shoot twice without stopping.”

I moaned. Yes, he’d hit a mental spot as sensitive as any prostate. Almost without thinking about it, almost without volition, my body heaved itself over, and I was on my stomach; and quick as a flash, Tommy was behind me, with his tongue slathering spit all over my butthole.

Now, being rimmed has never been one of my biggest turn-ons. It’s enjoyable, but it doesn’t send me into the stratosphere, the way it does with some people. But I wasn’t myself any longer: I was my little brother Buddy, that hunky teenager I’d watched for a week as he changed and took showers, until I almost couldn’t stand it any longer. I was that boy, and I’d never felt anything so incredible as this tongue squirming its way up my ass.

In what seemed like no time at all, my asshole was spasming and opening so that Tommy’s tongue was going in with virtually no resistance; that was when he scooted forward and slipped his dick in. And there wasn’t any pain, just the sensation of a space having been finally filled, the other half of the puzzle supplied, the whole joined. The smooth slide of one slippery, spit-covered mucous membrane against another. I swear. I could feel his dick against my heart. And he didn’t fuck, right away: he just lay there, moving in and out a little bit, holding me while I shook with sudden, wracking sobs.

After a few minutes of that, my ass started reacting of its own volition. It began humping up against Tommy, trying to take every millimeter of him, right down to the pubic bone. That’s when his sadistic streak started coming out. He pulled out to the point where just the head was inside my ass, and kept it there. No matter how frantically I pushed back, I couldn’t get any more of him inside. Then, about every ten seconds, when I was clawing the mattress and crying in frustration, he’d slam it balls-deep and grind it for a few moments, flattening me to the mattress, and then pull out again. God, he knew how to make me crazy. And then, while he had me pinned to the mattress, he leaned down next to my ear and whispered, throatily, “This is the way I used to make Buddy crazy,” and slammed it in with that extra-hard hip-twist that rocketed my prostate right into heaven and made my cum start spilling out all over the mattress, even though my dick wasn’t even all the way hard. “And this”—shove—“is the way”—shove—“I shot my cum up Buddy’s butt”—and I could feel his cum-tube pulsing, and he grabbed me in a ferocious bear hug, and for once in my life I was very glad there wasn’t a director leaning over us telling us where to shoot our loads, because from a cinematic viewpoint, we’d clearly fucked up big-time. No cumloads visible. But oh, I liked where we’d left them. I swear I could feel his load swirling around in my guts, practically percolating: all those spermatozoa beating frantically against the walls of my asshole, trying to find someplace fertile.

And we lay there contentedly for another ten minutes (we could still hear the sounds of the next scene being shot in the next room over), kissing and stroking each other and breathing hard; as our heart rates slowly returned to normal, Tommy eventually rolled off me, and I scooted down so I could suckle on his dick. There’s nothing like, for me, the act of sucking on a dick that’s just come out of my ass: sucking the remnants of a cumload out of it, cleaning my own shit off it (What does my shit actually taste like? Although I’ve sucked dozens of dicks after they’ve come out of my ass, I still couldn’t say), letting him know that I really worship his dick, that I appreciate the pleasure it’s just given me. And Tommy was looking down at me with a curious mixture of pride and wonder, and I guess I could have predicted what he said next. “You know, that’s exactly what Buddy used to do after I’d shot a load up his butt. Do you suppose these things run in families?”

“No, not really,” I mumbled around my mouthful of dick. “I just think I know my brother well enough that I knew, subconsciously, just what he’d like. That’s what relations are. People you know better than you want to.”


#PrideMonth2016

Labels: literature, pornography, queer, sex, writers

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Thursday, June 02, 2016

2:37 PM | The Boys From Rizal Street in Wattpad

I've decided to finally utilise my Wattpad account and post a short story from my forthcoming collection of erotic stories, Don't Tell Anyone. The story's titled "The Boys From Rizal Street" and it is very much specific in its use of geography: the main street that cuts across Tanjay, a town north of Dumaguete. The story revolves around a heartbroken guy who painfully recalls three former lovers -- Tobias, Samuel, and Joseph -- who have made it their business to shatter his heart. And then he realises one thing: all of them come from the same stretch of street in the town of Tanjay. It comes in five parts, and while it is slow-going at first, please be warned that the graphic parts are unapologetically pornographic. This story is part of a series of stories I meant to write in the full mode of literate smut.

Here's the link.

#PrideMonth2016

Labels: erotica, fiction, philippine literature, queer, sex, wattpad

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Thursday, May 12, 2016

2:54 PM | Looking at the Pictures

Currently watching Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016). I suddenly remember that back in 2009, a bunch of us -- Raz Salvarita, Kristoffer Ardeña, Q----- P------, and I -- planned to do a very risqué art exhibit. Didn't happen, because sad things happened. Oh, well. I'm not sure Dumaguete was ready for that exhibit anyway.

Labels: art and culture, life, memories, people, photography, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Tuesday, May 03, 2016

11:00 PM | Goodbye, BookSlut

The landmarks of my youth are slowly disappearing, and it's a little jarring. In the early days of the Internet, blogs and ezines were the thing, and slowly I gravitated towards specific sites that catered to my interests. One was Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field's Nerve, founded in 1997, which purported to be a purveyor of literary smut, and by God it delivered with its salacious array of high-brow sex stuff, including erotic fiction by established authors and nude art and photography by up-and-coming artists. The other was Jessa Crispin's Bookslut, founded in 2002, a blog that was a daily and ever-changing compendium of everything bookish and literary. The former has become a shell of its former self, and the latter is now being retired. "The only reason why Bookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it," Crispin admits.

This is why we don't deserve good things.

Vulture has the rest of the story here.

Goodbye, BookSlut. It was fun while it lasted.

Photo by Chuck Kuan

Labels: blogging, books, life, memories, sex, writers

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

8:06 PM | Visual Artist Rianne Dawn Salvarita Wishes to Provoke

Sex in art is not an uncommon thing. Neither is provocation. But there's something almost disturbing and enormously interesting about the latest works, in water-colour of Dumaguete-based Bacolod artist Rianne Dawn Salvarita. "I call this series Mechaniaco, a sensual surreal series. From words mechanical, maniac, mania to coffee, sex, and crazy mechanics."

And all of that shows: all of those words distilled to a series of disembodied sexual automatons in depictions that serve to delight and to perturb. And the water-colour frenzy paints them in delightful tones that subvert the sexual violence inherent in them.

What's the reason behind this series? What's the underlying philosophy behind this? "I've been thinking of the underlying possibilities of manipulating various objects related to human sensuality and taste," Salvarita says. "The human form, I think, also mimics mechanical objects, may it be for practical or aesthetic use. The human form is reduced, deconstructed to serve as the flatform of sacred vessels in the form of practical objects such as coffee plunger, and bird houses, that symbolize purity, beauty, innocence."









Rianne is selling these works for P2,000 each, with three pieces for P5,000 only. You may contact him in Facebook.


Rianne Dawn Salvarita, 35, earned his bachelor in fine arts, major in painting, from La Consolacion College in 2001. His works delve in modernism, surrealism, and the sensual, and primarily use the media of oil on canvas, watercolor, and mixed media. His solo exhibition include De Pictura at the Negros Museum, Bacolod City in 2002, and Metafisical Sandwich, also at the Negros Museum in 2004.

Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, feminism, painting, people, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

GO TO OLDER POSTS