YOU SAY "TAGAME", I SAY "TAGAME"...

It would be grossly unfair to lay everything at the door of poor Tom of Finland. After all, the same winter of my return to the Big City when I freaked out at finding myself in the "Muscle Academy", I also opened a book of Mapplethorpe photographs and found myself deafened by the pounding of my own blood — especially at the picture of the erect black penis snaking out of the zipper of the light gray suit trousers... It was just a rough winter for my self-esteem. The early church used to refer to lapsed Christians, particularly Jewish Christians who fell away, as “dogs returning to their own vomit”; well, I began to think the shoe fit pretty well.

The internet now makes it possible to access all of this in the privacy and comfort of your own home, especially if you and your spouse do not share a computer [an arrangement I recommend for obvious and not particularly praiseworthy reasons]. We only recently acquired a broadband connection, so for the last year or so I have spent countless hours waiting for pictures of nude men to load. That speaks for itself, but also of a certain desperation. Is there anything more ridiculous than sitting WATCHING a file download? Unless it’s watching a fax come through, which I have also been known to do... I have also spent hours cataloguing pictures various ways, getting rid of all the folders and lumping everything together, getting it off the computer by loading everything onto a CD, and finally throwing the CD away. Only to start all over again.

One link leads to another, and one night at about ten or eleven I wound up at Gengoroh Tagame's site. To make a long story short, I was up all night [some people say that one way to short-circuit depression is to stay up for 24 hours and force the circadian clock to restart...]. Well, I have no idea what my clock was up to the following morning, but I do know that I had had a revelation as unsettling as my first encounter with Uncle Tom, who suddenly began to seem quaintly old-fashioned, practically pure vanilla, now that I was confronting compelling [and beautiful] art in which hot wax melting onto body hair was the least upsetting thing that happened to anybody. Slaves were auctioned off, soldiers penetrated themselves with mortar shells, musclemen were bound and delivered to threatened and certainly unpleasant ends, and various innocent-looking bearded by-standers were subject to just about every variation on humiliating and painful manipulation and penetration you can imagine. [Well, maybe your imaginations are richer than mine; it was plenty broad for me.] Tagame even composes short videos, including one in which his hero is mounted by what looks like a strapping Labrador retriever with insecure footing. He is however, incredibly generous, and includes links to and posts of other “G-men” magazine artists on his site, all of which exposed another little bit of myself. To myself. I realize that I am a niche market so vanishingly small as to be invisible even in Whoville, but I couldn’t help thinking that somebody could make a fortune putting the art and the English language together, even if the marketing had to be online or viral...

Then there is Fleshbot, which pointed me in many directions, including Greasetank and Blue Blazes; I can’t claim that I wasn’t warned, but here I found that while everything I had seen so far might all form one continuum [something I was beginning to find inescapably obvious], I was also beginning to find the limits to my willingness to confront what I supposedly needed to know. GT and BB established some of those limits [piss and shit except as humor, torture even as fantasy beyond a point I can’t determine absolutely, and death as sexual -- no, death, period].The thing that puzzled me is that there are artists whose work continued to speak to me on some [aesthetic? reptile?] level even after it began to fundamentally creep me out. Greasetank is certainly one of those; dealing with him made me realize how much fear of violence had ruled my head and my life, and that there might be a way of dealing with it other than running away from it. Now, as a weakling, I have long realized that my fantasies revolve around power, both having it [not bloody likely] and succumbing to it.

And this leads me to another not very “settling” thought: this is where I was at ten years old. Now does that mean that I never really progressed beyond that age in my inner core, or that I have preserved it at the core in spite of everything else that should have put in perspective? I guess I should have known when I woke up in my first day in the college library stacks in the “Torture” section, that some things don’t go away. But the reality of what was being discussed was overwhelming and disgusting — all the more so because I could see that on some level it was being presented as entertainment, or I was seeking it that way. So there were, well, limits, and I thought I could stick to them. But then you realize that limits don’t abolish what lies across the line... Much of the other CG art on the web led me to another end of my tolerance: twinks. I’m just not interested, and that probably has everything to do with the fact that I wuz one. Not consciously, of course, and I would have had no idea what the word “twink” meant, though “androgyne” as a three-syllable word you only find in books, was well-known to me --- but I don’t even want to look at anything that contains them.
Put that in your self-esteem pipe and smoke it.

I think that the evolution of Tom of Finland’s art makes clear what’s going on. He started out showing what seemed clearly autobiographical boy/man scenarios, but over time the twinks morphed, grew, and came to resemble their partners. Now whether this reflected the mania for muscle in the leather world or set it in motion, or is really all about how no one you want will want you unless you can prove you’re as much [half] a man as he is, I have no idea, but it still seems striking. [Tagame usually features either young people together or older men together, and as far as I have seen, never the twain shall meet...] And then you have the dichotomy of the outward display of impossible flesh with the signs of inner vulnerability, softness... all the hallmarks of what I respond to: FINALLY, someone weaker than I am! although of course it wouldn’t hurt if he managed to look like a Mac truck at the same time. I distinctly remember the dark moment in which I finally admitted to myself that what I really wanted was a mating of armored tanks, and I would settle for watching, if I could not participate as a tank. There is no such thing outside the CG realm, of course; even the most muscle-bound men are still flesh, and even in the most carefully pruned, prepared, and positioned porn, things that should be “steel” are seen to flex, jiggle and bend in ways that are profoundly human. I suppose we can be grateful for that...

Well, this is probably more than anybody wants to know, but I had to say it once – admitting the truth, to myself, to a few, eventually to more than a few, is what this process is all about. I will try to keep my mind a little further out of the gutter in future. But at least you know what gutter I am speaking from, and that may help frame the discourse, should any in fact arise...
Stay well out there.
Pray for me.