Best Sex Writing 2010 (21 page)

Alongside its crude sexual fantasy, “Fired!” injects the tired gags of
Blondie
with realities that the strip studiously avoided. The lecherous boss held real power in the 1930s, enabled by a lack of sexual harassment laws and economic desperation. And anyone watching Dagwood’s constant firings has to wonder why Blondie tolerates it in such precarious times. Blondie’s aggressive
response to Dithers/Smithers here is much more plausible. Even the Bumsteads’ lascivious appetites seem much more in character when you consider the origins of the strip, which chronicled the adventures of a flapper named Blondie Boopadoop, who loved the dance halls and parties of the 1920s but eventually fell for Dagwood, the dissolute scion of the upper-crust Bumsteads. When the two married, Dagwood’s parents cut him off without a cent for disgracing the family by marrying a working-class trollop.

Dagwood’s humiliation is another common feature of the bibles. They catered to the sexual fears of their readers as much as they did their fantasies, and a common theme is the sexual humiliation or defeat of the protagonist. In “Bigger Yet,” starring “Claudette Coal-Bin,” a delivery boy who’s been lucky enough to get laid by the great movie star gets kicked out on his ass on page eight, his cock still rock hard, when he makes the slip of telling her that his boss is even bigger than he is. In “Chris Crusty VII,” the protagonist winds up getting beaten and robbed when the woman’s husband comes home; the last page shows him telling a flirtatious young woman to “go pound sand up yer ass!!!” In a nasty display of misogyny and anti-Semitism, “Gimme Beck” portrays Geezil, a caricatured Jew from the early Popeye strips, unsatisfied by what he gets for his five dollars from a hooker. In retaliation, he slips his fingers inside her and declares, “Ah dot’s it!! Now listen you bedroom boiglar!! I’m the boss—one finger I got up your ass and my thumb in your cunt—now, give it beck my five bucks or I rip out the partition!”

The history of the Tijuana bibles is largely speculation, the creators unknown. You can say the same about much of comics history, but the bibles were actually illegal, whereas
Superman
and
Millie the Model
were merely disreputable and juvenile. Even the origins of the name are uncertain. The bibles didn’t come
from Mexico, but because many people picked them up in border towns, it could have been the specific reputation of Tijuana for forbidden pleasures, or it could have been outright racism. For whatever reason, the name stuck.

Even though the bibles violated virtually every obscenity law in the United States, that inhibited their production and distribution no more than Prohibition kept Americans from getting ahold of gin. Between seven hundred and one thousand titles were published from the ’30s to the ’50s. In
The Tijuana Bibles: America’s Forgotten Comic Strips,
comic historian R. C. Harvey cites a 1992 paper by Robert Gluckson that estimated that in 1939 alone, three hundred titles were produced with a total of three million copies. “Other sources,” Harvey writes, “say twenty million copies were produced yearly by the end of the decade.” Whatever the numbers say, though, they’re just broad guesses. The artists, printers, and distributors took great pains not to leave records of how much and what they produced.

The term
underground
has pretty much been diminished to a marketing gimmick to make middle-class consumers feel transgressive. In the days of the Tijuana bibles, though, underground networks were the only way to buy or sell them without legal consequences. Harvey describes the course taken by the bibles as “drawn in attics, printed in garages on cantankerous machinery, and distributed surreptitiously from the back pockets of shady vendors in alleyways and in dimly lit rooms.” Occasionally, organized crime was involved in the manufacture and distribution, but even at their height, no mobster was going to become a major player by selling twenty-five-cent fuck books. Despite the mass quantity that Gluckson and others estimate, selling bibles was a small-time racket.

The names of the creators have been almost entirely lost to
history. One of the few exceptions to this rule was dubbed “Mr. Prolific” by Donald H. Gilmore in his work
Sex in Comics.
The prophetically named sexologist Gershon Legman eventually identified Mr. Prolific as “Doc” Rankin, a World War I veteran who worked for Larch Publications, a publisher of girlie cartoons and dirty joke books, in the 1930s. Art Spiegelman unabashedly praised Rankin’s work as he would a respected colleague in the introduction to Bob Adelman’s anthology
Tijuana Bibles:
“He was not only the seminal influence on the genre, he was by far its most competent draftsman, drawing credible likenesses in complex entangled poses with graceful steel-pen strokes. This guy was good enough to earn an honest living had he so desired. Visibly enjoying his work, he offered good value, often adding extra gags and caricatures in frames inside the frames.”

Spiegelman assigns a moniker of his own to one of the post-War artists: Mr. Dyslexic. Spiegelman’s judgment of Mr. Dyslexic is as harsh and merciless as his praise of Rankin is effusive: “He has no sense of left-to-right narrative progression and is constantly placing his figures or his balloons (and sometimes both) out of sequence. By hidden example he teaches the hidden difficulties of the cartoonist’s craft. He can’t draw even rudimen-tarily well, certainly can’t spell, and holds for me as a working cartoonist the same fascination a really nasty car accident might hold for a bus driver.” Mr. Dyslexic’s failings as an artist are visible even to an untrained eye, and while he certainly deserves every iota of wrath that Spiegelman calls down upon him, it has to be said that his work never reached the depths of incompetence shown in “Fired!” One of his works, “Chambers and Hiss in Betrayed,” is fascinating for the way it blends obscenity with Cold War paranoia. The 1948 Chambers-Hiss case remains one of the most contentious and emblematic of post-War political divisions.
Whittaker Chambers, a Communist Party member, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that State Department official Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union (and to an extent, even today), whether you believed Hiss or Chambers was seen as representing where you stood on broader issues. Mr. Dyslexic explains Chambers and Hiss by imagining a sexual affair between the two. Hiss unforgivably betrays his lover with a woman, leading Chambers to turn Hiss over to the Feds. “I’ll not have him,” Chambers says as Hiss is led away in cuffs, “but neither will any woman.”

 

 

It’s Friday night, and I’m headed to the East Side Club, one of the last two remaining gay bathhouses in New York City.

Ostensibly a relaxation and social club for gay and bisexual men, it’s located on two floors of a nondescript office building on East 58th Street. I take an elevator to the sixth floor and wait behind a thick, Plexiglas window in a dark cell of a foyer, reminiscent of a vintage, blue movie theater box office. Posters for events such as the International Mr. Leather Contest, prominently featuring half-naked men, line the walls.

After a few moments, the manager buzzes me in through a small door. I am immediately overcome by a smell of chlorine, industrial-strength disinfectant, locker-room funk and poppers.

A labyrinth of interconnecting dark hallways is lined on either side with innumerable clapboard rooms. Each room contains a twin-sized cot, a hook for hanging your clothes and a table with a
couple of condoms and a packet of lube. But whether anyone will be using the provided protection is anyone’s guess.

The lights in each room are on a dimmer but, as none of the rooms have ceilings, ambient light and noise easily spill over from the hallway. It’s here in the hallway that I meet Rubin.

A slim, youthful-looking Filipino, Rubin’s soft, delicate features belie the fact that he’s actually thirty-seven years old. He blushes when he admits that, in sexual trysts, he often lets men his own age believe that he’s many years their junior.

When I question him, he explains to me that he had been getting tested regularly for HIV every six months since coming out at age twenty and moving to New York City. Those tests stopped two years ago, however, after a night of heavy drinking when he had “bareback” sex with his best friend of fourteen years, an HIV-positive man.

Bareback sex is a popular and, in its implied rebellion, erotic term within the gay community for sex without a condom. Rubin has been vaguely unsettled by that high-risk incident and does not talk about HIV status with the men he hooks up with. He knows he could have sought HIV testing and counseling if he had really wanted to, but part of what has stood in the way is his shame.

“I’m afraid that people will tell me I should have known better,” he explains, casting his soft, brown eyes toward the ground. “That I did this to myself. I just don’t want to hear that.”

Tonight, Rubin has decided to get an HIV test. He’s getting it here, in the middle of a sex club. Wearing nothing but a towel, he chats with me after having had his blood drawn.

“I don’t think these people are judging me,” he says of Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the Men’s Sexual Health Project (MSHP, pronounced “Em-Ship”), the diagnostic center inside the club where the testing is administered. “I mean, how could
they? Look where we are. And besides, he’s cute,” Rubin says of Mike Dreyden, the porn star who’s promoting tonight’s testing. “I’ve never met a porn star before,” he admits. “And I want the DVD.” In addition to raffling off his latest release (the proceeds go to MSHP), Dreyden is giving away a free DVD sampler of porn previews to anyone who gets tested.

It’s been more than twenty-five years since the publication of Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen’s brochure, “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” introduced the notion of “safe sex.” Most gay men know the message by now, but the safe-sex rhetoric no longer seems to be working. At least it’s no longer producing the intended behavior. In fact, it may be producing a whole slew of new behaviors that work to defeat the message.

The fact that sex without condoms feels better—both physically and often emotionally—is an intense temptation. Many gay men—in fact, most men, regardless of sexual preference—want to have sex without condoms and, sooner or later, most do.

Recently released reports from both the CDC in Atlanta and the New York City Department of Health confirm that new HIV infection rates are rising dramatically in certain key demographics, particularly in young men (in their teens and twenties) and men of color, both locally and nationally, even as overall rates are in decline. And those numbers don’t take into account the infected and at-risk individuals who aren’t getting tested or counseled. Additionally, other sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis, which were once almost wiped out are now on the rise again—a sign of risky behaviors.

The safe-sex message was born at a time of crisis when HIV was a literal death sentence. Since then, radical changes in disease treatment have (hopefully and optimistically) turned HIV into a chronic, rather than fatal, condition. An entire generation of sexually
active young men now exists that wasn’t even in existence when the crisis was at its peak. Plus, legions of men who have practiced using condoms for most of their lives are beginning to seriously wonder what they’ve been missing.

One of the least-discussed developments is the fact that some men live a lifestyle where they not only prefer, but insist upon, sex without condoms. And now some of these “barebackers” have started calling bareback sex “natural sex,” implying that it is the safe sexers who are engaged in unnatural behavior by wearing condoms.

The only response we have to these developments, however, is the same, tired message: safe sex. The implied judgment of that message is that smart people always use a condom and so those who choose not to, for whatever reason, likely feel shame.

Dr. Daskalakis, who received specialized medical training on HIV in Boston, at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, before founding MSHP in 2006, concedes that shame is a big part of why it’s so difficult for us to talk about sex.

“I love working with commercial sex venues, and would never say anything bad about them,” he says. “But why do they exist? One reason is that people think it’s hot to have sex with a lot of people in one place. The other reason I think, frankly, is shame. I feel like the way that we push sex—gay sex in particular, and unprotected gay sex especially—into this place of badness, whether it’s pathologized because of HIV and STDs, or pathologized because of some moral majority, I think what that automatically creates is shame and the need to hide what you’re doing. I feel like shame is still a major part of what is going on in the community.”

The shame implied by the safe-sex message makes it difficult for HIV-positive people to disclose their status or to talk openly and honestly about their medical challenges.

Dr. Richard Greene, a frequent volunteer with MSHP, tells of a med school student in his twenties who called him after a sexual encounter with a man who revealed his HIV-positive status afterward. The young student was shaken and wanted Dr. Greene’s advice as to when or how or if to inquire about HIV in regard to having sex. “And this is a med school student,” says Dr. Greene. “How is the average guy supposed to know how to deal with this?”

It’s 9:00 p.m. on a Friday, still relatively early by bathhouse standards. Nevertheless, approximately five dozen men—of various shapes and sizes, skin color and ages (a good portion of whom appear to be in their fifties and sixties)—draped only in towels, walk back and forth in a never-ending, circuitous parade.

It’s a solemn ritual whereby potential sexual partners scope each other out and express and deflect interest by the subtlest of gestures: a quick nod, a knowing glance, a grab of the crotch or briskly brushing up against one another.