Now, about Krzysztof. I met him at a so-so bar one Tuesday night. We decided to go back to his place. He was Polish, had actually come from Poland, still had an nice accent, had that fine-boned look some Polish guys have and light blond hair that, unstylishly, touched his shoulders.

“Nice car,” he said as he climbed into my Jaguar.

“I bought it used.”

“It’s still nice,” he said. I looked over at him. Now that we were outside the bar, he looked a little shabby around the edges.

“You sure going over to your place is a good idea?”

“Sure. I have a roommate, but he won’t mind.”

When we got to his apartment building, in a marginal part of town that left me worried about parking the Jag, his roommate was awake, padding around in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He was good-looking, but not as handsome as Krzysztof.

“Hey,” the roommate said.

“Hi,” said my date. “Rick, this is… sorry, I forgot your name.”

I lied, figuring I could backtrack later.

Krzysztof’s room was monastically bare. Not messy, not dirty, just bare, nothing on the walls but a plain wooden crucifix. A mattress on the floor. Some of those candles in glass holders decorated with pictures of Jesus and the saints, which Krzysztof went around lighting. A pile of books in one corner, next to a small CD player. An open closet with a handful of clothes on hangers.

“I have to take a pee,” Krzysztof said. “Be right back.” He closed the door behind himself.

I picked up one of the books. The poems of Saint John of the Cross. Not the kind of thing I’d find in most of my tricks’ rooms. I opened it up, and Krzysztof’s name was written on a bookplate inside. So that’s how you spell it, I thought.

The door opened. “Back,” Krzysztof said. He was already pulling off his shirt. Even in the candlelight, I could see how pale he was. There was a flurry of golden-brown hair on his lean chest, a little thicket between large nipples. He never took his eyes off me as he unbuttoned his pants and let them fall to the floor. His briefs had a couple of holes in them. My dick leapt to attention. I put the book down.

Krzysztof walked over to me and dropped to his knees, rubbing his face hard against my crotch, gnawing at my stiff cock thorough my pants. I grabbed a handful of his candlelight-blond hair and pushed his head into me. He whimpered and squirmed.

“Unzip my fly,” I said. He did. “Take my dick out.”

“Can I suck it?”

“Not yet. Stand up.”

Krzysztof rose to his feet. His torn-up briefs were stretched by his hard-on, the distended holes revealing the pallor of a hip, a flurry of honeyish pubic hair.

“Now turn around.” The rest of him was slim, but his ass was perfectly formed, curves and masses beneath the white cotton briefs. There was a rip in the fabric, running halfway down his butt, exposing part of his crack. I went over to him and laid my hand on his ass and he shivered slightly. I grabbed hold of the cloth with both hands and pulled hard, till his briefs gave way with a rip. He trembled even more.

His ass was pale as milk, smooth as silk, beautiful. Most of his body might have verged on the scrawny, but his butt was astonishing. At the top of the cleft there was a dark tone to his skin, bruiselike, the kind of thing you sometimes see with very pale guys. I ran my fingers over the spot, then down into the crack. He shifted, relaxing so I could slide my fingertips over the moist heat of his hole.

“Okay,” I said. “Get down on the bed, on your belly. Keep what’s left of those briefs on.”

“Yes,” he said, lying down, looking expectant, nervous.

“Untie my boots,” I said, standing on the mattress to either side of his head. He squirmed around and untied the laces, then pulled my shoes off. He kissed my right foot.

“Now get your butt in the air.”

The shreds of white cotton fell away, exposing even whiter ass cheeks which, slightly parted, revealed a trail of dark blond hair. I reached down and spread his ass. His hole was perfectly shaped, clean pink nested in a halo of cinnamon-colored fur, and I wanted it.

“Can I turn on music? My roommate…”

“Sure.”

He reached over and hit the button on the player. The chanting of medieval nuns. Unbelievable.

There was so much I could have done with Krzysztof. I could have fucked his mouth, his ass, from the looks of things I could have tied him up and beaten him. I could have shown the weedy fucker what a truly demanding top I could be. I didn’t, though. I knew then, with the certainty of damnation, that I was going to eat out Krzysztof’s ass. His ass. My mouth. Magic. Poison.

I breathed in. Slightly musty but clean.

“What?”

Krzysztof repeated himself. “Yes, please,” he said.

The nuns chanted away about salvation or something. I dove face-first into the Eye of God, started at the bruise-dark beginnings of his crack, tonguing flesh against bone, then lower, towards darkness. My spit matted down the hair. Lower. Lower. Toward the heat. My tongue brushed, just brushed, the soft pucker of flesh, then moved down to the ridge between his furry blond upper thighs, to the base of his balls, my chin resting against the baby-soft sac, the smell of his asshole sweet in my nostrils.

This time I understood what he was muttering into his pillow: “Yes yes yes.” I pulled his perfect asscheeks apart and looked down at the now-shiny hole nestled in swirls of damp hair. A hole that led to Krzysztof’s guts, to his shit, his heart, his soul, his essence. An Easter egg. Gobble it down.

I spit on my forefinger, rubbed it tentatively around the damp hole, pushed in slightly, met initial resistance, then welcome. I sank in to the first knuckle, pulled my finger out, sniffed at it, sucked at my fingertip. My passion. His asshole was my passion. I lowered myself to his butt and stuck my tongue in. Krzysztof sighed and pushed his ass up at me. I burrowed deeper, tasting the brink of his insides, wanting to go further, to commit myself utterly to him, to eat my way to wherever he truly was, whoever he was. Krzysztof.

The door opened. The roommate. I gave him a sidelong look, then I backed off and spread the pale asscheeks so he could see where I’d been. The hole was wide now, shiny, engorged. Licking, kissing, sucking, I dove back inside Krzysztof.

I hadn’t thought of my dick for what seemed like a long time. Why would I, when it was my tongue, my heedless, hungry mouth that connected me with the risky blond boy lying askew on his barren bed? But now I realized that I’d been leaking precum like a motherfucker, that my cock was slimy-slick inside my pants.

I reared back, kneeling, and brought my hand down hard on Krzysztof’s ass. I didn’t want to hurt him; I’m not a sadist. I just wanted to leave my mark on him, the way he was leaving his mark on me, the way I could smell his asshole on my upper lip. The angry-pink print of my hand rose on his very pale flesh, tearing with unexpected ferocity at my heart. I bent over and kissed the mark I’d left, then spread his cheeks and trailed my tongue again towards Krzysztof’s musky hole.

“Let me get on my back,” he said.

While he rolled over, I looked up at the roommate. Rick. The guy was just standing there, not even touching the hard-on that bulged inside his jeans. I didn’t know if he was waiting to be asked to join in or what. I didn’t even know whether he was Krzysztof’s boyfriend.

“Leave, please,” I said. He didn’t. I was in no mood to argue with him.

Krzysztof was on his back now, knees up to his chest, his arms looped around his bent legs, ass stretched, open, his hole wet, exposed, his dick stiff against his lean, hairy belly. Nice dick, uncut, dripping, but it was his ass I wanted, needed. I lay on the floor and licked at his asshole, which quivered, responded, opened even wider for my mouth. My tongue strained to go up inside him, as far as I could go. It was all that mattered. I reached up and spread his hole with my thumbs. I had to taste Krzysztof, devour him, be devoured by him, his ass, my desire for him, for his hole, for Krzysztof’s ass. The nuns had stopped singing.

“Oh fuck!” said Krzysztof, as I lay there shooting my tongue in and out, flicking it against his secret flesh.

“Have fun,” the roommate or boyfriend or whoever said, shutting the door behind himself with a small slam. Whatever. I took my mouth off the deep, dark abyss and looked up, across dick and belly and chest, at Krzysztof’s beautiful, blissed-out face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, and nothing was. Nothing at all, not in the whole world, a world that smelled like Krzysztof’s ass, a world that was Krzysztof’s ass, a world that was heaven, pure heaven.

He said, “I need to come soon.”

“I want you to sit on my face,” I said.

“I can do that.”

I tugged off my shirt, pulled my pants down to mid-thigh, scooted onto the mattress and lay on my back. Krzysztof straddled me and squatted down, his butt just inches from my face. I marveled at his ass, its curves, its pallor, even the one small blemish on the left cheek. That blemish made him human; otherwise the perfection of it would have been too much, would have maybe made me cry.

I inhaled his smell again, then stuck out my tongue. He lowered himself onto my mouth and I gobbled at him, starving. I could tell he was jacking himself off; as waves of pleasure rolled through his body, his asshole tightened and expanded, again and again. My world, my universe, was his ass, his pleasure my utter subjugation, my triumph, my access to Krzysztof’s ass. Heaven. Heaven. No one who hasn’t been there could possibly understand.

He bent over and grabbed my dick. I was too close. I pulled his hand away. Too late — I was going to shoot. I didn’t want to, didn’t want to leave Krzysztof’s ass, not ever, but it was too late. I squirmed, arched upward, burrowed my tongue as far up into him as fate and love allowed, and could feel him pumping away, could feel cum landing on my chest and belly. His cum, my cum, ours.

Some moments are perfect moments. Krzysztof’s asshole was a perfect moment. There was nothing, really, to say or do after that. He pulled himself off me and I felt alone. He reached over to the CD player and the nuns started chanting again. He stood, walked to the closet, threw me a towel. I wiped off and got dressed. He wrote his name and phone number down on a slip of paper. When he handed it to me, I didn’t offer mine in return.

I knew that in a perfect world I would have spent the rest of my life rimming Krzysztof’s ass, but it isn’t, and I wouldn’t.

We kissed.

“I can taste my ass on your lips,” he said.

“Romantic,” I said, and meant it. “I’ll show myself out.”

I hoped I wouldn’t run into his roommate or boyfriend or whatever, and I didn’t. When I got outside, I crumpled up the paper with his phone number and let it drop to the gutter. I got to the Jaguar, paused, went back and picked up the paper, smoothed it out, put it in my pocket.

I was glad my Jag was in still in one piece. I was glad to be leaving that part of town. I was even glad, in a way I didn’t quite understand, to be driving away from Krzysztof.

Some moments are perfect. Just like that.

The San Francisco International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival — the oldest, biggest, and probably most fabulous queer film festival in the world — has never been shy about showing sexually explicit flicks. And that’s as it should be. Queer people spend more time examining our own sexuality than most other folks; dicks and cunts are an integral part of our figuring out just who we are. So it was gratifying that once again, amidst this year’s murky lesbian mysteries, chirpy gayboy comedies, and the stand-up-and-cheer story of a Thai transvestite volleyball team, the Festival programmed a clutch of crotch-centric shows of the sort that, years ago, lost the Fest its NEA grant.

While past Festivals have often unspooled male-male fuck films, this year’s hottest porn flick was the all-woman Sugar High Glitter City, the latest clit-pic from dyke-a-licious couple Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Made by dykes for dykes, SHGC eschewed the soft-focus, airbrushed aesthetic of Playboy’s “lesbian” pictorials in favor of something a lot more down, dirty, and edgy. Women of varying races and body types (though skewing toward the 20s) cavorted in nasty, gritty closeup, provoking moans of appreciation from the women in the sold-out house. To be sure, the form of the film was hardly ground-breaking; the dystopian plot about a society in which sugar is outlawed was just the thinnish pretext for a series of girl-on-girl encounters featuring fisting, dildos, and dominant dyke daddies. Switch the sexes of some of the actors and it would have been just another het porn flick. But SHGC sure did deliver the girl goods, in soaking-wet, orgasm-filled profusion.

Less “pornographic,” but no less graphic, Peter Barbosa’s documentary, Out in the Open, explored gay men’s penchant for public sex, alternating talking-head interviews with hardcore scenes of sex in the bushes, bookstores, and backroom bars. Aiming at both head and hard-on, the film scrupulously presented various viewpoints on monogamy, sluttishness, and the self, all the while treating the packed house to hot shots of glory hole sex.

Then there was The Phantom, the dark tale of a Portugese garbage man (really!). A long way from the saccharine pleasantries of Will and Grace, it featured the star’s big schlong getting blown in loving close-up.

And a documentary called The Pain Game, detailing the considerable talents of Mistress Cleo Dubois, headed up a stimulating late-night program of S/M films, delighting them that’s into whips and chains.

But perhaps the hottest tickets, sexwise, were back-to-back retrospective looks at dirty movies, one for the fags, one for the dykes.

Thomas Waugh, a Canadian professor and the author of Hard to Imagine, guided a theaterful of horny guys on what he called “a rollercoaster ride through eight decades of gay and bi male porn.” And quite a ride it was. While many a queer pornhound has seen what Waugh pointed to as the first above-ground gay male skinflick, The Boys in the Sand, the evening’s real treasures came from way back before the era of Stonewall and the de facto decriminalization of porn. Tracking down rare archival footage, Waugh found totally queer images in early “straight” stag films.

One major astonisher was a French film from the 1920s based on the opera Madame Butterfly. This time around, Butterfly’s faithful maidservant consoled her with cunnilingus, while Lieutenant Pinkerton’s male servant sucked his master’s less-than-faithful dick. Too bad the film was silent; a bit of Puccini would have been perfect. Other putatively straight stag films, such as Piccolo Pete and the strip poker opus A Stiff Game, included a bit of male-male cocksucking as a means, Waugh theorized, of “inoculating” straight male viewers against homo-desires while titillating those whose tastes ran to dick.

Such is the murkiness of smut history that Three Comrades, the earliest all-male stag film Waugh has found, may date from any time between 1928 and the 1950s. Whatever its vintage, the flick’s blurry images of fucking, sucking, and rimming were instantly familiar to the audience of gay guys.

Waugh zoomed through the decades, from the rise of 8 mm, to the rise of commercial aboveground 1970s porn, to the triumph of video, which, Waugh pointed out, turned queer porn “into a domestic masturbation aid rather than a collective community-builder.” Bemoaning the rise of superficial mainstream product featuring “synthetic, self-hating, headless penises,” Waugh noted a recent rise in niche genres and specialty companies, even as rapid globalization has universalized “the Big Mac, the cum shot, and the shaved scrotum.” It was a fascinating trip through gay smut, though the audience groaned whenever the clip stopped short of the cum shot, and several patrons of the arts later complained about the shortage of something more… orgasmic.

The women then had their turn with “Lesbian Porn 101,” a program presented by sex educator Laura Weide. The place was again packed, but then, as one audience member pointed out, “Whenever the Festival shows lesbian porn, it’s standing-room only.”

“How many of you like to watch porn?” Weide asked the audience. Many hands shot up, lots of cheers. “And how many of you have seen a lot of movies you’ve liked?” This time, tellingly, a mere three or four women raised their hands.

Weide did her best to remedy that. While Waugh’s presentation had been chronological and academic, Wiede’s was topic-based, offering a sampler of everything from dildo-packing dyke daddies to a scene of a Survivor-like tribe of tribal dykes practicing “ecstatic breathing.” Like Waugh, Weide extolled authenticity, contrasting amateur and woman-produced porn with the “uninspired Baywatch ripoffs” of the commercial mainstream. “Performing cunnilingus the way it’s shown in most mainstream films will get you kicked out of bed real quick,” she said. And Weide did clarify one previously contentious issue: the distinction between “erotica” and “pornography.” It’s all, she said, in the decor. “If the characters in the movie have good jobs and a kidney-shaped pool,” she said, “it’s erotica. A plaid sofa and ugly shag carpeting equals porn.”

If “Lesbian Porn 101″ was little more than the sum of its (dripping, wide-open private) parts, it was still an exhilarating view of images of queer female sexuality, from the cowgirl loopiness of Hay Fever (according to Weide,”the silliest lesbian porn film ever made”) to a jaw-dropping scene of a butch fucking her bottom with a dildo impaled on her stiletto heel. Every orgasm prompted a delighted cheer from the crowd; a straight-at-you shot of a gushing ejaculation brought down the house. If anything, the women’s program was even sexier than the guys’, and the women went home happy and, one presumes, horny.

For all their strengths and weaknesses, the fuck-based programs in this year San Francisco Festival exemplified its organizers commitment to keep the “sex” in “homosexual.” In the rush to queer assimilation, while we fight to get married in church, enlisted in the army, and let into the Boy Scouts, it’s nice that what goes on below the belt is still foregrounded in the Festival.

He had come back, with mixed emotions, to spend the summer at his parents’ house. East Jesus was one of those picturebook-pretty farm towns that hid, Richie knew, a not-so-beautiful heart. The fact that Richie’s family was Japanese-American, one of the few families of Asian descent ever to settle there, hadn’t helped. There were the usual to-be-expected taunts, of course, but as stupid as they were, they still hurt. Maybe even worse were the nods to liberalism, like when his sixth-grade teacher had asked him to explain Chinese New Year to the class. He’d done his best — Richie almost always did his best — but when he got home and told his parents about it, they were livid. “What’s next?” his father thundered. “Confucius’ Birthday?” It had taken Richie a few more years to figure out why they’d been so mad.

So when he figured the other thing out, became aware that his slanted eyes and ocher skin weren’t the only things that set him apart, he’d kept it hidden. His attraction to other boys was kept a secret, deep and dark. It wasn’t till he’d gone off to college two states away that Richie Yoshida had let the little beastie out to play.

Even then, it hadn’t been easy. He desperately wanted so many guys, including, distressingly, his to-all-appearances-straight-as-anything roommate. Richie always, it seemed, had a hard-on; he just didn’t know what to do with it. Sure, there was a Gay Students’ Alliance on campus, but he’d been too chickenshit to join. One night he’d circled around the hallway for at least 10 minutes, passing the meeting room’s closed door six or seven times before glumly giving up. He was, he figured, pretty much a hopeless case.

Then he discovered the men’s room in the Visual Arts Building. There was the hole drilled in the wall between two stalls. There were the hard-on drawings and requests for sex scrawled everywhere; they got painted over regularly, only to reappear, miraculous as stigmata, within days. And there was the Sketchers-clad foot that made its way past the partition, into his stall. The foot tapped as if by accident, but it was, pretty clearly, no accident. Richie bent over to steal a glimpse into the neighboring toilet, and there, bent over, was a good-looking blond boy, his face alarmingly pink from the blood rushing to his upside-down head.

“Slide under the stall,” the blond boy whispered.

“But…”

“Slide under.”

“How? I won’t fit.”

“Christ.” An exasperated whisper. “Just your legs and crotch, okay?”

Richie’s dick was already hard as an uncircumcised rock. He managed, sitting back on his heels, to get it on the other side of the stained partition, where the blond boy took it expertly into his nice wet mouth. It didn’t take long for Richie to come, and, to his surprise (Richie had tasted his own cum once and found it unpleasantly gamy), the blond boy swallowed every drop of it down.

Richie began to spend almost all his afternoons hanging out at the Visual Arts Building. The blond boy, it turned out, was a regular, as were several other young men. He gave them nicknames: Curved Dick; Football Player; Too Much Cologne. Eventually he ran into the blond boy outside the confines of the men’s room. Richie would have ignored him, but the blond boy struck up a conversation, and his easygoing manner and wide smile put Richie at ease. They went to a movie together, then to bed, the first time Richie had ever had real, full-fledged, lying-down sex with anybody. It was a revelation.

By the end of his freshman year, Richie Yoshida had joined the Gay Students’ Alliance and come out to his close friends. He’d even told his roommate, who’d said “That’s cool,” but started turning off the light before he stripped down for bed.

Then came finals, the end of the school year, and the trip back home to East Jesus and, he figured, to several lonely months of jerking off in the downstairs powder room, with its basket of scented soaps and its unintentionally camp wallpaper of pink poodles and Eiffel Towers. He’d have to keep secrets; he still couldn’t get up the courage to come out to his mom and dad. But he had a decent summer job at his fathers plumbing supply store, and he needed the money.

He’d been home for a few weeks, it was late June, when he spotted Bob Kondyra. Richie was with his mother at the supermarket. “Can I help you out with your bags?” said a sort-of-familiar voice, and when he looked, it was Bob Kondyra, wearing a supermarket uniform.

Kondyra — everyone called him by his last name — had been, well you could call him a “greaser.” All through school he’d sported an unfashionable pompadour. His attitude had been even worse than his grades. But Kondyra had been, maybe as a result of being held back once or twice, the first boy in Richie’s class to reach puberty. Back then, every trip to the gym locker room had been an occasion for wonderment. Kondyra’s body had hair where the other boys just had dreams, and his dick had been startlingly big.

Kondyra was the envy of the prepubescent; despite his evident social liabilities, he seemed to have no problems finding girlfriends, and if some of the girls had bad reputations, well, so did Bob Kondyra.

“Richie?” said Kondyra.

“Yeah,” Richie said, “I’m back here for the summer. Mom, you remember Bob Kondyra?”

“Sure thing. Hi Bob.” His mother smiled, though every word she’d ever heard about him had been bad. Richie hadn’t told her about Kondyra’s dick, though, which throughout high school had remained prodigiously larger than average, filling Richie with barely suppressed desire whenever the boys hit the showers after gym.

“We should get together, Richie,” said Kondyra. “Catch up.”

“Sure thing,” said Richie, though he was more than a bit surprised. When Kondyra had taken notice of him in school at all, it was, Richie recalled, with scarcely concealed contempt.

He might have forgotten about the whole thing if it hadn’t been for the dream the next night. Richie rarely remembered his dreams, and when he did, they almost never had much to do with real life. But there it was: a dream about a motorcycle, a mysterious road that went nowhere, and Bob Kondyra. And Kondyra’s dick. When Richie woke up he’d puddled the sheets with cum.

So he went back to the supermarket the next day and made it a point to run into Bob Kondyra. Bob, it turned out, had the next day off, a Sunday, and Richie would be welcome to come over and talk about old times.

After Sunday dinner, Richie borrowed his mother’s Ford without telling her where he was going. He smuggled out a half-bottle of Scotch as he left the house.

Kondyra’s place was pretty much what he expected, down to the Pamela Anderson poster on the wall. Things started out awkwardly enough, but fortunately Kondyra had left the TV on when Richie arrived; sitcom noise papered over the silences. Generous applications of Scotch soon made things almost relaxed.

“I always figured you didn’t like me, Richie.”

“That’s not true.” A convenient semi-lie.

“I figured you thought I was stupid.”

Silence.

“You got a girlfriend, Richie?”

“Nope, not now.” Richie took another burning swallow of liquor.

“You ever had a girlfriend, Richie?”

What was he getting at? Should Richie tell the truth or not?

“What do you mean?” Richie’s head was swimming.

“I mean,” and Kondyra fixed him with a semi-drunken stare, “that you always wanted…”

“Wanted?”

“…to suck my dick.”

There was really nothing to say.

“You can suck it if you want.”

It had to be a trick. On TV, Richie suddenly noticed, John Ritter and Suzanne Somers had gotten in a spat. “Chrissy!”

“You can suck it.” Kondyra’s hand was kneading his crotch.

“Um…” said Richie, and then couldn’t think of any more to say.

Kondyra unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis. It was, if not quite as large as Richie had remembered, still a sizable piece of meat, and it was getting harder by the second.

Richie took another swig of booze and dropped to his knees. There, just inches from his face, was the thing itself — Bob Kondyra’s notorious dick.

“All you guys want to suck it,” Kondyra slurred, “you want to suck it even more than the chicks do.”

Clearly, more had been going on in high school than Richie had suspected. Which guys? he wanted to ask. Which guys wanted to suck it? But he couldn’t, because by that time his mouth was full of Kondyra’s swelling cock. It was just a tad ripe, and it stretched his jaws, but it was otherwise thoroughly satisfactory.

“Oh yeah,” Kondyra mumbled, “feels good.”

The Three’s Company rerun had given way to the evening news. The supposed-President was saying something about bringing religious faith back into public life. Richie sucked harder. There was a commercial for antacid. Kondyra reached for the Scotch bottle and gulped down another swig.

“…in cities from New York to San Francisco,” the TV announcer was saying, “homosexuals by the tens of thousands celebrated the anniversary of a riot at a Greenwich Village gay bar, a turning-point in the movement for homosexual rights.” And some guy started gushing about what a wonderful day it was and how he’d come all the way from Oregon to San Francisco just to march in the big parade.

“Look at them,” slurred Kondyra. “Look at them fucking faggots.”

Richie could have taken his mouth off Kondyra’s dick, could have just stood up and gotten the hell out of there. But he didn’t. He sucked harder, accelerated the pace, until Bob Kondyra half-rose from the chair and shot a big load down Richie’s near-gagging throat.

Richie stood up, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and, grabbing the Scotch bottle, said, levelly, “Next time, ask another fucking faggot to suck you off, okay?”

He walked unsteadily to the door, let himself out, and got into his mom’s Ford. He was, he knew, a long way from the land of rainbow flags, rainbow bumper stickers, rainbow necklaces and rings, from Dykes on Bikes and gay marching bands. Driving cautiously, he headed back to the house he grew up in. The place he grew up in. East Jesus, Minnesota.

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).

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).

Now, about Krzysztof. I met him at a so-so bar one Tuesday night. We decided to go back to his place. He was Polish, had actually come from Poland, still had an nice accent, had that fine-boned look some Polish guys have and light blond hair that, unstylishly, touched his shoulders.

“Nice car,” he said as he climbed into my Jaguar.

“I bought it used.”

“It’s still nice,” he said. I looked over at him. Now that we were outside the bar, he looked a little shabby around the edges.

“You sure going over to your place is a good idea?”

“Sure. I have a roommate, but he won’t mind.”

When we got to his apartment building, in a marginal part of town that left me worried about parking the Jag, his roommate was awake, padding around in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He was good-looking, but not as handsome as Krzysztof.

“Hey,” the roommate said.

“Hi,” said my date. “Rick, this is… sorry, I forgot your name.”

I lied, figuring I could backtrack later.

Krzysztof’s room was monastically bare. Not messy, not dirty, just bare, nothing on the walls but a plain wooden crucifix. A mattress on the floor. Some of those candles in glass holders decorated with pictures of Jesus and the saints, which Krzysztof went around lighting. A pile of books in one corner, next to a small CD player. An open closet with a handful of clothes on hangers.

“I have to take a pee,” Krzysztof said. “Be right back.” He closed the door behind himself.

I picked up one of the books. The poems of Saint John of the Cross. Not the kind of thing I’d find in most of my tricks’ rooms. I opened it up, and Krzysztof’s name was written on a bookplate inside. So that’s how you spell it, I thought.

The door opened. “Back,” Krzysztof said. He was already pulling off his shirt. Even in the candlelight, I could see how pale he was. There was a flurry of golden-brown hair on his lean chest, a little thicket between large nipples. He never took his eyes off me as he unbuttoned his pants and let them fall to the floor. His briefs had a couple of holes in them. My dick leapt to attention. I put the book down.

Krzysztof walked over to me and dropped to his knees, rubbing his face hard against my crotch, gnawing at my stiff cock thorough my pants. I grabbed a handful of his candlelight-blond hair and pushed his head into me. He whimpered and squirmed.

“Unzip my fly,” I said. He did. “Take my dick out.”

“Can I suck it?”

“Not yet. Stand up.”

Krzysztof rose to his feet. His torn-up briefs were stretched by his hard-on, the distended holes revealing the pallor of a hip, a flurry of honeyish pubic hair.

“Now turn around.” The rest of him was slim, but his ass was perfectly formed, curves and masses beneath the white cotton briefs. There was a rip in the fabric, running halfway down his butt, exposing part of his crack. I went over to him and laid my hand on his ass and he shivered slightly. I grabbed hold of the cloth with both hands and pulled hard, till his briefs gave way with a rip. He trembled even more.

His ass was pale as milk, smooth as silk, beautiful. Most of his body might have verged on the scrawny, but his butt was astonishing. At the top of the cleft there was a dark tone to his skin, bruiselike, the kind of thing you sometimes see with very pale guys. I ran my fingers over the spot, then down into the crack. He shifted, relaxing so I could slide my fingertips over the moist heat of his hole.

“Okay,” I said. “Get down on the bed, on your belly. Keep what’s left of those briefs on.”

“Yes,” he said, lying down, looking expectant, nervous.

“Untie my boots,” I said, standing on the mattress to either side of his head. He squirmed around and untied the laces, then pulled my shoes off. He kissed my right foot.

“Now get your butt in the air.”

The shreds of white cotton fell away, exposing even whiter ass cheeks which, slightly parted, revealed a trail of dark blond hair. I reached down and spread his ass. His hole was perfectly shaped, clean pink nested in a halo of cinnamon-colored fur, and I wanted it.

“Can I turn on music? My roommate…”

“Sure.”

He reached over and hit the button on the player. The chanting of medieval nuns. Unbelievable.

There was so much I could have done with Krzysztof. I could have fucked his mouth, his ass, from the looks of things I could have tied him up and beaten him. I could have shown the weedy fucker what a truly demanding top I could be. I didn’t, though. I knew then, with the certainty of damnation, that I was going to eat out Krzysztof’s ass. His ass. My mouth. Magic. Poison.

I breathed in. Slightly musty but clean.

“What?”

Krzysztof repeated himself. “Yes, please,” he said.

The nuns chanted away about salvation or something. I dove face-first into the Eye of God, started at the bruise-dark beginnings of his crack, tonguing flesh against bone, then lower, towards darkness. My spit matted down the hair. Lower. Lower. Toward the heat. My tongue brushed, just brushed, the soft pucker of flesh, then moved down to the ridge between his furry blond upper thighs, to the base of his balls, my chin resting against the baby-soft sac, the smell of his asshole sweet in my nostrils.

This time I understood what he was muttering into his pillow: “Yes yes yes.” I pulled his perfect asscheeks apart and looked down at the now-shiny hole nestled in swirls of damp hair. A hole that led to Krzysztof’s guts, to his shit, his heart, his soul, his essence. An Easter egg. Gobble it down.

I spit on my forefinger, rubbed it tentatively around the damp hole, pushed in slightly, met initial resistance, then welcome. I sank in to the first knuckle, pulled my finger out, sniffed at it, sucked at my fingertip. My passion. His asshole was my passion. I lowered myself to his butt and stuck my tongue in. Krzysztof sighed and pushed his ass up at me. I burrowed deeper, tasting the brink of his insides, wanting to go further, to commit myself utterly to him, to eat my way to wherever he truly was, whoever he was. Krzysztof.

The door opened. The roommate. I gave him a sidelong look, then I backed off and spread the pale asscheeks so he could see where I’d been. The hole was wide now, shiny, engorged. Licking, kissing, sucking, I dove back inside Krzysztof.

I hadn’t thought of my dick for what seemed like a long time. Why would I, when it was my tongue, my heedless, hungry mouth that connected me with the risky blond boy lying askew on his barren bed? But now I realized that I’d been leaking precum like a motherfucker, that my cock was slimy-slick inside my pants.

I reared back, kneeling, and brought my hand down hard on Krzysztof’s ass. I didn’t want to hurt him; I’m not a sadist. I just wanted to leave my mark on him, the way he was leaving his mark on me, the way I could smell his asshole on my upper lip. The angry-pink print of my hand rose on his very pale flesh, tearing with unexpected ferocity at my heart. I bent over and kissed the mark I’d left, then spread his cheeks and trailed my tongue again towards Krzysztof’s musky hole.

“Let me get on my back,” he said.

While he rolled over, I looked up at the roommate. Rick. The guy was just standing there, not even touching the hard-on that bulged inside his jeans. I didn’t know if he was waiting to be asked to join in or what. I didn’t even know whether he was Krzysztof’s boyfriend.

“Leave, please,” I said. He didn’t. I was in no mood to argue with him.

Krzysztof was on his back now, knees up to his chest, his arms looped around his bent legs, ass stretched, open, his hole wet, exposed, his dick stiff against his lean, hairy belly. Nice dick, uncut, dripping, but it was his ass I wanted, needed. I lay on the floor and licked at his asshole, which quivered, responded, opened even wider for my mouth. My tongue strained to go up inside him, as far as I could go. It was all that mattered. I reached up and spread his hole with my thumbs. I had to taste Krzysztof, devour him, be devoured by him, his ass, my desire for him, for his hole, for Krzysztof’s ass. The nuns had stopped singing.

“Oh fuck!” said Krzysztof, as I lay there shooting my tongue in and out, flicking it against his secret flesh.

“Have fun,” the roommate or boyfriend or whoever said, shutting the door behind himself with a small slam. Whatever. I took my mouth off the deep, dark abyss and looked up, across dick and belly and chest, at Krzysztof’s beautiful, blissed-out face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, and nothing was. Nothing at all, not in the whole world, a world that smelled like Krzysztof’s ass, a world that was Krzysztof’s ass, a world that was heaven, pure heaven.

He said, “I need to come soon.”

“I want you to sit on my face,” I said.

“I can do that.”

I tugged off my shirt, pulled my pants down to mid-thigh, scooted onto the mattress and lay on my back. Krzysztof straddled me and squatted down, his butt just inches from my face. I marveled at his ass, its curves, its pallor, even the one small blemish on the left cheek. That blemish made him human; otherwise the perfection of it would have been too much, would have maybe made me cry.

I inhaled his smell again, then stuck out my tongue. He lowered himself onto my mouth and I gobbled at him, starving. I could tell he was jacking himself off; as waves of pleasure rolled through his body, his asshole tightened and expanded, again and again. My world, my universe, was his ass, his pleasure my utter subjugation, my triumph, my access to Krzysztof’s ass. Heaven. Heaven. No one who hasn’t been there could possibly understand.

He bent over and grabbed my dick. I was too close. I pulled his hand away. Too late — I was going to shoot. I didn’t want to, didn’t want to leave Krzysztof’s ass, not ever, but it was too late. I squirmed, arched upward, burrowed my tongue as far up into him as fate and love allowed, and could feel him pumping away, could feel cum landing on my chest and belly. His cum, my cum, ours.

Some moments are perfect moments. Krzysztof’s asshole was a perfect moment. There was nothing, really, to say or do after that. He pulled himself off me and I felt alone. He reached over to the CD player and the nuns started chanting again. He stood, walked to the closet, threw me a towel. I wiped off and got dressed. He wrote his name and phone number down on a slip of paper. When he handed it to me, I didn’t offer mine in return.

I knew that in a perfect world I would have spent the rest of my life rimming Krzysztof’s ass, but it isn’t, and I wouldn’t.

We kissed.

“I can taste my ass on your lips,” he said.

“Romantic,” I said, and meant it. “I’ll show myself out.”

I hoped I wouldn’t run into his roommate or boyfriend or whatever, and I didn’t. When I got outside, I crumpled up the paper with his phone number and let it drop to the gutter. I got to the Jaguar, paused, went back and picked up the paper, smoothed it out, put it in my pocket.

I was glad my Jag was in still in one piece. I was glad to be leaving that part of town. I was even glad, in a way I didn’t quite understand, to be driving away from Krzysztof.

Some moments are perfect. Just like that.

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).

“Nice cock!”

Celine and Julie had rented a gay video. Their husbands, Astérix and Bruce, were out of town on boring business trips. So, just for a lark, they took a trip to the local adult bookstore. Giggling like schoolgirls, they made their way past the dildo display to the shelves of videos.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Celine. “Let’s not get a straight video. Every time Astérix brings one home, the men in it are so… yucky.”

“Indeed,” said Julie. “That Jeremy bloke makes me want to barf.”

“And,” added Celine, “we won’t have to look at all those silicone tits.”

And so they found themselves in the gay video section, browsing through titles like Stud This and Powertool That.

Back at Julie’s, they nuked some butter-flavored popcorn, lowered the lights, and shoved Big Boys Get Buggered into the VCR.

“Yummm, he is big,” Julie tittered. “It would take two Bruces to add up to that.”

But Celine was transfixed by the sight on the screen: Kris Randall’s cock, in tight close-up, was oozing pre-cum. Oozing, that is, until handsome Vin Stroker licked it off. Stroker ran his tongue around the swollen head of Randall’s dick, then swallowed the shaft in a single gulp.

“Merde!” said Celine. “Did you see that?”

“I bet Bruce wishes I could do as well,” marveled Julie.

“Gay guys sure know have to have sex, all right.”

Julie nodded. “And gay men have such…”

“Big muscles?” asked Celine.

“Well-trimmed pubic hair.”

“Look at that one’s. It looks like Hitler’s mustache!” Celine giggled.

The camera had pulled back. Kris Randall was face-down on what was supposed to be a workbench in a car repair place, his muscular legs and perfect ass pointing toward the camera’s eye. Vin Stroker reached for a grease gun.

In the usual porn-actor monotone, Randall unconvincingly begged his costar to take it easy, but the nozzle of the grease gun slid up inside his hole like a Pokémon card into a kid’s pocket.

“Oh my God,” said Julie. “He’s putting his fingers up the guy’s ass!”

“I don’t think,” said Celine, “that I ever could do that to Astérix.” But she had a broad smile on her face and her hand had found its way to the crotch of her shorts.

“What the fuck’s going on here?” It was Casey Somebody-Or-Other, playing the garage owner. He’d walked in on the sight of Stroker sticking three fingers up another man’s butt when he should have been tuning up the Lexus in the corner. But Casey couldn’t have been all that angry; he reached down and started kneading his cock through his blue mechanic’s overalls.

“Oh my!” said Julie, when Casey pulled out his dick. “It’s even bigger than the other ones.”

“I hope they both fuck that guy on the bench.” Celine was a bit surprised to hear the word “fuck” coming out of her mouth; she never said such things when Astérix and the kids were around.

“Face it, darling,” said Julie, “you wish you were that guy on the bench.”

Celine reached for the remote and, free hand on the jog-shuttle wheel, made the men on the screen do her bidding, freezing in their tracks, backing up, then slowly going forward again.

“Hee hee,” said Julie.

“I feel,” said Celine, “like the tables have been turned.” And Julie knew just what she meant.

Celine was rubbing herself vigorously through her shorts now, not caring if her friend noticed. “Mmm,” she said, and closed her eyes. She felt great.

“Celine? Celine?” Julie’s voice was surprisingly faint. Celine opened her eyes. She was no longer in Julie’s comfy, almost too-clean living room, but in a dirty garage smelling of brake fluid and sweat. And right in front of her were three naked men having sex.

Casey had stripped off his coveralls and was kneeling on the rough wood workbench, fucking Kris Randall’s mouth. Randall, on all fours, gulped the big dick down greedily. And Vin Stroker, sweat rolling down his lean, muscular body, was pounding into Randall’s wide-open ass.

Celine couldn’t believe her luck. She moved closer; her nostrils were filled with the smell of male sex. She reached out and put her hand on Stroker’s shoulder, running her fingers over the slick flesh. But Stroker didn’t notice her at all. Her hand reached his well-muscled ass, which flexed as Stroker plowed Randall. But there was still no response, not even when she gave his butt a playful slap. It was if she wasn’t there. And then she realized that, as far as the men were concerned, she wasn’t.

She felt a little hurt at first, but then decided to take advantage of her invisibility. Squatting down, she watched Stroker’s cock, shiny in a jet-black condom, slide in and out of Randall’s lubed-up hole just inches from her face. Her hand was deep inside her shorts and she was playing with her swollen clit, keeping perfect pace with the fuckstrokes before her eyes. If Julie could see her now…

Julie! Celine glanced back over her shoulder, and there, in a little floating window, was Julie, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. With her free hand, Celine waved, and Julie waved back.

Celine clambered to her feet and went to watch the blowjob up close. Randall had an intent look on his face as he deep-throated Casey’s enormous cock. When Casey said, stiltedly, “Yeah, suck that big tool, boy,” Celine giggled, but Randall didn’t.

She moved beside Kris Randall’s naked kneeling body, rubbing her fingers over her soaking-wet cuntlips as she watched him getting used from both ends. Then she pulled her damp hand out of her shorts and grabbed on to Randall’s cock. He didn’t seem to notice, but as Celine jacked him off, he moaned louder and sucked harder.

The pace accelerated. Above the sound of flesh against flesh, Celine heard Julie’s voice. “They’re almost done,” the faint voice said. “Come on back before the video ends or you’ll be trapped in there.”

And at that moment Vin Stroker growled, from between gritted teeth, “I’m fuckin’ gonna come.” He pulled out of Randall’s ass and tore the condom off just as Casey pulled his cock out of Randall’s mouth. In perfect synchronization, the money shot exploded. Stroker’s cum sprayed over Kris Randall’s back and ass, Casey pumped his wad onto Randall’s pretty face, and Celine felt the insistent throbbing of the dick in her hand as the third man shot his load. And, without even having to touch herself, Celine came, too — big, sharp, shuddering waves that started in both her brain and her cunt, then drenched her body, leaving her happy, exhausted, spent.

She looked back at Julie’s small face in the distance and, right before everything faded to black, she shouted just one thing at the top of her lungs: “Tell Astérix I’m staying here!”

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).