Beginning from the Rear or Ass Demon

After a fraught week, my beautiful friend Maria and I decided to spend a Friday afternoon licking our wounds in the marble womb of the Metropolitan Museum of Art off Central Park. The steps were thronged with tourists. I scooped Maria out of the crowd and arm-n-arm we ascended into the venerable halls of esteemed artists. The cherry on our culture sundae: Michelangelo’s first painting.

The priceless piece, a diminutive copy of a German print titled “St. Anthony Tormented by Demons,” has undergone painstaking, expensive renovations. We slid through the cluster of serious faced admirers, huddling around the painting in a small gallery. The haloed Saint is encircled by demons, brilliantly fish scaled and monsterous; the first kinda looks like it is humping his leg, and the last…

I slid out of the crowd towards the back of the room. Reunited with Maria and whispered aside, “Did you look at that last demon?”

“Oh yah- I looked at that demon three times and thought, ‘oh! he so went there!’”

At which point, we had to leave the room, collapsing in hysterical laughter against each other. Because that last demon can only be described as the Ass Demon, with a winking, gaping pink butthole worthy of all the gay porn in LA.

Perhaps he was just faithfully copying the original print, but I prefer to think he understood the taboo confronting his audience. It’s profoundly satisfying, imagining an adolescent Michelangelo meticulously painting each wrinkle around the anus, cracking himself up with the audacity of it. This is the spirit of the same genius artist who would later defy Church law by secretly dissecting cadavers to learn muscle structure to paint the truth of the human body.

And part of the truth of the human body is a zillion pleasurable nerve endings in all our pink parts, including our assholes. The great equalizer, I believe Tristan Taormino once called it.

Yet the taboo remains, tangled up with fear of gayness for many man and out of bounds, seemingly irrelevant, for many women. Of course, the whole shebang is associated with poop, so it can be literally dirty, which is high on the ookie scale for many folks. The good news, my friends, is that this is nothing a shower cannot remedy, and for the fastidious, enemas.

When the behind has been ignored as a potential erogenous zone, the pleasure from touching, rimming and penetration can take us by surprise. Ladies- spread the good word - it’s not just about the prostrate! Anal play also tends to require a slow hand (or tongue or toy) and a level of relaxing and presence that can be intense in bed.

While there is a lot to be said for normalizing (liberating!) anal sex for the masses, the transgressiveness of the act can be a turn on. Exploring new or disputed territory with a partner makes us vulnerable together, and the trust, gentleness and desire we can show each other through this process…also a big turn on!

So – look to the old masters for inspiration. Begin by looking the ass demon in the eye with Michelangelo then check out some of these excellent resources:

• Luscious, stories of anal eroticism Edited by Alison Tyler Forward by Tristan Taormino
• Anal Pleasure & Health: A Guide for Men and Women by Jack Morin
• Bend Over Boyfriend video by Carol Queen

And add your own to the list, por favor!

PS...the secret is lube lube and more lube.

Laughing At Ourselves is Good For The Soul

Not necessarily known for their sense of humor, it comes as no surprise that a certain cohort of the LGBTQ community, what I call the “HRC Gays”, are up in arms about the movie Bruno. GLAAD teamed up with HRC to cause a shitstorm all over the funniest movie I’ve seen in years.
Because Bruno, a flaming, insensitive, culturally ignorant homosexual character played by actor Sacha Baron Cohen (star of Borat and before that HBO’s Da Ali G Show), interacts with real-life people, the humor is two-fold; you are at once laughing at the silliness of the character, but mostly at how people react to him. Sometimes it takes that extreme of a character to allow people to be overt about their discrimination. Dennis Lim of Slate perfectly summarizes the film’s premise, “Brüno is less a character than a button-pushing social experiment in locating the tipping point of tolerance: How much can he get away with? What does it take to unleash the inner bigot? For his merciless ambushes to work, Brüno needs to be this flamboyant—and this moronic.” The HRC Gays say that the nuanced humor in Bruno is too sophisticated for most people to get. A spokesperson for HRC said, "We strongly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen and Universal Pictures have a responsibility to remind the viewing public right there in the theater that this is intended to expose homophobia."

Like Borat, the plot and story line of Bruno is weak, so much so that it is almost forgettable, but it's no matter because it’s the gags that make Sacha Baron Cohen’s movies. Bruno packs way more punch than Borat, giving audiences more of what they came for.

In one scene, Bruno poses as a casting director for a baby photo shoot. A stage mom agrees to unbelievable things like letting her baby pose as a Nazi, getting crucified on a cross dressed like Jesus and even promises to have her baby loose 10 pounds, even if it means her infant has to have liposuction. These are the people who look like asses in the film and for once in a movie, the butt of the joke is not always the homosexual man.

One photo from the shoot depicts Bruno holding his baby in a hot tub with three naked men. Referring to it, GLAAD said “Scenes like that don't help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children.” In this respect, GLAAD is right. Bruno isn’t even trying to be a movie about helping America understand that gays can assimilate in straight world. Instead, it exposes the rampant homophobia that is ugly and not at all comfortable.

At an extreme fighting match, a rowdy crowd starts throwing chairs and chanting violent threats at Bruno and another character making out in a caged ring. It’s not meant to be funny and none of my fellow audience members laughed, we all winced as one. Bruno was #1 at the box office opening weekend. Even if people came in to laugh at their stereotype of a gay man, they left seeing what gays have to deal with in this country and somehow everyone ends up on his side.