Good Vibrations Magazine

This all started a few years back.

I travel a lot. A lot. I was in India, of all places. Out on the outskirts of Delhi, there’s a place called Humayun’s Tomb, kind of a precursor to the Taj Mahal, a big Moslem mausoleum with an immense domed interior, imposing, maybe even a bit creepy. It’s also not a big tourist destination, kind of in the middle of nowhere, and one spring afternoon I found myself all alone in this huge old place. I looked up, surrounded by the past, the presence of death, of history and… well, I just got horny, intensely horny. I looked out a doorway, across the garden — nobody coming.

I unzipped my pants and pulled out my cock, which was already half-hard. Now, I’m sure if some mullah somewhere is reading this story, he’s getting righteously pissed off, so let me say right here that no sacrilege was intended. And even if it were, hey, I’m an equal-opportunity offender; when I was going to Berkeley, I had sex in a church pew, though it was a Unitarian Church, so maybe that doesn’t count.

Anyway, I stood there and beat off in the immensity of the place, no sound but the cawing of ravens in the warm distance. It didn’t take me long. Staring up into the architectural void, my muscles tightened, hips thrust forward — I had one of the most intense orgasms of my life, my jizz spewing across the geometries of the inlaid floor, shattering the order of a perfectly arranged universe. I licked off my hand, stuffed my dick back in my pants, and took a few snapshots.

The next time I did something like that, it was somewhere very far from Delhi in the spring. I was in St. Louis in the middle of a pelting rainstorm, driving a friend’s old Ford Festiva cross-country — don’t ask — when the car broke down in the caffeinated middle of the night, on a deserted street right near the Gateway Arch. It was pissing down rain, blurring the sharp steel profile of the floodlit parabola. I’d never been to Saint Louis before, in fact, had never been to Missouri, and I had no idea of what I was going to do, not at 3 am. And I was, decisively, horny. At first I sat there, the still-alive radio blaring out some banal ’80s oldie, my hand working my dick through my jeans. Then I figured what the hell and pulled out my cock. Staring up at Saarinen’s great, meaningless curve, I wondered if I was somehow queer for arches and domes, a parabola fetishist. Whatever. I got out of the car, my hard, slightly curved, and, if I do say so myself, impressive dick throbbing.

I stood facing the Festiva, so if any other damp, unfortunate soul happened by, he’d probably mistake me for a drunk taking a piss. I stared upward to the crest of the immense Arch. Cold rain soaking most all of me, I clamped down hard on my dick, squeezing and pulling at it, forcing it further and further away from Saint Louis and closer and closer toward the point of no return. My eyes lost focus, my mouth filled with rain, and my sperm, one more liquid amidst the storm, flew in mini-arcs onto the white Festiva, where it was washed, presumably, into the gutter, maybe to eventually join the timeless flow of the mighty Mississippi. Or else headed, who knows, to some purification plant, perhaps winding up in the drinking glass of some adamant Republican.

My parabola-equals-lust theory was put to the test some six months later in Paris, when I’d finally dried out from that night in St. Louis. I got up just before dawn and made my way to the Place du Trocadéro, just across the Seine from one of the greatest phallic erections of modern man, the Eiffel Tower. I was gratified to note that my dick responded equally well to another sort of architecture. There wasn’t a gendarme in sight. With the help of my camera’s auto-timer, I was able to document myself shooting my nut in front of Monsieur Eiffel’s masterwork.

Now there was no stopping me. I managed to engage in sneaky self-abuse wherever I went. The Colossi of Memnon in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. The dungeon of a Crusaders’ castle. Chichén Itzá. In San Francisco, on the way back from a trip to the Golden Gate Bridge, I beat off in the near-empty last car of a subway train, though the thrill was squelched when I realized that two other guys in the car were doing exactly the same thing.

And I documented each cumshot with a self-timed photo, which I then put up on a Website that began getting an inordinate number of hits. Somebody even started a jealous rumor that the shots were Photoshopped fakes. They’re not, of course. I just happen to have a job that takes me all over the world. And a hyperactive libido.

I was spending a week in New York. To celebrate the freedom of the flesh, I thought, a trip to Lady Liberty was in order. I got up bright and early and headed down to the tip of Manhattan, catching the very first boat to Liberty Island. When the ferry docked, I sprinted to the Statue’s entrance, despite the admonitions of the Park Police, and was the first visitor to arrive at the gate. A backpack check — no bomb — was followed by an elevator ride part-way up, then the endless, nauseatingly spiralling stairs that led to the crown of the Lady With the Torch. I’d been in training, so I fairly flew up the stairs, upward through the narrowing torso, all the way to the top. I’d left all the other tourists far behind me, their fading footsteps almost inaudible. I had a few precious minutes all to myself. After barely glancing through the surprisingly small windows toward the skyline of Manhattan, I found a place to set up my camera, pushed the self-timer button, spit in my hand, and, calf muscles screaming, got to work. I stroked my anxious hard-on for all its pleasure-soaked nerves were worth, but I didn’t, damn it, have time to unleash my huddled spermatozoa yearning to breathe free. Tourists’ multilingual voices had been coming steadily closer. And closer still. The camera clicked, and I managed to put away my dick just moments before two fairly homely German guys in their twenties struggled up the final flight of stairs. I’d worn a loose jacket to cover the evidence, and so, as the small space in the crown quickly grew more crowded, I headed back down. Mission accomplished.

I was in the Statue’s Museum, next to a mockup of the Lady’s gigantic sandal-clad foot, when it happened. Three uniformed National Park Police came up to me, and asked me to come this way please, sir.

Okay, how the hell was I to know that the Statue’s insides were under constant video surveillance? Listen, it’s not like I’m some Third World terrorist bent on bombing the Statue of Liberty into copper smithereens. It’s not even like they said it was, that I committed an obscene act. I mean, I’m an artist, and jacking off is part of my art, a vital part, and what the fuck’s “obscenity,” anyway?

I guess they expected me to plead guilty and skulk off, but listen, it’s been centuries since the Puritans landed here, bringing their damn puritanical ways with them, and enough is enough. So I told them I wanted a lawyer, which is why you’re here, and now there’s just one thing I want to know.

Do you think you can get me off?

Simon Sheppard is the coeditor of Rough Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power and author of the forthcoming collection Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories (Alyson, 2001).