Erotic pleasure between males –
a totally natural, instinctive, magical thing
(that has been going on since humanity’s beginning) –
became a taboo in the Greco-Roman warrior age
and under Father religions it became a sin.
.
For centuries the Church said sodomy was one of the worst sins,
and associated it with sorcery and heresy;
then in medieval times, seizing powers previously ecclesiastical,
governments made sodomy into a crime
for which the penalty could be death
or a spell in the gaol or stocks, hard labour and public humiliation…
.
Preachers and puritans railed against bum sex for centuries
and the population bought their lies
so that by the 18th century those homosexually inclined – were the most despised.
Late 19th century, the new science psychology
declared same sex attraction to be a sickness
and set out to analyse and cure us…
…and just as we were rejecting all those stories,
in the 1970s,
in the early days of Gay Liberation,
AIDS came along
and now anal sex could kill us.
.
Fucking went out of fashion.
Safer Sex became the game,
condoms were for many a killer of passion:
Fear stalked the scene in my early gay days.
But the queers got organised in the years of the plague.
Then from the late 1990s, thanks to miracle medication,
gay men stopped dying, I am one of the survivors.
We gradually left those dark dying times behind
and at the same time did we also somehow
let go of sin and shame, of fear?
For the world since then has become ever more queer.
Was AIDS our purification by fire?
No more seen as sin or crime or sickness can
same sex love can at last fly higher?
AIDS opened people’s hearts, queer activism changed society’s minds
gay men formed a global community with others of our kind:
the Ls, the Ts and Bs – all the outsiders of the hetero-patriarchal tyranny!
All standing up for our right to be free, our right to love and live authentically!
.
The 21st century brought
Pep/Prep and undetectable viral loads:
after two decades the fear of AIDS vanished,
just as we entered the very new age of the cruising app…
suddenly sluttery came back into fashion.
No more need to cruise in the parks, the bars, the saunas
now we can also cruise at home.
Every bedroom becomes a back room
in the age of the dating app,
where no-one is policing the drugs we indulge,
the games we play, the risks we take.
And now it seems
in the post AIDS era,
on the gay sex scene
the fear has gone, the shame released or repressed or denied
and it seems
EVERYBODY WANTS TO GET FUCKED.
.
Booty galore arrives unprompted in my grindr inbox
Fantastic butts and gaping gateways to the heaven inside.
No more fear of god’s condemnation
no more fear of society’s excoriation
nor of the law’s harsh hand:
bum sex is liberated
across the land.
We’re living in the Age of The Proud Bottom.
.
The secret is out. The male prostate is heaven’s gate.
No more shame or denial. We want to have it all.
The potency of the anal chakra, so long suppressed, calls!
.
I see some gay men celebrating and others denigrating our promiscuous hook up culture
but do they reflect just how amazing it is, when we look at history,
that we now have this freedom to play, to fuck, to love?
Considering the history of the last 1000 years this freedom may never have come.
So let’s ask,
What does promiscuity teach us?
.
After 40 years on the London gay sex scene
I see men pursuing their dreams,
reclaiming pleasure as a human right
and erotic connection man to man as a divine rite.
I see interracial pleasures, a brotherhood of lust
where yes there’s dangers but there’s also trust.
Men who’d rather cuddle, kiss and fuck than fight other men
or dominate and control women
is a fucking good thing.
.
The sexual underworld is still a secret playspace, that the world can ignore,
a hidden zone erotic with surprises in store for those who explore:
For some the road of excess does lead to the palace of wisdom.
Sex is the great leveller, said Edward Carpenter.
Stripped bare we are all beautiful and vulnerable,
we all have the same kind of desires and dreams,
we all need intimacy, we all need to be known.
We learn that we’re all each other’s mirrors,
all seeking the connection
through which we can better know, and enjoy being, ourselves
and although mostly we know it not, we’re
all out there seeking to feel, know and heal
our disconnect from the cosmic Self:
I only worked that out after finding the reconnection!
Love was never meant to be constrained
In a paired up, coupledom only game
Love is for everybody.
Sex was never meant to be
Condemned as sin, as shame.
Love is designed to flow
Within, between, above, below.
Love connects us to the bliss divine
Reveals the light of the cosmic design.
“Sex is Natural, Sex is Good,
Not Everybody Does It, but Everybody Should.”
Open your arse and your mind may follow.
The male prostate no longer denied,
rediscovered as the way to the heaven inside.
Pleasure is our human right/rite divine.
The Age of the Proud Bottom.
rainbow messenger 