ABC of perversions

ABC of perversions (Nederlands: ABC van perversies)

AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PERVERSIONS

Introduction

At the end of the nineteenth century psychiatrists developed the concept of perversion as a general term to cover all sexual variations on the straight norm. According to these doctors the perversions, including homosexuality, belonged in the realm of pathology. Most words for perverted interests were invented at that time: homosexuality, uranism and sexual inversion, sadism and masochism, pedophilia, fetishism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, zoophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia, transvestism and many more now-forgotten terms. The concept of heterosexuality was also developed and the general term sexuality acquired its present meaning: previously it referred to gender.

The Latin words pervertere, to reverse; perversus, bad; and perversitas, wrongness, are the roots of the modern terms perverse, pervert, perversion, and perversity. In the nineteenth century these concepts acquired their modern sexual meanings. Psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who invented several of these terms, considered perversions a sign or proof of mental aberration. It was significant whether people engaged in these behaviors only once for their pleasure or as a kind of foreplay, in which case it was considered a relatively innocent pastime, a perversity. When it became the erotic aim and people got addicted to it or derived their identity from such preferences, they were perversions. Homosexual behavior was seen as a pathological perversion if it was not a one-time event and originated from a deeply-felt homosexual interest. At that time it was unusual for such an interest to be seen as an identity. Church and state had always been most concerned with sexual acts that were regarded as sins and crimes.

At the end of the nineteenth century, psychiatrists discovered the human being behind the act and focused more on the homosexual person than on what he did. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who has been called “the first gay of the world,” made this discovery: for him, being “uranian” (his word) was more essential than having gay sex. His was the world-famous formula: homosexuals were “female souls in male bodies.” (Sigusch 2000) Now being homosexual would precede doing something homosexual. One could be a masochist without ever having suffered actual pain or humiliation. Perverts became a separate class of people who, according to psychiatrists and public opinion, belonged in asylums. Although most persons with a preference for variant forms of sexual pleasure were not hospitalized, they had to face the negative stigma. Feelings of guilt, social rejection, and suicide could be consequences of the new ideology. There were, however, other people who did not bother too much about such prejudices and started to experiment with sexual variations, even to defend their interests as did the men who started the first homosexual rights movement in Berlin in 1897.

Nowadays perversion is a term that is already on the way out. Scholars have coined a new concept -- “paraphilia.” The word “perversion” is loaded with negative meanings and unacceptable in academia because of its popular use, so psychiatrists and psychologists arrived at this linguistic innovation. The term stems from ancient Greek and means something like “next to love.” The most important difference between nineteenth-century perversion and twentieth-century paraphilia is the exclusion of homosexuality, once a perversion but not a paraphilia because homosexuals live in love, not next to it. Therefore in some enlightened countries they got the right to marry. Another difference is that perversion continues to sound serious and nasty, while paraphilia sounds tasteless and tame. Nonetheless it covers all acts that go beyond homo- and heterosexuality, many of which make the “normal” citizen tremble: from coprophilia to pedophilia and lust murder.

This collection of paraphile interests may be the wildest and most exciting corner of science, but most books devoted to it are either pornographic or their authors do their best to look serious while remaining negative about perversions. I want rather to incite pleasure, also the pleasure of thinking about perverted sexuality. There is no reason to be negative about perversion because it is everywhere and can be put to positive and negative uses, like all other erotic habits. Moreover, kinky sex is the best food for thought.

The only progress made by the psychiatrists was to depathologize homosexuality. It was a historic victory that they decided homosexuality was no longer a psychic disorder. Regrettably, they kept the other perversions as mental pathologies in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the continually revised and enlarged handbook of mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. They added a new category, egodystonic homosexuality, for those who are unhappy with or disturbed by their homosexual orientation. Egodystonic heterosexuality did not make it to the list. Later, the psychiatrists made it more neutral and, to be politically correct, included all disturbances caused by sexual orientation. This approach remained imbalanced because no one will ever visit a shrink to get rid of their heterosexual orientation, while fundamentalist Christian organizations continue to try to “cure” homosexuals with the full approval of the psychiatric handbook. The main problem was and remains that a social problem, gay discrimination and straight norm, is reduced to an individual psychiatric disorder. Consequently some psychiatrists started a discussion about whether pedophilia, for example, belongs in the DSM. They are opposed to including it merely because society may see it as morally objectionable; since that is not how insanity is determined. The DSM has several criteria to define mental disorders, but none of them fit all cases of sexual desire for minors. Green mentions the following: “present distress … or disability … or a significantly increased risk of suffering,” which does not include pain incurred through conflict with society (Zucker, 2002:407). Not all pedophiles show psychic distress or disability because of their sexual desires, and their suffering most often is socially induced. So, there seems no reason to include pedophilia among the mental disturbances; the same applies to all other paraphilias for they also do not fit the criteria of the DSM. Nevertheless, they are still mentioned in the latest edition of this catalogue of insanities.

Perversions are in themselves not pathological phenomena. Like homo- and heterosexuality, perversions can develop into mental disorders, for instance because of social circumstances, but no sexual interest is in itself pathological. In most cases, they are innocent forms of pleasure that are neither criminal nor insane. The common element of all perversions is that they are not seen as “normal.” But they are not abnormal in the sense of insane or unreasonable, nor do they depart from a statistical median, because there is no sexual center that defines normal and abnormal. Perversions are often seen as morally wrong, but that is rather an expression of a narrow morality that lacks respect for sexual diversity. The norm that was in the past coitus, has now become broadened and thus been broken. It also includes oral and anal sex, homo and hetero. Kisses and intimacies that don’t include the genitalia, such as petting and licking, are accepted as foreplay. When such interests become the main aim of pleasure and are located outside the genital zones, for example, feet and bums, psychiatrists define them as body fetishes. Interests in kinky acts such as bondage, spanking, or verbal humiliation also fall outside the normal repertoire and are defined as sadism or masochism. A preference for certain types of clothing and material such as leather or rubber, or uniforms of nurses and soldiers, is fetishism.

All these sexual preferences are, however, not pathological in themselves. Apart from social rejection and individual abjection, they are very much like more common hetero- or homosexual relations. Activities in which persons have no respect for partners or for themselves, are in my opinion uncivilized, but still not signs of mental disturbance. There are sexual acts that can become criminal or pathological, like the use of force or the abuse of power, but in such cases the law establishes penalties. It makes little sense to criminalize or pathologize sexual pleasures because they can sometimes lead to criminal or crazy acts; in fact, they are not very different from other social activities such as car driving, educating children, or working that can also degenerate into abuses and aggressions. There is little reason to create special sex crimes, as most countries do, because those activities in general fall under existing statutes that forbid abuse, violence, or force.

In the past, most sexual relations were between unequals: men and women; clients and whores; masculine and feminine, as in butch and femme and trade and queer; sex worker and client, rich and poor, old and young, masters and slaves, victors and vanquished, well- and poorly educated, or between people of different ethnicities. In those times the idea of equality between sexual partners was nearly unimaginable. Not-so-ancient theories of sexual desire that developed around 1900 took inequality or opposite characteristics of partners as a self-evident starting point. Ulrichs, mentioned above, made it a central point of his theory that “female souls in a male body” (which he called “uranians”) could only get passionate about the opposite pole, a male soul in a male body (a straight masculine man). He explicitly used the example of electricity to underpin his theory: opposites attract. His uranians would rarely consider having sex with their equals, other uranians.

Nowadays tables have turned and few people realize what a sexual sea change we are witnessing. The sexual norm is shifting toward social equality and sexual democracy (meaning that sexual relations should be between equal consenting partners) so that differences between erotic partners become minimal, especially in terms of their social or economic power. Power differentials underlie the revulsion felt toward the quintessentially unequal relations of pedophiles or zoophiles, or those who visit prostitutes. In contrast, what can be more equal than two gay men or lesbian women? The social advances they have made can largely be explained by the new ideals of equality. They are even more similar than heterosexuals, who still have to deal with a gender difference. Same-sex marriage is a logical consequence of this development. But of course, there is absolutely no reason why sexual equality should be preferable to sexual disparity. On the contrary, differences stimulate the surprise and the curiosity that are so beneficial for lust. Most kinky sex depends on difference, on an exploration of the unexpected and the unknown. While love is for the long term and needs some stability, sex is about situations and moments.

In our discussion of the normalcy of perversion, we could just as well reverse the relation of perversion and sexual norm, and affirm that all sexual pleasures include perverted aspects. The dichotomy of homo- and heterosexual establishes the idea that the object of desire is a particular gender, male or female. But the object of sexual interest is always much more specific. Humans who like women don’t like women in general, but black or white, young or old ones, with big breasts or nice bums, with certain personal characteristics or specific kinds of clothing, in certain situations (beach, red-light district, elevator, park, prison, army barracks, bedroom), and prefer certain acts. Sexual desire has a strongly fetishist character; it is specific and therefore never “normal” or straightforwardly homo or hetero. Perhaps in love relations humans have a strong preference for a certain gender, but this is certainly not the case with sexual preferences. Again, there is no pre-established norm for sexual pleasure. When people are idiosyncratic in some way, it is in their sexual fetishes.

In gay and lesbian studies and in particular in queer theory, a critique has been developed of the “heteronormativity” of Western societies. Heterosexuality has remained the implicit and unspoken point of reference, the social norm, notwithstanding a century of gay emancipation. The question of queer theory is how to break this rule. One way to get heterosexual preferences out of their position of domination is to indicate their multiplicity. The straight norm implies all heterosexual interests are quite similar, although the general term covers a wide variety of desires that have little in common. The straight world is not unlike the gay world in that it contains dozens of subgroups when it comes to sexual pleasure. There are pedophile, fetishist, sadist, masochist, exhibitionist, and voyeurist heterosexuals. All the specialties discussed in this book exist among both straights and gays. Heterosexuality – especially its exclusive and compulsory form – is a novel and unstable norm that should dissolve into its various parts; that would make it possible for the normative hetero to get closer to his or her desires. Heterosexuals, with their own special preferences – for fat partners, or blond ones, a little cruelty, or a bit of romance – have as little in common among themselves as gays or lesbians. If the concepts of homo- and heterosexuality would fall apart, marriage and adoption would no longer be privileges only of heterosexuals, and perversions would not automatically be associated with homosexuality or vice. People with, for example, sadomasochist preferences might have more in common with each other across gay and straight lines than with others who are simply gay or straight. When heterosexuality falls apart into its component interests, it will no longer be the general norm. Queering straights means teaching them to discover their fetishes or sexual hang-ups.

Some perversions are generally seen as abject, such as pedosexual relations with children under legal age, bestiality, lust murder, cannibalism. But even such “extreme” perversions are not intrinsically pathological. Some of these perversions can be played out in innocent forms. Lust murder can be staged just as sadomasochists do with their desires for imprisonment and slavery. As regards pedophilia, it could be argued that current ages of consent – between 12 and 18 years in most countries – are arbitrary and fail to protect children, for whom ignorance is a greater danger. We would be better advised to teach children much earlier about sexual culture so they can decide for themselves what they want, and learn how to refuse undesired proposals. Now we keep kids in the dark too long, to everybody’s disadvantage. The main question in age-unequal relationships, even the legal ones, is whether the older partner respects the wishes and desires of the younger person and protects him from harm, not whether or not they fool around.

In the case of bestiality it has been argued that zoophile relations can be loving, and are not per se abusive. Having sex with animals is, of course, much less horrible than murdering them for the meat industry. A society can reject such preferences as immoral or criminal, but that is no reason to declare them insane; neither do such preferences belong in criminal codes. Better to prohibit cruelty to animals than bestiality. Perversions such as lust murder and cannibalism are already forbidden by laws against murder and manslaughter, so there seems to be no reason to criminalize preferences, especially when they are not acted out.

Perversions have often been seen as mainly male interests, but women are every bit as perverted as men. Females have been hindered in exploring their sexual interests by a society that continues to define them as less sexual than males. Nowadays, women “score” lower than men in nearly all sexual statistics, primarily because of the continuing socio-sexual difference between the genders. One consequence is that men exaggerate and women underrate their sexual activities. These statistics moreover make it clear that women are catching up with men. Nowadays more women masturbate and those who do, practice it more often. They use more porn and sex toys than before. In the past it was unthinkable that a ladies’ journal would offer vibrators to new subscribers, but a Dutch one did so. When it comes to sexual variations, women will catch up with men and existing gender differences will disappear.

Perversions make it abundantly clear to what degree sexual desires are culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. There is already a question in the case of homo- and heterosexuality of what is natural about these preferences, but in the case of SM, fetishism, or voyeurism, a biological predisposition is utterly unlikely. The objects we adore are in general totally social and dependent on fashions and fads. How could the preference for fur that masochists like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch deemed essential a century ago be innate, while our contemporaries prefer leather in their SM games? Hypoxyphilia (the desire for a lack of oxygen) appeared shortly after the invention of plastic bags. The desires of gay men, who now mostly go for masculine figures, have changed through history. While in the past “normal” males like messenger boys, sailors, soldiers, and construction workers were their sexual ideals, nowadays gays go for their muscled equals who visit sport schools and fitness centers. At the same time, they masculinized and became machos rather than sissies. Homosexual desire is more specific than a preference for men and boys, thus it is unlikely that particular sexual interests in boyishness, sturdy masculinity, fake soldiers, soccer players, or musclemen are biologically based. Such preferences can be deeply ingrained through a personal history of obsession and repetition; they are not innate.

It remains an interesting question why these perversions in their individualized forms only arrived on the social stage in the fin-de-siècle of the nineteenth century. One explanation has been the culture of self-reflection and autobiographical self-representation that began in the late eighteenth century with The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The psychiatric case history was a medical adaptation of this culture of self-reflection. Such cases followed the familial and personal history of the patient and ended ideally with the diagnosis and therapy of the doctor. The physicians allowed their better-educated clients to write their own case histories; the psychiatrist von Krafft-Ebing included letters he received from “perverts” in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). The case history typically included the psychic problems that were present in the patient’s family, including alcoholism, insanity, criminality, social misfortune, and incidents that affected the brain. Such histories were essential because men of medicine believed insanity and perversion were mainly inherited, and that parents passed their degeneracies on to their children. But traumas and remarkable incidents could also explain certain preferences.

With masochism and fetishism, all kinds of special experiences were suggested to explain the specific content of desires. A boy who had seen his teacher spank another pupil could become a sadist or masochist, while fetishists had picked up their special interests through objects and events they came across by accident but which left indelible impressions. Often it meant that the object of desire was not a person, but a piece of clothing or a situation that subsequently initiated the lust. So goes the still-interesting theory of fetishism offered by Alfred Binet (1888). He saw that perversions in general are accidental associations of ideas, connections of lust with unrelated experiences such as seeing something special. The self-reflection that was a part of some medical therapies, or the writing of sexual case histories, in a sense created the profiles of the various perversions. Together with this self-reflection, the individualization and sexualization of society contributed to the emergence of sexual perverts. They heralded a culture that moved from families to individuals, from production to consumption, from labor to pleasure. One sad thing about contemporary capitalist societies is their reluctance to facilitate erotic arrangements, probably because so few are directly marketable.

When it comes to terminology, I prefer the word perversion. Perversion is to paraphilia what queer is to gay, a reversal of ingrained concepts. Psychiatrists continue to have the weird idea that sex and love are one of a kind and do not understand that sex and love go in different directions. All sex is finally perversion, beyond love, as love again surpasses lust. Friends look together into the future, lovers pierce each other’s eyes, and the meeting of perverts is a moment of bliss that offers an interior experience. With a sexual climax the eyes close and the world gets lost. The regard turns inside and liquids flow outward. In fact, all sex is perversion as an inversion of and digression from daily habits.

The pleasant experience of lust is loaded in modern society with sorrows and scruples. People do not learn to talk about their sexual wishes and are often not capable of doing so. They have no place to go to experience their specific erotic interests because no society offers a dense and rich sexual infrastructure, not even Amsterdam, Paris, London, or New York. Psychological and moral thresholds, such as the belief that good sex is best in a love relation, impede the access to sexual experiences. This is quite a misunderstanding. People who have experience with sex in and outside of love situations, value both for completely different reasons. Sex can be the fulfillment and summit of love, while outside love relations it is often simply good and horny. Lust depends on moments and situations, love on long terms and stability. To put the two on an equal level is to be mistaken about both.

This book was written as a series for an Amsterdam monthly, Gay News. Because of the preferences of its readership and my own, the focus is on queer issues. The gay world has a better-developed culture of variant sexual practices than the straight world, from public cruising, trash parties, fetishisms, mud wrestling, drag queens, and sadomasochists to pedophiles. Although this is a queer book where slang terms for perversions are preferred above the decent Latin-like names or the fantasy-names in Greek or French, these “serious” terms will not be left out. The text offers a mixture of essay, academic notions, literary and biographical digressions, and personal experiences of others and myself. Sometimes it is mainly fantasy, in other places it delves into real situations.

This lexicon is intended as an invitation to engage in kinky pleasures with oneself and others and to keep them safe. Perversions are often difficult to realize because perverts lack suitable opportunities or partners to play with. Kinky scripts often are so special that they are difficult to communicate. Therefore the idea of curiosity is proposed, to go beyond one’s personal hang-ups and get interested in the other’s. Lust is not about identities, whether homo or hetero, but about affinities. Perversions originate in a social world and should find their place somewhere, in particular locations and between certain people. Sex needs space and it would be a sensible idea to create a more sophisticated sexual infrastructure, beyond the internet, in the gay and “general” scene, sex clubs, and the world of prostitution, that is accessible for the curious and for the various fetish interests. While that space remains difficult to find, this book offers a glimpse of such a world.

Acoustophilia

If you like dirty talk or get excited by other sounds, that is acoustophilia. There are many subdivisions of this inclination: some people like certain kinds of music when making love, while most people know the excitement that comes from the noises of sex, such as breathing, pumping, whipping, the cries from deep in someone’s throat. There are languages that sound sexier than others -- when I hear someone speak French, my erotic interest gets aroused.

Acrophilia

If your desire is to reach the highest or lowest place, that is acrophilia. When you love climbing mountains, going to the top of a skyscraper, bungee jumping, deep sea or sky diving, it is possible that you are an acrophiliac. Other forms of acrophilia are alien abduction fantasies and having sex in a submarine or on an airplane. Gay men who have had sex at 30,000 feet belong to the so-called seven mile club.

Acrotomophilia is love for handicaps. See Ampusex

Agalmatophilia. See Statues

Agonophilia

An erotic interest in wrestling is called agonophilia. If you are one of those rowdy, rough types who think of sex as a kind of wrestling match, you are probably an agonophiliac. Wrestlers are reputed to be very homophobic, largely because their games look so much like gay sex. Wrestlers like wrestling, but apparently not gay sex, while gay men like wrestling because it looks so much like good gay sex. I once met a guy who had a terrifying obsession with wrestling. It was never clear whether his game was dead serious or foreplay. He frightened me a lot, but looking back it was double the fun of standard sex. His fighting was not about reducing his partner to a passive role in the usual game of “winner takes all.” See Wrestling, Mud, Sport

Agoraphilia

Agoraphilia is the opposite of agoraphobia (respectively love for and anxiety about open spaces). It is a variation of lust that most gay men know quite well, as it is a serious name for public sex. When they planned a bicycle lane through Amsterdam’s busiest gay cruising area, most people thought it would be the end of gay activity there. But because of the agoraphilia of homosexuals, the place only became busier. See Public sex

Algolagnia

One of the many neologisms doctors created was algolagnia in 1892, an innovation by Münich psychiatrist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing who that same year wrote a study of suggestion therapy for homosexuals and was a specialist on spiritualism. His new word comes from the Greek: a lust for pain. A year before, from the names of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing had crafted his term sadomasochism that has stayed with us.

Allophilia is the love of “others,” sexual attraction between people of different ethnicity. It seems to have been used in South-Africa in the times of Apartheid when sex between racial groups was strictly forbidden – and taboos raise such erotic desires. Since this is no perversion, it will not be dealt with here.

Allorgasmy

Allorgasmy is a queer word for a common occurrence: thinking of someone other than your partner while you are doing the deed with him. A psychiatrist once told me of a client who dreamed of getting fucked in the ass by a big black man while he had straight sex with his wife. It is a way to stay “normal” while embracing gay allophile sodomitical desires.

Ampusex

Handicap or ampusex is the remarkable preference for people who are missing parts of their bodies. It is an ambition that is often found in former war-torn areas due to the availability of amputees. A combination of aversion, compassion, and lust turns into a sexual attraction. The surrealist German painter Henrik Neugeboren (1901-1959) who changed his name to Henri Nouveau, lived in Paris from 1925 to his death. He kept a scrapbook with drawings, diaries, newspaper clippings, and objects d’art that illustrated his preference for physically handicapped men. Peter Gorsen (1984) once called him a “homosexually orientated narcissist with massive fetishist and masochist tendencies.” Many of his drawings show young men who lost a leg on crutches, sometimes in SM situations or intertwined with another guy with the same handicap, apparently because Nouveau also loved twin sex. In Wilhelm Stekel’s massive study of fetishism (1923), there is also a case history of a man with the same appetite. Both men grew up in Germany after World War I, where the many handicapped soldiers apparently became objects of sexual obsessions.

Anaclitism is another word for infantile sex.

Anastemaphilia is grandism or the love for tall men. See grandism

Andromimetophilia

Andromimetophilia is a typical term from John Money, one of the most prolific authors on paraphilia. He has come up with many weird terms of questionable Latin or Greek origin for new perversions. This strange concoction refers to men who love women in drag. In the gay scene, it is mostly the opposite but the sexologists have not yet found a word for it, so I suggest gynemimetophilia, or in plain English, “drag lover;” or in international slang, “travobravo.” The next step is love for a drag queen who has taken off her dress and is now again a boy or man: the male transvestite once again in male attire. My suggestion would be andropostgynemimetophilia. Are you still with us?

Anthropophagy

Eating human flesh is anthropophagy; when this turns you on you are an anthropophagophile. Another more common word is cannibalism. Jeffrey Dahmer went the other way round. He first had sex with his victims, then murdered them and ate them. Tobias Schneebaum, an amateur anthropologist from New York, is the only gay man to my knowledge who has admitted to having eaten human flesh. He became a cannibal while living among Indians in Peru, and joined them in the festive dinner party after a victory over a neighboring tribe. When he was asked how he liked it, he could not come up with an answer, which makes me guess that he invented his story of Indian anthropophagy to stimulate the sale of his book and interest in his person. See Cannibalism.

Armpits

Armpits can play the same role as a mouth or an ass. As notorious sweat areas, they can be most attractive to dirt lickers. In a hot summer you can spot boys and girls with large sweat stains on their shirts around their armpits. For some this might be embarrassing, but others find it horny as hell. Scientifically, the name for this preference is axilism, a word as non-sensual as it is nonsensical. Who ever met a boy or man who is an axilist? Almost no one, I think, and certainly nobody will refer to himself as one.

Army sex

In the old days gays used to take Thebes and Sparta, where male lovers fought bravely next to each other and died in each other’s arms, as shining examples of the acceptance of homosexual love in the ancient world. These examples were living evidence there was nothing wrong with the masculinity of gay men. In 1905, Benedict Friedländer devoted an article to the question “whether the allowance of homosexuality harms the military proficiency of a race.” His answer was a resounding no, because the best Japanese generals and admirals, who shortly before had inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Russians, came from regions where pederasty was common practice. These days, gays in Europe are allowed to join the army, even in England. Nobody doubts any longer that they can handle their weapons as well as straights, perhaps even better.

Historians have researched the occurrence of same-sex practices and desires in homosocial environments like the army. Their conclusions diverge widely. I myself studied the archives of the Haarlem military court from the nineteenth century. Homosexual behavior was only punishable then if it involved “a violation of public decency” or rape. Comparatively few soldiers have been convicted for such offences, but from the scanty data it appears that Dutch soldiers looking for gay sex could find it easily and did it everywhere. Violence hardly played a role as far as I could determine. Rape was not reported, and sexual assault rarely (Hekma 1991). Many soldiers put their sexual energy to quite different usage. Around 1900 they earned a decent buck by prostituting themselves for queens horny for real blokes. Whoever reads Joe Ackerley (1968) about London or Magnus Hirschfeld (1904) about Berlin in the early twentieth century will find exciting tales about sex with soldiers. The servicemen liked the money and the gay sex as well. The U.S. Army in World War II was the subject of Alan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: 1990) and Paul Jackson discusses the same topic for the Canadian army in his One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II (Montreal: 2004). They tell both sexy and sad stories about homosexual loves among soldiers. Until recently gay men stood guard outside the barracks in the old Soviet Union, because, contrary to Russian women, they did not object to a quickie with a soldier wanting sex in his lunch time.

In the United States, homosexuality has been considered a “serious problem” in the armed forces until 2011. The Clinton policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT, since 1994) on speaking up about homosexuality has not led to acceptance of gays and lesbians. On the contrary, during his terms in office the number of men and women expelled from the armed forces because of their sexual preference doubled. Simultaneously soldiers and sailors still have lots of sex among each other and they have remained sex icons in America. Read the books by Steven Zealand like Military Trade (1999), The Masculine Marine (1996), Sailors and Sexual Identity (1995) and Barrack Buddies and Soldier Lovers (1993), or, better still, book a trip to San Diego, where on the fringes of the military barracks, soldier sex is readily available.

For the past several decades, things in Holland have been quite different. Here whoring recruits have deteriorated into gay bashers. Marcel Bullinga in Het leger maakt een man van je (The Army Makes a Man Out of You, 1984) documented many instances of intimidation and rituals of sexual humiliation. These were directed at soldiers who were not “real men.” Probably such violence was a negative outcome of increased publicity about homosexuality, and the new visibility of gay men since the 1960s, while prejudices against gender and sexual variations still lingered on. Masculinity was no longer self-evident and conscripts had to prove they were not poofs. Meanwhile the army became heterosocial, breaking the seedy and dangerous but lustful tension of men among each other.

These days in Europe you do not have to go the barracks to admire uniforms or cruise soldiers. Many men flaunt army green and camouflage colors, as fashion dictates. Soldiers’ apparel gives them a virile appearance. Some fashion designers like Jean Paul Gaultier have created gay versions of army clothes, sailor shirts and trousers and military dazzle painting -- a blow in the face of men for whom soldiers are a sexual fetish. They sport army clothes because of lust, certainly not because it is fashionable. They search for other rough soldierly men and join sex groups that go with names like Pink Soldiers and Olivengrün. On secret farms and in deserted barracks they experience their army-sexual practices of discipline, humiliation, and imprisonment, of domination and commands.

Some gay men, once conscientious objectors, now feel completely at ease in the gay army. Others discovered during their time of service that barracks hold more than stupid boredom. They evoked desires that could be better experienced in a pseudo-battalion with gays than stationed at a post in Kosovo with straight soldiers. Read the book S1 by Bram van Stolk (1995, in Dutch) for a story, horny in retrospect, but in reality no fun at all. It is about a drill sergeant, pushing his recruits’ faces in the mud to near expiration, because they were not obedient. Soldiers and obedience are staples of gay porn.

An important element in soldier sex is a sense of equality inside the ranks. Put on a uniform, become one with the group, and horny dreams of brothers and comrades follow automatically. Soldiers have it, but also cops, soccer players, working men, sportsmen, squatters, skinheads, leather folk, and gays who have created their own male uniform with crew cuts, levis and white t-shirts. Many gay men cannot resist the fantasy of “real men amongst each other.” The military has always been teeming with budding gays who thought it dead certain that the men’s world was their calling. They became priests, soldiers, sailors, cops. Some felt attracted to the supervirility of nazi groups or skinheads. Most of them had a rude awakening because of the homophobia of real men. And many macho men appeared to be sissies in disguise.

In the gay scene the cult of masculinity sometimes inspires laughter. Leather guys and gay soldiers may want to look like real blokes, but underneath a mask of macho behavior is a daft tart. They are simply queens who cannot live up to their pretence, goes the argument. A frock would suit them better than a uniform. This bit of criticism is rather weak, since most of the time the pose of masculinity in straight men is even less convincing. Their macho performance is a religion and a dogma they cannot laugh at. This can be a problem for gay men too. When it comes to sexual pleasure, keeping a distance from or being ironical about your soldierly role is not beneficial to lust. In a gay army an iron discipline that suppresses giggles is a prerequisite for a satisfying sexual result.

It is quite some progress though, that you do not have to enter the real barracks anymore to have army sex, that gay men can have fun among each other, without depending on whoring rookies. Also that iron discipline and severe training are no longer boring labor for the whole week, but the horny pleasure of pink soldiers who ignore the discos full of clones and spend weekends in real or fake barracks to satisfy their army-sex desires.

Asphyxiation

Getting excited by reducing the oxygen flow has been named asphyxiation. Another word is hypoxyphilia, loving a lack of oxygen. There are several ways to do it. The simplest is to replace normal air by sniffing poppers, though they are not legal in the Netherlands and many other places. The plastic bag is used with similar results. Put the bag over your head, close it off around your neck and soon the oxygen level will go down to dangerous levels but your cock may rise. Hanging can achieve the same result. Every year about 200 mostly young men die in the US because of accidents related to this practice. Because of these dangers, it might be wise to find a partner who shares your hang-up, so you can help each other out with the technicalities and especially with loosening the rope at the end of the game. Most fatal accidents happen when the pervert loses control of the situation at the moment of cumming and really gets hanged. See Autoerotic fatalities, Strangulation sex

Assassinophilia

Assassinophilia means you love to imagine your own or someone else’s murder. Assassin is the French word for murderer; it stems from a Syrian group of dissident Muslims who not only killed their opponents, but also smoked hashish – hence their name. The crowds of the past who visited public executions or went to the gladiator games, acted upon murderous lust. The Spanish of today use the poor bulls in their arenas for such excitement. There are people who dig the idea of killing or being killed without, in most cases, really wanting to assassinate or be assassinated. These ideas may be very exciting, but the step to the real combination of eros and thanatos is rarely taken. Some can get excited with fake games. Sade (1967: 495) was so happy that he could retell the story of his own execution in absentia: “Everyone knows the story of the brave Marquis de S*** who, when informed of the magistrates' decision to burn him in effigy [his image], pulled his prick from his breeches and exclaimed: ‘God be fucked, it has taken years to do it, but it’s achieved at last; covered with opprobrium and infamy, am I? Oh, leave me, leave me, for I’ve got absolutely to discharge;’ and he did so in less time than it takes to tell.” The idea of the utter debasement of being executed brought him the horniest ejaculation.

Some people play a Russian sex-roulette by engaging in unsafe sex and taking the risk of getting an hiv-infection. There are young gay men who think they are only really gay when they have been infected. Morons. Some men who venture into the scene of male hustlers know they run the risk of being murdered by one of these male beauties. In 1980s in Amsterdam, there were about two murders each year of male clients by street urchins who are insecure about their sexual preferences (van Gemert 1999). Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and composer Marc Blitzstein were victims of such murderous youth. Playing mock-murderous SM games but stopping before it becomes dangerous is a way to express the lust of being murdered. Crucifixion, asphyxiation, or hanging in difficult positions may get beyond the edge and proceed to serious injuries or even death. Take much care when you indulge in such practices and do it preferably with trustworthy companions. Some people are auto-assassinophiles who have a similar interest in this variation, but they desire to kill themselves (see the former and following entries).

Autoerotic fatalities

Various forms of autoerotic activities may have lethal results. The best known among them is strangulation sex. But there are other ways to engage in self-stimulation with an SM touch. Many young men masturbate as an extra stimulation while hanging themselves. They do so in the nude, in their daily outfit or some fetish clothing like drag, women’s underwear, leather and so on. They may use bondage but hanging is the main stimulation. They can use a tree, a beam in a stable or attic, or connect neck and ankles and see to it they can liberate themselves after cumming, or enjoy orgasm afterwards. Most often they do it alone but sometimes – safer - with a group of male youngsters. Many succeed in getting off but things can go terribly wrong mostly because they lose control of the situation, certainly when they stand on the tip of their toes to enhance the pressure. Their feet may slip away, they fall in the final moment of excitement, the convulsing movements of orgasm may move them off their toe tips and they are really strangled. They may not able to unlock handcuffs and so on. You may wonder where they learned this game because seeing imagery of real hangings doesn’t seem a good inspiration. See Asphyxiation, Strangulation sex

Autofellation

The art of being able to suck off your own dick is autofellation. It is mostly the young and athletic who are able to perform this astonishing act. They should do it in public to stimulate the perverted mind, although the act in itself is not perverse.

Bears

Bear love or the love of chubby mates for each other is on the rise. In Holland alone there are two clubs catering to bear aficionados. It started in 1987 with the Bear Magazine and it was a reaction to the supposed effeminacy of gay men but nowadays not so masculine men and transgenders may join. In 1999 in San Francisco it was the absolute number one among gays. A bear walking the streets was the summit of all possible ideals and wild parties were held in his honor. For those failing to understand this preference, let me explain: it has to do with men who are rotund, furry, and get ablaze with lust and love for each other. Lacking these qualities, you can still make it to bear lover. As bears among each other you can go through the whole sexual gamut, but what you often see and what most people can easily picture is kissing and hugging. It sounds a bit dull and thus fits San Francisco to a T. I picture bears as wrestlers or weight lifters, but most of the time these men shave off their fur. Mud wrestling or Turkish oil wrestling is a kinky specialty when I think of bear love, but I have not come upon it yet, except as a passive spectator sport at official oil wrestling tournaments. Or it may get an intergenerational turn when it comes to the mutual love of adult bears and cubs (Wright 1997, 2001).

Bees

Nobody particularly likes to be stung by a bee, but some men will do anything to be stung on their dick so it will swell up. They had better be careful, because some people die of such poisonous stings. And try not to get stung on the unprotected head of the cock as it is difficult to get the sting out of it. The true lover of such a practice is further advised to wrap a leather thong around the root of his cock before being stung, to restrict the blood flow so the blessing of the injected poison remains in the shaft only. It is quite a job, because first you have to catch the bees, drug them somewhat by shaking their cage firmly, so you can more easily lift them up by their wings to put them on the side of your dick and prod them to sting you. Such complicated instructions will almost guarantee failure and mishap. Better leave it to the experts like experienced beekeepers. But if you are lucky, your cock will be twice as big for a day or two.

Befouling

Befouling is exciting for the cleaning freaks that most queens are. The smallest stain on their clothes can drive them out of their minds. Fetishists can be crushed when their beloved apparel shows minuscule defects. Impeccable satin trousers excite me most: no stains, loose threads, or yellow spots. But when people are riddled with such uptight obsessions, the opposite comes in through the backdoor, turning them crazy with lust when their favorite clothes are torn or soiled. So neat and tidy queens may go starry-eyed when their nicest outfits go to pieces. In a fight as a small boy I once damaged the Bavarian leather shorts of the boy next door. His despair over this little accident evoked in me an excitement I can later with near certainty interpret as sexual. Fighting, destroying, and humiliating were our forms of boys’ eroticism. See Cleaning sex

Belly dancing cannot really be classified as a perversion. Boys who belly dance display something unmasculine, slavish, and obscene; for some, this is an attractive stimulus for perverted fun. See Unmasculine

Bestiality

There are many forms of bestiality, zoophilia, or animal love. They are usually seen as occasional relations between man and animal, such as the lonely herder with his entrusted cows or sheep. For some it is a perfect alternative to masturbation. In the nineteenth century Dutch military courts frequently convicted cavalry who boinked their horses or infantry who fucked sheep. The soldiers defended themselves by explaining that their salaries were too low to hire prostitutes. Before 1800 many men were given death sentences for sodomy, mostly for anal sex between men, but in some cases because they had done it with an animal. These cases of bestiality were recorded as sodomy and the death sentence applied to both men and animals (Rydström 2003). Sodomy at that time was about men having sex with men or with animals. Later on, the term referred mainly to animal lovers until the words bestiality and zoophilia became more common. Nowadays, sodomy has made a resurgence in the many books on the history of sodomitical men-lovers.

Anal sex between men and men, men and women, and sex between men and animals were all equally punishable: people were executed for such pleasures which were regarded as “sins against nature” by churches and as capital crimes by Christian states. All over the Western world men have faced the death penalty for such acts. In Sweden, many young shepherds who spent long times alone with their beasts could not always refrain from having sex with their animals. In Germany, half of the men persecuted for “unnatural intercourse” in the early twentieth century had done it with animals (Dickinson 2007). Between 1923 and 1965, Austrian courts saw some 50 cases a year, mostly of young farm boys who received no or light punishment (Grassberger 1968). Kinsey (1948) found that about eight percent of US men had sex to orgasm with animals.

In many countries bestiality is no longer a crime. The police will only get involved if there is a case of public indecency or animal abuse. Some people think bestiality is always animal abuse, but people who really love their pets know better. Animal rights activists oppose any type of animal domestication, so they will define husbandry, pet keeping, and animal love equally as illicit. Because they now have more influence, and men and their animals have become more intimate, there has been a resurgence of indignation about bestiality. Several countries have again outlawed it: Great-Britain under the god-fearing Blair, California under the moralistic entrepreneur Schwarzenegger, France, Belgium and Norway. All Dutch political parties favored criminalization in 2004 after a public outcry over a very innocent case of pony love. Luckily, the Minister of Justice did not see the necessity of one more fake law. But 4 years later, a new parliament and a new minister succeeded this time and made bestiality a crime and forbade animal porn. Where the public sees abuse, real animal lovers see only true love, not crime. Many pet animals demonstrate a desire to have sex with humans. If a dog is riding your leg, it can mean two things: either you need to take a shower and wash your clothes because you smell like a bitch, or it could be that the dog’s owner is a zoophile.

The French gay poet Jean Sénac describes in Ébauche du père (Paris 1989: 121, 149) how he had sex with a chicken during the 1940s in Oran, Algeria. He took one from the coop, fondled it, folded it into a ball, and looked amazed into its seductive anus. “I penetrated. Warm! Good. A bit difficult. Warm. The shit. Fascinated. At the same time afraid, ashamed. I went in it, slowly, awkward. The point of my thing right into it. A rim of pleasure. Warm and like a skin that replies.” The animal died and the poet felt excited and ashamed, stank of shit. It appeared the chicken was not a common hen, but his mother’s beloved cock. This experience did not make him shy away from animal sex. Later, on a farm, he played with a German shepherd, and both got excited. He ended up masturbating the dog, and again he felt pleasure and anxiety, and stank again. Apparently, the sexual excitement was mutual. Later in his life, he changed from animals to young Arabs, and was probably murdered by one.

There are some men who have an exclusive preference for animals, just as others are heterosexuals. In the Byzantine Empire, training animals to have sex with humans was a real profession. The experts used many methods, including putting the animals’ favorite food on sexual organs. They also used the scent of the female of the species and put it on the location where the male should stick his penis. The rest was a question of getting used to it just as with humans.

The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile (Amherst: Prometheus, 1995) offers a fascinating story of a zoophile who loved his mares. It is a classic coming-out story, this time not about being gay or lesbian, but about bestiality. The pseudonymous author, Mark Matthews, was a happily married man with two children when he discovered his preference for horses and ponies. At first he satisfied his obsession in clandestine ways, just as married gay men make a stop along the highway. But slowly the horseman came to the conclusion that he did not want to do it in secret anymore. He struggled with the questions of how to tell his wife, parents, children. They all had to gasp at first but after a time they finally accepted him.

The horseman’s book ends with a few tearjerkers. Friends still find bestiality disgusting but in Mark’s case they feel it is OK. He makes money for charity by letting children ride his horses. To close the book there is a sorrowful story of the death of a beloved mare and the purchase of a new one. In some ways it is easier to be a zoophile than a gay man. There is no market where you can buy a cute guy who after some training, stays in your room like a good boy. The last few paragraphs tell of the new mare’s sexual initiation. The learning process takes some time but the results are positive. She much enjoys the sex with her new owner. Now Mark lives alone on a farm where he can live out his love without worrying about the gossip of neighbors.

Bestiality seems to be more common among men than women (eight against 0.4 percent according to Kinsey). Men enjoy looking at sexual contacts between females and beasts, but women seldom show an interest in this variation. Maybe they are better at keeping it a secret. Men probably fantasize more about bestial sex with well-hung animals such as a donkey, horse, or bull, while women are more likely to choose smaller pets like dogs that lick their pussies. A Dutch novel of a gay sailor described how in the 1950s in Port Said, Egypt, he saw sex shows where among other amusements a prostitute and a donkey had sex together. Rumors go that in bordellos in Mexico they hold bestiality contests in order to attract more clientele. The whore who takes in the donkey’s dong the deepest is proclaimed the winner. They never say whether or not men still actually want to do it with her afterwards. Most likely not because the men were probably more interested in the donkey’s dick than in her cunt. Guys who attend such a contest must be more zoosexual and homosexual than heterosexual.

There are some less loving forms of sex with animals. A hideous form is chicken fucking since the animal rarely ever survives it as Sénac found out, to his dismay. The men who do it usually make it even worse by strangling the bird at the moment of climax. When the chicken dies its sphincter contracts and the man gets better pleasure from the beast. It is not only chickens that are abused in this way, but also turkeys and geese. In a body-art film by Otto Mühl there is one such scene with a goose.

There are people who shove fish, snakes, and rodents, sometimes in a sack, into their body cavities. The vibrating movements of such animals can be very stimulating, but also very dangerous, not unlike the bottles that may break in your ass. A subcategory of bestiality is insect-love or formicophilia. The little critters crawling all over your body stimulate lust. Using a bit of honey on the genitalia or another erotic zone assures the insect-lover that they keep busy.

Roman emperors practiced a very different form of bestiality. They sometimes pretended that their partners, or they themselves, were animals. Julius Caesar used to wrap himself in a lion pelt and attack his captives, in particular their genitals. Tiberius taught very young slave boys to nibble on his dick like little fishes while he swam. Some modern masochists find great pleasure in being treated as a dog or horse. The Dutch David Boy ran a hot story about young men who were hitched to a carriage and forced to run a race like horses. The losing “horses” were of course severely punished and whipped, but what happened to the winners? Unfortunately, this sport is not in the Gay Games. In some leather shops they sell rubber dog or pig masks for the masochist who enjoys the humiliation of not only being treated like an animal, but also looking like one.

Anthropologist Marie-Christine Anest did a study on homosexuality and bestiality in Greece and wrote Zoophilie, homosexualité: Rites de passage et initiation masculine dans la Grèce contemporaine (Rites of Passage and Male Initiation in Modern Greece. Paris: 1994). It seems Greek boys still like to initiate their sexuality with gay sex but apparently neither are the local donkeys safe from the young Greeks’ sexual antics. Often it is only a lonely shepherd or a soldier lost at a desolate guard post who shoves their prick into an animal or anthill. Sometimes it is practiced by a group of boys from five to 17 years old. In the late afternoon they go searching for a suitable animal like a cow or donkey. They tie the animal to a tree and while the older boys begin the fucking the others hold it still. In some places they all run into the sea afterwards, where they relive their excitement by jacking each other off. Sometime the boys masturbate the donkey, a local symbol of potency. The boys use the example of the spurting donkey cum to test their own testicle capacity. They find all kinds of reasons to have sex together.

The Greeks have a whole mythology about the pros and cons of certain animals. On the island of Cyprus, boys have a preference for donkeys because they believe sex with donkeys will make their cocks grow larger. With a sow it may be more fun, but also more dangerous because if the pig enjoys it, she pushes back and a boy could be squashed under the weight of a sow. The boys keep their sex with animals totally secret but sometimes leave the piles of stones that they stood on to fuck the donkey as a proud memory of their escapades.

Greek boys have sex in groups with beasts and with each other. It offers a safe and stimulating situation to learn about sex and try out new variants. In a club, kinky sex is often more exciting and relatively safe. Beginners can watch from the sidelines at first and participate when they feel comfortable enough. Their friends might help them to overcome their shyness. People can invent new games and break barriers together. Crazy people have less of a chance to create a disaster as, for example, with strangulation sex. A club for every perversion and a disco with a mini-zoo would be ideal.

Those who are acquainted with the work of Midas Dekkers know that his jokes are often a bit stale and straight; that is also the case with his book, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality (Dutch original, 1992; English 1994), the standard work on this subject. But it carries many nice pictures and some heartfelt things are said. Dekkers (1992: 164) opposes the pathologization of bestiality: “As long as neither partner suffers, there is in fact no possible form of sex that is sick, bad or crazy.” True, but where to draw the line about suffering? (Beetz & Podberscek 2005)

Biastophilia is a hang-up for rape. Such pseudo-serious words are often too abstract for horny thoughts. See Rape, Gangbang

Bisexuality is not a perversion and so we skip it.

Biting

Biting, like scratching, is a crueler form of kissing. Besides the kiss of love, we all know the love-bite. Sink your teeth into his or her neck, nose, ass, belly, or chest and you will leave a nice red imprint of your love in the physique. Who does not know the awkward moments when, talking to somebody, you suddenly notice the signs of a love-bite or hickey on the other person’s throat. Against your will your eyes are drawn to it, no matter how you try to avoid paying attention. The other one can try to cover up this visual evidence of love by putting on a shawl or putting up his collar. Talking about it can be bad form.

Blind sex

When you like to be blindfolded or wear a mask, that is amaurophilia or blind sex. The deprivation of one sense – in this case: seeing - makes the others more intense. The feeling of powerlessness this evokes increases the horniness of many people tremendously. Depriving someone of several senses makes the one that cannot be wrapped up, the sense of touch, the pinnacle of sensitivity. No voyeurism for amaurophiles, but should feelings of exhibitionism be accelerated? See Mask

Block

The word block always summons up horny dreams in me. A raised platform for the sale of slaves is the ultimate for an exhibitionistic masochist and voyeuristic sadist. A slave brought to the dais with a rope around his neck, turned around, shown, humiliated, etc. For pain freaks, branding offers an extra stimulus: selling a slave on a block, furthermore branding him as a token that he is the possession of the buyer, that he is less than a human being, that others decide on his life and his fate. Branding bums on a block. Preferably shackled in iron bracelets.

Blood sports

The most dangerous are blood sports when blood in great quantities is lost or contamination occurs so there is a risk of HIV-infection. At the end of the last century there was a pedosexual in Germany who liked nothing better than pricking boys with a needle and sucking some of their blood. Because the guy was Jewish, this was cause for great commotion. Age-old myths of vampires sucking the blood of innocent and in this case Christian children were dug up, to turn an inconsequential affair into a major scandal. I think the whole idea of blood sucking and vampirism is outdated, but maybe it is on the rise in the emerging Gothic scene. In earlier days physicians put leeches on their patients as a treatment for many a disease. As medication it did very little for most diseases but it may unintentionally have evoked horny lusts of which we still know nothing. Which is a major loss.

Body manipulation

These days body manipulation is pretty popular. For a long time this custom was reserved for puritans. They circumcised boys and girls to subject them to a repressive sexual morality. In Holland it is occasionally discussed whether the circumcision of boys as well as girls should be outlawed. The female version is nowadays forbidden; the male version was paid for in the past by Public Health Care (!). Most people still find the mutilation of a boy’s genitals in babyhood less objectionable than that boy’s genitals being sucked off in adolescence by a friend. Nowadays body manipulation has become popular in diverse forms, from the relatively benign like piercing and tattoos, to the extreme like scarring or removal of body parts and also circumcision. In continental Europe, the countries of the uncut, there are men who desire to be circumcised because they like the cut version of the penis better. In the USA, where male genital mutilation is common, it is the other way around: there are men who have a foreskin sewn on since they prefer them uncut. We may expect that other bodily additions and manipulations will one day become more common and people will find inspiration in the bodily manipulations of “primitive” people on noses, lips, teeth, earlobes, genitals and elsewhere. Some men are again so obsessed with big dicks that they pay enormous sums to gain a few centimeters through an operation. Never heard something similar for clits but of course women not only have cosmetic surgery on their face but also in their genital area, like on labia and vagina. There are men who want to have breasts put on or their genitals taken off and women who desire smaller or bigger bums or bosoms. Complete transsexual operations have made it into Public Health Care, while the other artful body manipulations have not, even if they are based on strong sexual obsessions.

Bondage

Human bondage has many forms. The most common type is symbolic. In marriages and relationships, two people submit to being tied together for eternity. Women promise obedience to their husbands. For some this is the most enticing and rewarding kind of being bound. Physical bondage takes place with ropes, belts, handcuffs, chains, and the like. These objects are readily available and less expensive than a marriage or registered partnership.

Each technique has its own pros and cons. Rope can cut into the skin and create unnecessary pain. Silk and cotton can easily crack. Handcuffs can get stuck to the point where you need bolt cutters in order to get loose. Bordellos in Holland only get a certification of quality when such cutters are available in their SM playrooms.

Rope is fun for boy scouts. Joost Veerkamp devoted a sexy handbook to ropes and boys, Het verkennen van jongens (1988: scouting for boys). The rope culture offers many possibilities for sexually stimulating games that are just not possible with steel cuffs. Some Japanese bondage rope work looks like works of art. Ropes also are closely tied up with other gay fetishes, not just boy scouts, but also soldiers and sailors.

Many bondage toys are also available in leather: belts in many sizes and forms, cuffs to bind everything from your neck to your feet, dog collars, masks, horse bits, and cock cages. The nice part about leather is its smell. It has the distinct advantage that the material is softer than rope or steel. You can use it to hang people head down, feet up. With a leather belt you can not only tie your slave up but also beat him. Straightjackets are sometimes made from leather. Rubber as a competitor to leather has the distinct advantage (maybe you think it is a disadvantage) that it closes off the body and makes you sweat immensely. But leather is more reliable for bondage games.

Iron and steel are often used in combination with leather. The most interesting iron toys for bondage are cuffs, chains, and bars. These last toys have shackles that can be put on ankles and wrists, or collars around the neck. The bars can be used to spread your prisoner’s feet, which has the distinct advantage of opening up his arse. Some bars have fetters for ankles and wrists; others fix wrists and neck together while the larger ones look like a pole that has a neck collar and shackles for wrists, ankles and middle. Such tie toys restrain most movements so your victim can get too stiff in his impossible position.

Iron and steel are hard, cold, and scentless and can make sexy noises. Some people get off on handcuffs clicking on the wrists of a petty criminal, while others dream of the clatter of chain gangs. Steel and iron fetters can be fitted with spikes that make them look more dangerous. In the nineteenth century struggle against masturbation, codpieces were made with spikes on the inside to prevent boys from getting hard-ons. Some men today have special ones made with the specific aim of getting an erection. The same can be done with dog collars.

Cages can be made from iron, but also from wood or stone. They do not bind masochists literally but very much restrict their movements. There are special cages that make most movements like standing up or lying down impossible; these fit only one person. The most extreme are the iron cages that have a human form with spikes on the inside: these are meant to kill. The cages of zoos for animals or the cases for fattening pigs and calves also inspire many SM people: bondage plus bestiality.

Bondage aficionados often turn to the Middle Ages for their bondage and torture dreams. The high priest of SM, Larry Townsend, wrote about such medieval practices as impaling and crucifixion. He advises against trying either of these practices at home. Impaling is a form of capital punishment -- the victim is set with his ass on a pole that will slowly penetrate his intestines because of his own weight. It was a humiliating penalty that equaled the convicted person to a sodomite. A mild form of impaling can be imitated with a big dildo. The Catholic Church has created many arousing pictures of bondage and torture. Many men have popped their loads to such images as Christ nailed to the cross or Saint Sebastian bound to a tree. Such images made Japanese author Yukio Mishima a gay masochist. Holy Sebastian has become the icon of gay sadomasochism and several books are devoted to his cult.

More realistic and less murderous medieval games can be played with wooden pillories that can be found in some leather bars. These also come in different forms, from the ones that only hold ankles or wrists to the most famous one for neck and wrists. Pillories were mainly used for humiliation. The public could throw mud, rotten eggs, or tomatoes at the victim who had to endure their anger and excitement, and who was often maimed or even killed by the mobs.

Another medieval punishment that has recently regained some popularity is branding. It is a special form of bondage because it does not impede the movements of the branded person. Although it is a physical inscription on the body, the tie that is created is more on the symbolic side. A branding shows that the branded person is restrained in his movements not by physical means but by the authority of his master whose sign is on his body.

Nineteenth century medical treatments have also found their way into the modern bondage culture. Chastity belts and straightjackets are perfect examples: once again their use has been reversed, from inhibiting to inciting arousal. To go one step further, there are some who like to be bound to an operating table or dentist’s chair for treatments such as catheter insertion, speculum exams, or extracting teeth.

There are many techniques and materials for bondage. What things and how they can be bound is a theme for specialists that could fill many volumes. Hands, feet, neck, cock, balls, mouth, ass, and eyes can be tied down, closed up, or bound together. Nipples are useful for clamps and rings, as are thumbs for cuffs and screws. There are gags with or without holes for oral penetration. People can be tied to trees, torture-, goal- and totem poles, as well as to furniture, a cross, an iron ball, behind a horse or to a wagon, to other prisoners or animals, in a cell, cage, chest or sling. Some like to hang their victims, whether it is just with their tiptoes touching the ground or in a leather harness upside down. Bondage can be added to a scenario of prisoner of war, galley slave, gladiator, patient, animal, scoundrel, thief, whore and of course cowboys and Indians.

Bondage is a basic technique that has so many variations, it is easy to think of it as fitting any situation. In the end everyone has his own bondage fantasy. The major difficulty is communication between the participants, because each person has his unique wishes. Working together is easiest when one person’s curiosity becomes a rewarding experience for all involved.

Where is the excitement in these bondage practices that can be so exhausting because of all the work involved? For the most part it is psychological. The Marquis de Sade suggested centuries ago that the greatest sexual rewards come from the deepest humiliation, from surrender to pain and filth. The loss of control makes the masochist feel free, letting himself go to the desires of the other. Power provides sorrows that inhibit the lust while powerlessness erases them and makes the lust overpowering.

It remains an interesting question whether such humiliation is bound to our post-Christian society that still finds sex a taboo and remains guilt ridden, a society where punishment, not sex, is the stimulation. If you think about bondage this way, the desire is not between your ears but in your culture. As far as I know, SM was unknown in ancient Greece and Rome. These cultures had a more easygoing sexual culture, while those who were into violence and humiliation, received their part in daily life that was dominated by slavery and cruelty. Maybe sexuality and violence were so deeply ingrained into the culture that SM, like homosexuality, never got a chance to develop into a separate identity and lifestyle.

Devotees of gay bondage could in the past turn to magazines like Project X, Itch, or nowadays Bound and Gagged. The best creator of erotic drawings of women in bondage was John Willie (1902-1962), who in his time collaborated with several magazines. Bizarre has been republished by Taschen. Willie’s work depicts mainly women in bondage and humiliation but that should not keep gays from enjoying it. Larry Townsend’s writings and publications, the art work of Étienne or the Tom/ns of Finland, Holland, Pékin are a main source for gay men in SM. The “autobiographical novel” That Day at the Quarry (1994) by Tom Shaw is engaging reading. These works offer the possibility of dreaming about things you would not want to happen to you, but which are hot nonetheless.

Boy love

Boy love is a nice word but a rather difficult concept to discuss because “boy” has so many meanings. In contact ads 50-year-old men advertise themselves as “boys.” If you call a black man in the USA “boy,” you will most certainly offend him because of the servile undertone of “boy” that dates back to the times of slavery. Boy love generally stands for the love of adult men for male persons between the age of preadolescence and young adult. But even in this description it remains vague, for a six-year-old can already be a boy and some male children never become boys because they are stupid or unplayful. For others a boy is only a boy when he behaves boyishly, something not all boys do. I have seen retired men or girls behaving as boys, and many male persons who never reached that blessed state.

As if that were not enough, there is also the age of consent that makes a boy an adult. That boundary varies. Is it when he can drive a car, become a soldier, get paid work (in the sex business), have sex, buy alcoholic drinks or drugs, and so on? Countries also have different sexual ages of consent: In most, it is between 12 and 18, but in some countries no male of any age is allowed to have sex with another male (most often these laws don’t mention lesbian sex). This is quite different from the age of their conscious sexual awakening, which for boys as well as girls starts around their twelfth year. According to biologists, in the twentieth century menarche in women started some 18-24 months earlier than previously, nowadays at about 12 years of age. Some see this as the beginning of sexual life. According to Freud and many other psychologists, erotic life starts at birth. Sexual innocence may thus be rather an imposed than biological state. Related to this question is quite another: is sex play bad for children who are not sexually “ripe” yet? Perhaps it is better to teach about sex and sexual citizenship so they know what they engage in rather than enforce chastity until marriage which few young people are able or willing to maintain. Since the 1990s there has been a tendency to raise the age of consent, recently in Japan to 18; the European Union intends to do the same. In an always more sexualized society, age of consent and of sexual ripeness go in opposite directions. It means that most kids are said to be biologically ready for sex by 12 but have to wait until 18 before they can engage in it. These are difficult times for boys and girls who go for sex, and also for boy love. See Pedophilia, Pederasty

Branding

In the past slaves and criminals were branded to indicate who was their owner or what crime they had committed. The signs could be placed on the head where it was difficult to hide them and on other parts of the body, such as shoulders or arms. For criminals, brands served as warnings to respectable citizens, a kind of bodily inscribed criminal register. The branding itself was often a public event on a scaffold, intended both to humiliate the bad guys and warn the good guys. The humiliation is even greater because branding is commonly done to animals. Nowadays branding has become a rare but very horny habit among kinky people who have reasons similar to those of the judges and owners of the past: to show that a slave is your property and to humiliate him or her. The nicest is when the body is branded in a public setting, to excite the sadists and frighten the slaves. It is a good entrée for an evening of sex and abuse. What is branded on the body of the slave is up to the master: his name, initials, an S for slave, simply a number, perhaps some sign of belonging or of the offenses that occasioned the punishment. A simpler version of branding is writing texts or numbers on the body, or using a knife. What some like about branding is the smell of burned skin. It is advisable to use a specialist - mistakes can have severe consequences.

Brands

Fetishes are sometimes focused on brands or trademarks. Skinheads prefer Lonsdale while sport-crazy queers and sneaker fags fight about whether Nike, Adidas, or Puma is sexier. My preference goes to Adidas, not only because their suits and shorts are shiny and soft – good for sexual stimulation - , but also because of the three stripes that make me think of prison bars. When my nephew told me that young people explain Adidas as an abbreviation of “all day I dream about sex” (of course you can create your own variation with sadism, satinism, satanism, slavery, sneakers, sportsex), it made me even hornier. When I walk the streets, I do not often miss the signs of Adidas. To my regret, here in Amsterdam there are too many stupid British hooligans wearing the worst Adidas products. Some young queers, however, look very tasty in the vintage sportstuff with the three stripes. Have a look on the internet market and you will find which brands are in fashion by the references to sexual or gay interest.

Bum-love

Pygophilia or bum-love should be sharply distinguished from anal preferences. You can love bums and hate fucking. You can satisfy the love of the round bum by kissing, licking, rubbing. Some men express their love of buttocks by dealing blows to the beloved arses and from this an entire specialty developed with its own clubs and magazines. Castigatio, as a club is called, or chastising, is not, of course, restricted to the behind. With certainty we can call spanking bums one of the sweetest ideas in the spectrum of sadistic preferences.

Burial sex

The desire to be buried is tafephilia. Most people have a mortal fear of being stuffed in a coffin under the ground still alive and some go to any length to make sure their coffin will not be sealed before it is absolutely certain they’re dead, but a small group gets off on the idea of being buried. A coffin to them is what a cage or a cell is to a masochist, with a pinch of hypoxyphilia (love of lack of oxygen) added to it. Tafephilia in short is strangulation sex in a coffin under the ground.

Cages

Not only birds, but also prisoners, naughty boys, and masochists get locked up in cages. They come in many forms. Prisons have cells for prisoners, bad boys may be penned up in a toilet, farms have sties and stalls for pigs and calves, zoos have cages for wild animals, and dogs are put in kennels. Depending on his bestial, criminal, or boyish inclinations, a masochist can choose any of these. The size of a cell is of utmost importance. Some people like big cages for groups of prisoners, while others prefer tiny cells that leave little space for movement: too short to lie down, too low to stand up. Cages can be made of wood, stone, iron or wire netting, each with its own charms. A stockade is for some reason very horny and makes a nice square cage. In China and Japan they used wooden cages or cangues to put criminals’ heads in, or simply placed a board around their necks. In Europe they had iron versions of the cangues. Kinky parties in abandoned prisons or stables with their many cells or stalls arouse the fantasy of many SM people. Movies such as Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour show the niceties of prison sex. My earliest dreams concerned circus cages and the trucks that pulled them around. They inflamed boyish dreams of being caged like an animal, pulled along highways to unknown destinations, and put on show to an interested public. Not to speak of the taming and training that the wild animals get from the circus fellows.

Cannibalism

In the past cannibalism was something only “primitive” people did. Europeans used stories of such abhorrent habits to prove their own moral superiority by pointing out that heathens consumed other humans. It is still unclear how widespread cannibalism was because other cultures rarely left any written or other traces of their activities. Also, Europeans liked to tell wild stories about faraway cultures where people were addicted to polygamy, sodomy, and cannibalism and walked around naked. We all know the stereotypical history of the white missionary who disappeared into the cooking pot of the black tribesmen and was eaten with gusto. These wild tribes were eating apes, so why not humans? The Aztecs were infamous for murdering subjected people, but their gods, rather than they themselves, were reputed to eat the hearts of the sacrificed humans. There are myths that it is worthwhile to eat body parts, for example, eat hearts to become more courageous, dicks and balls to enhance male potency, or vaginas to stimulate female fecundity. These stories never had explicit sexual content, but certainly worked on a subconscious level. The people who acted on them were not self-identified perverts, but perverted they were in the eyes of Christians who considered themselves saints compared to such primitives. The real perverts, however, were all along in the Western world. Fritz Haarmann, the monster of Hanover, not only had sex with young boys, but also murdered them and sold their flesh on the local market to get rid of their corpses. After the Great War this police informant picked up male hustlers around the local train station and invited them to his home, where they met their fate. This very much shocked the local population, already stricken by poverty and inflation. Another serial killer who ate human flesh was Jeffrey Dahmer, a white gay man who picked up young guys on the streets of Milwaukee. He had sex with them, murdered them, and ate their meat. His victims were mostly ethnic minority kids. When the police finally arrested him, they found body parts still in the refrigerator. Until then they had not paid much attention to the disappearances, and thinking it was only a lovers’ quarrel, even returned to him a naked, injured Laotian teen who had just escaped his torturer’s clutches: already drugged, he was soon afterward killed by his torturer. Dahmer himself was subsequently killed in prison by a fellow inmate.

The best-known European case is the “cannibal of Rothenburg,” a small German town. Two men met each other on a website devoted to cannibalism. Jürgen B. had a sexual desire to be cannibalized, while Armin Meiwes had a corresponding wish to eat human flesh. First they cut off the cock of the victim but did not enjoy eating it, probably because they did not have the right recipe. Then, Armin killed Jürgen with the final aim of a cannibal solo-dinner. He only half-succeeded, because at the time of his arrest, parts of the body were still uneaten. It became a remarkable and sensational court case. The first question was what, exactly, was the crime: murder, manslaughter, or assistance at suicide? Although the victim had fully cooperated, even suggested the killing, the court decided it was manslaughter and sentenced the culprit to several years in prison. It appeared that there were several hundred interested visitors to the cannibal website. Most of them will not have carried through like this couple, but will have fantasized on the deed. What most people find most abhorrent, others find fascinating and exciting.

Some people say cannibalism and anthropophagy (the eating of human flesh) are different, the first having no erotic aim, while the latter has. The case of Rothenburg makes clear that most people also use the word cannibal for persons with an erotic interest in human flesh. For me there is little reason to go against the common-sense meanings of these terms, also because it is difficult to differentiate between erotic and cultural forms, especially when it concerns half-conscious fantasies.

Books on cannibals often are sensational; the best book on Dahmer is Richard Tithecott (1997). The serial killer, not a subject for this encyclopedia, is excellently treated from a cultural-historical perspective by Senelick (1987).

Castration

Balls make the man. There are many sayings from Latin and other languages that speak of the potential and power in a man’s family jewels. Dutch as well has its share of proverbs about men with and without balls. A man with balls is potent, fertile, and strong because he can keep his women-folk under control so they will not have sex with strangers. A faggot, in this macho-ideology, is a man without balls.

Destiny had it that not all men could keep their balls. In some parts of the world, wars were wars of the fittest. The losers might lose their balls or their entire genitals. In Italy until the late nineteenth century, young boys with beautiful voices were castrated for the opera so that their voices would not change much. Members of radical Russian-Orthodox sects castrated themselves in order to lead a chaste life. Other Christians strongly opposed castration because a chaste life was to be realized from inner convictions, not from external operations. In Arabia, Turkey, and China, slaves were castrated so they could be trusted guardians in the harems. These eunuchs were thought to have no further sexual desires, thus leaving to the master exclusive sexual access to his wives. In India some men chose to castrate themselves for religious reasons. These hijras made their money as musicians, by performing rituals at the birth of babies, and by prostituting themselves. Oxen and capons are respectively castrated bulls and cocks that are said to be tastier as food. Oxen were also said to be both tamer and stronger and thus better beasts of burden. I still don’t know whether these are the true results of castration; perhaps castration produces the queer mix of stronger and tamer animals.

Castration has also been performed on human males to make them tamer sexually. From the 1930s to the 1960s so-called sex offenders (mainly rapists and pedophiles, but also homosexuals) were castrated in the false hope that they would no longer commit “sex crimes”. The results of this policy were disappointing because most castrated men not only did not lose their sexual interest but also developed negative side-effects, and for obvious reasons, acquired anti-social feelings. Some of them moved on from sex-crimes to other forms of criminality. These decades were some of the darkest times for homosexuals in Europe and the US. Many gay and straight men were castrated to curb their sexual desires, sometimes simply because they had been cruising public toilets or expressed a desire for men. Gays were hunted down by police, judged by courts, and castrated by physicians, whose work should be healing, not destroying. Some were coerced into it through pressure exerted by their families, doctors, priests, and deacons. In the Netherlands about 300 men were forcibly castrated in the name of justice and probably hundreds more through their own “free will.” At least half of these men were gay. The experience of being castrated was awful for the victims. The operation made them more feminine, with higher voices, breasts, and less body hair but their desire for sex did not disappear. The criminalized sexual escapades simply continued, and other forms of criminal pursuits were added. For these reasons, the operations were finally forsworn. In their place, a not much better alternative was introduced. Since the 1970s sexual deviants, especially pedophiles, have received various hormone treatments to dampen their sexual desires. Such “chemical” castrations remain ugly magical tools with nasty side effects, but are still imposed.

Some perverts have inverted the negative idea of castration into something desirable. They think it would be horny to lose their balls, but as they dislike the idea of having no balls, they perform pseudo-castrations where the knife passes by but does not actually damage them. Thus they live out their fantasies of being prisoners or losers, or tame but strong oxen.

Paul Bowles’s story “The Delicate Prey” offers a Moroccan version of the castration tale. A murderer shoots a young man in the desert, ties his hands and feet together, and slices off his sex organs, thus robbing him of his honor and life. The story has a “happy” ending when the murderer is buried up to his neck in the desert and left there to die in the cold of the night followed by the sweltering heat of the day. Moroccan hustlers, who sometimes murder their gay clients in Amsterdam, leave the evidence of their ethnicity by castrating the victim and leaving the severed penis in his mouth.

Catamite

Catamite is a good old Latin word for boy whore, game boy, Ganymede, trade, or male prostitute. It is neither a perversion nor a disgrace to make a living with sex, so the word does not belong here. Under money we discuss the perverse pleasure of making money from sexual relations. Game boys have to be mentioned here because of the possibilities they offer to experience perverse pleasures. By no means are all men and boys you meet in bars and clubs interested in all variations described here. If you do not want to keep searching forever, you can try a business transaction. But take care to find a catamite who offers what you are looking for and who does not pursue wrong intentions along with his services. For some game boys, the easy game is robbing a client in bondage.

Catheters

There is a select group of gay men who like to stick catheters in their penises. You can buy them at just about any leather shop, so it cannot be as uncommon as one might think. Catheterophile Alfred Kinsey, famous because of his sex reports, put not only catheters in his dick, but also the end of a toothbrush. He seems to have started this practice with straws at a young age. Some Australian aboriginals widened the urethras of young boys so they could fuck them by that entrance. Penis manipulation knows many forms. What is abhorrent and painful to most people is once again the pleasure of others.

Cats

In the 1920s a doctor suggested the presence of cats in a male household was a sure sign of homosexuality. Straight was dog, queer was cat. Gay men are often cat lovers, but I have never heard of them having sex with their pets.

“Men and Cats” is the title of a short story by Dutch author Jac van Hattum. Two near-naked men fight each other with hissing cats as their weapons: a cruel love battle with messy results. “The fellows soon were bloody torsos; then they hit each other’s face; when they were blind in four bloody eye-sockets they threw the cats against the wall and fumblingly searching for each other they embraced. In each other’s arms they wept like sentimental drunkards and restlessly their hands caressed their slashed trunks.” The narrator joins in the bloody love-game, rubs salt and pepper in the wounds of the dying men and kisses them where they are still undamaged. This story of cat love was published in 1947. It is a specialty, which we can sum up best as blind sadist cat sex. We will pardon Van Hattum his sordidness and figure it was an echo of a cruel war. His books and poetry that contained more gay material were remarkable not only because they were early homosexual, but also algolagnic works.

Cells come in many forms, from small cages for animals to large prison rooms where sometimes dozens of prisoners are incarcerated. See Cage, Prison

Chains

Another word that inspires the libido of the pervert is chains. Used in bondage for prisoners, slaves, criminals, masochists, but mainly for forced laborers who have to travel in chain gangs to the workplace or penal colony. In early nineteenth-century France they chained two forced laborers together and these men, delivered to each other on their chain for days, sometimes fell in love, or simply had sex. The French called chain mates who desired each other “chevaliers de la guirlande,” a term much beyond the atrocious situation in which they lived. These lovers in chains, these “knights of the garland,” became popular in French plays and cabarets. Their love apparently inspired erotic fantasies in the Parisians of those days (Dobelbouwer 2001). Why not revive such nice traditions – chain gangs of masochists at kinky parties and cabarets that celebrate their loves on stage!

Chicken sex

Strangely enough, chicken sex is not only the sex of chickens but also the literal translation of a Chinese word meaning homosexuality. Under Western influence the Japanese established anti-homosexual laws, and for a short time also a regulation prohibiting unnatural fornication: in these, the Chinese word for chicken sex was used. No one has ever been able to explain to me how chicken sex resembles gay sex to the extent that they share the same word.

I once found a so-called friendship glass that showed two fucking roosters under an inscription “Sote vriendschap.” Such friendship glasses were made in Europe in the eighteenth century and could be both homo- and heterosocial. Their aim was the celebration of friendship: two friends would drink together from such a glass. Most glasses show two intertwined hands or two persons embracing each other with words for friendship in Dutch, French, or Latin. The glass of “sote vriendschap” is exceptional because it apparently refers to a friendship of sodomites, strongly prosecuted in the Dutch Republic at that time. The engraving “sote vriendschap” supports this view because “sote” is not a Dutch word, but “soete” (sweet) and “sotte” (foolish) are. I suppose the epitaph has to be read as sweet, foolish friendship. The carving of the two cocks underscores this reading. And again we have to ask the question why fucking roosters represent same-sex desire. Probably because vagina and anus are combined in hens so all sex is anal sex – and then adding a touch of humiliation to sodomites by representing them as chickens. But then, why did they do it themselves? – because the glass surely belonged to a couple of friends.

Some humans have fucked chickens for their pleasure. Otto Mühl, the Viennese actionist, made a movie that continued his work on body art that included a scene of fucking a goose. The most sordid part of this scene is the strangulation of the bird at the moment of climax. This is done to augment the pleasure: at the moment of death, the sphincter of the goose contracts. Otto Mühl was a follower of Wilhelm Reich’s freudomarxist theory. He believed that people should go through all forms of sexuality in fantasy or practice, including incest and bestiality, to become healthy heterosexuals. See Bestiality.

Child sex: See Infantile games, Pedophilia, Pederasty

Choreophilia is dance love.

Chrematistophilia

The love of being a victim of extortion is chrematistophilia. With the disappearance of blackmail, modern gay men have lost one interesting perversion. When homosexuality was still a crime, hustlers made money not only selling their bodies but also by extortion of their clients. It still happens with adulterous straight men who believe in monogamy, but only in conservative circles are such sins taken so seriously that blackmail is possible. Chrematistophiles could replace their desire for extortion with a desire to be robbed. Take a hustler home for some good bondage sex and you might experience the lust of being robbed against your will and understand what the queens of older days lusted for with petty criminals who blackmailed them. Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899-1923; Yearbook of Sexual Intermediaries) has many newspaper notices on men who were blackmailed and sometimes committed suicide after being “disgraced” (becoming known to be a homosexual), but never of gay men who liked the experience. So the passion remained a well-kept secret.

Circumcision. See Body manipulation

Claustrophilia

The opposite of claustrophobia and agoraphilia is claustrophilia. Instead of fearing closed spaces or loving open spaces, a claustrophile gets excited by cells, cages, or being stuck in an elevator. A claustrophile feels more comfortable in a tight dog cage or chicken pen than in an open square.

Cleaning sex

Another word to start daydreaming about; cleaning sex. Some boys and men immediately think of shower scenes or the rough soaping up of each other’s bodies. Some fantasize about working their loved ones over with sharp detergents, bleach, or drain cleaner (might cause irreparable damage). Romantics will dream of a tongue caressing their toes or nipples. Lazy fags think of young men cleaning their homes for free with sex added.

The cleaning drive of gay men has always surprised me. It must be their feminine disposition, urging them to make their dwellings look spick and span. Empty and bare rather than full and dirty, seems to be how many queers prefer their houses. Even far-out masochists crawling the floors of dark rooms, getting horny licking shitty boots, can let their mums eat straight from their well-cleaned kitchen floors at home.

Maybe it is the inclination for discipline and control that turns gay men into such cleaning freaks. I have known some who could only sleep with you after you were scrubbed completely clean under the shower, with a shower cap though, because your hair was not supposed to get wet and soil the bed. They get nervous when the cups and glasses in their cabinet are not lined up perfectly. They get desperate when the colors of the flowers you give them don’t match the well-planned color scheme of their living room.

When a friend of mine got his first cleaning boy, he thought he had to give guidance with a billy club. And he wanted his help to walk around naked with shackled feet, so he would not be able to escape prematurely. He stuffed dollar bills in his underpants, so the boy had to undress him to get the money he had earned, after which my friend expected some free sex. The boy told my friend he was a stupid faggot and could keep his money, turned on his heels and left. Since then my friend tries to find cleaning help in the slave circuit, but he finds most of the propositions not very appealing. He is a dumbo and demands too much.

Another acquaintance did much better. He did not ask for help in his household, but placed an ad under personals for a cleaning slave. He was lucky and a host of willing candidates lined up for an interview. They were all eager to do the cleaning work, preferably in maid or prisoner attire, either heavily chained or in subservient positions. Some liked to be beaten or to be fucked. This acquaintance had his hands quite full, keeping his seraglio of house-slaves at their cleaning work, because his slaves turned out to be masters of disobedience. He learned he could slap them around better after they had done their work well than the other way around, since punishments for these slaves were their own reward. And a reward is only given after the work has been done punctiliously.

A bisexual masochist friend did things differently. He began as household help (little variation, always the same bosses), and then started his own cleaning agency. His next step was to become a cleaning consultant. In that capacity he called on his customers at their homes, giving directions about how they could furnish their house so that it required minimum upkeep. It was lucrative financially and sexually stimulating, because while he was snooping around the house, in search of dust and grease spots, and looking for contact points (the smaller the better), he had ample opportunity to strike sexual poses and make sexual innuendos. Often his advice resulted in a sex game, with all kinds of role-playing and positions.

When another friend of mine got a cute cleaning boy, he dreamed of turning the roles around with himself as the dull maid, the other as the cruel boss. The help could earn double wages if instead of cleaning, he would force my friend to dust and mop in chains and cuffs and torn, obscene clothing. The new master further had only to give orders, deliver a kick or blow now and then, and put a boot on neck or cock. My friend satisfied his longing for humiliation and abuse and the help earned more money for less work.

As a maid my friend derived too little pleasure from only one boss, so he kept on dreaming and thought the young man, just promoted from boy to master, should start an employment agency for domestic help with an ample supply of boys and men trained for drudge- and slave-work. Once a week he could sell his livestock at his house. His clients then could choose from those on offer and negotiate on slavishness, sexual obligingness, attire, and length of working hours. In that way the beloved cleaning boy could even make more money as supervisor of a slave stable, while the masochistic maid as his commodity could serve different gentlemen all over the city in the household and with sex.

It is fabulous how many ways there are to humiliate and abuse a house-slave. Fuck him, while he does the dishes with cuffed hands. Make him lick your floor clean. Fondle him while he has to keep on working. Limit the movements you ask of him, like undressing while tied up, so that he can only get naked by laboriously tearing the clothes off his body. You can make your house extra dirty in all kinds of ways, so that the maid derives little satisfaction from his labor.

Publicly offering cleaning slaves is another situation to dream about. In what state are they being offered, tightly tied up, to a pole, in a cage, naked, in a uniform like an overall, soccer gear, or waitress dress or in other ridiculous clothes, wearing a mask and stuffed with a mouth gag? Do they have to perform their sex and cleaning trick right away, can they be abused and maltreated on the spot, how is the rental arranged -- by a fixed price or by an auction? How are they delivered to their buyer, or do they deliver themselves with all the necessary subservience?

There must be a beautiful and lucrative career waiting for a cleaning helper, who works his way up to renter of cleaning- and sex slaves. It might be difficult at first to find a sufficient supply of willing masochists, but there are many of this kind among gay men. You have to convince them that all is safe and fun. For the clients the only problem might be that people who simply want their house well cleaned and who are not in it for the sex, are also served hand and foot. It all comes down to the proper drilling of the maids.

Beyond cleaning there are other markets for serviceable boys and men such as waiter, guard, nurse, pet, rocking horse, towel or some other thing. Cleaning is an obsession for gay men. It can also be much more fun and horny. With a link to money-sex it becomes doubly profitable in terms of spunk and cash. See Thing Sex.

Cock

The cock is the most venerated fetish in homoland. That is why there are so many words for it: penis, prick, dick, pencil, phallus, tool, apparatus, young man, basket etc. There are many words that go with it like cockring, cocksure, cocklove, cockfetters and whatever you like. The cock itself may be the object of all kinds of perverse games. An acquaintance of mine, in his youth, was in the habit of linking his dick to his friend’s with a rope through their shorts’ opening. They subsequently set off on a bike tour. The fun was to prevent the distance between them from getting longer than the rope. They were courting danger for their excitement. Imagine the ways in which they ended their funny but dangerous game. And this is only one of various forms of cock torture!

Coprophilia (scat love), coprophagy (eating shit) and coprography (writing dirty texts): See Scat.

Cruising

The favorite pastime of many sodomites and pederasts of the past and homos and gays of the present is cruising: walking around in specific places to find sex partners. The word cruising comes from the Dutch kruysen, a crosswise pattern of sailing to block a harbor. Ships would sail both with and against the wind to keep enemy vessels from escaping. Similar movements were made by sodomites of the time who tried to find their beloveds in churches, near urinals, by city walls or in other public urban spaces. This cruising culture was the main way to find gay sex for long periods of time in many places in the world. In the Turkish empire and the Arab world, bathhouses were the preferred locations for homosex. Visit Budapest or Istanbul and enjoy their popular and luxurious hammams full of hidden gay sex. The ancient Greeks had their sports schools for such pastimes. In more recent centuries, parks, cemeteries (Père-Lachaise in Paris is famous for its graves of Proust, Wilde, and other gay litterati, and also for cruising between tombs), beaches, train and bus stations, highway stops, and toilets in department stores were added to the regular meeting places. In many cities gay men gathered around military establishments to meet the soldiers who were bored stiff by not warring and so took up gay gaming. The night watches of the past were a similar attraction: in the nineteenth century Dutch police arrested sodomites who tried -- with pouches of money -- to seduce the soldiers who stood guard at government buildings. At the Tiergarten in Berlin and Hyde Park in London, soldiers made extra money by pleasing homosexuals. In Russian Rostov, gay men met and sometimes even had sex on the last run of the circular tramway. In Paris, the second wagon of the subway was suggested for cruising. In the 1970s the abandoned warehouses, empty trucks, and piers of the New York meat-packing district were conveniently located close to the gay West Village.

The trick of cruising was to pick up someone for a moment of pleasure. Some of these places, such as the New York piers, a highway stop near the Dutch city of Utrecht, the quays of the Seine near Austerlitz railway station, and the former fortifications in the Verrières park of Paris, attracted kinky men. Most of these places (except the last) are now lost for wild sex and the leather guys rely more on bars and kinky parties. There are few outdoor opportunities left for men who need parks, stables, and abandoned factories for the extra titillation of sex under a dark sky. Since the 1960s the outdoor cruising places have had competition from the indoor sex of saunas and the dark rooms in bars and discos. Many gay men like the safety and cleanliness of indoors, while others continue to prefer parks and beaches for their beauties and risks. Smell lovers lament the disappearance of urinals because they liked to mix the pleasures of gay sex with the strong odors of piss. The new generation of not-so-queer young gay men abandons cruising for all kinds of reasons: they prefer marriage to cruising and love to sex, desire respectability or integration and reject queer outdoor life. The straight mind takes over queer bodies.

There is abundant literature on gay cruising. The nicest publication was Stream, which appeared in the mid-1990s and published many stories on the pleasures of pavements, parks, and bathhouses (Humphreys 1970; Delph 1978; Dangerous Bedfellows 1996; Leap 1999). See Public sex

Curiosity

Most people think about sex as an expression of their own deepest desires. Since Rousseau and Krafft-Ebing, this self-examination of inner motives has focused on the self, not the other. But because so much sex is duo- or 2-plus-sex, the question should rather be how to get from individual to shared interests. It is easy, of course, when two people share an interest. I always advise my students to think about their sexual preferences and interests, and communicate them to their partners. It seems very practical advice because most people start with sexual relations, even marriages, without ever discussing erotic issues. They are too shy to do so, or don’t even know what they like best in bed. These people will end up disappointed about sex because desires are specific but are rarely shared with an incidental partner, regardless of what great love or passion he or she may inspire.

The best way to start sharing and communicating sexual secrets and pleasures is to be curious about the other. Curiosity is the major principle for learning and exploring life, just as for sexual pleasure and erotic progression. It is the principle that makes us break out of our self-obsessed individuality and sexuality, to emerge from private fantasies and solo-sex to shared pleasures, be it in duo-sex, orgies, or self-stimulation. Curiosity means you want to know about the other, in verbal and physical terms; you want to delve into his small pleasures and great interests. Ideally, the inquiry is reciprocal. When the spark of curiosity has been ignited, sexual relations can go many ways – just as in other social situations. You may become interested, perhaps be seduced, sometimes find yourself disgusted. Occasionally you will be bored. As Edmund White said about gay sex in the 1970s, it may start with a one-night stand, sometimes it remains just that moment of shared pleasure, at other times it develops into a friendship, passion, or love.

Curiosity is what dogs do with each other, sniffing and licking and looking. Humans have the advantage of adding speech and thought to the physical abilities on which curiosity is based. Being curious is the foundation of eroticism; it means conquering sexual and subsequently other worlds.

Cybersex

While some perversions wane or disappear, promising new ones arrive. Any time a new invention is announced, I ask myself how soon it will be put to perverse use. Cybersex is growing at such a rate that it seems as if it might eventually replace real sex. The number of contact ads in all kinds of straight and gay publications has steadily dwindled as more and more people find their lovers and sex partners on the internet. After phone and French minitel sex, it is now the computer age where cybersex is commonplace. The internet offers a forum for all kind of perverted interests, each with their own discussion lists and websites. There is perhaps more perversion in cyberspace than in bedrooms. But there are also police officers and puritans who want to control the internet, for instance, the Cyber Angels, who want to protect the real angels against pedophiles and pornographers.

Already back in the 1990s I met an experienced fag from New York who encountered a Norwegian boy half his age who had never set foot in a gay bar, but knew all about Amsterdam's queer scene, thanks to the city’s website. The younger guy knew most of Amsterdam’s homosexual infrastructure yet had never experienced the feelings, scents, and colors of gay life.

Just as with other telecommunication sex, computer sex offers possibilities that are not easily found in the real world. It lets people image living out their fantasies. A fat old man can become the young butch he once was, someone who has four inches can easily claim to have ten, a straight man can pose as a lesbian woman. The challenges and opportunities are endless. It only becomes difficult, as always, to shift from virtual to everyday reality. With the minitel, half of the contacts stayed in the wires, and with the internet the numbers are surely higher.

Computers offer a dim look into a future in which sex might be reduced to masturbation stimulated by sexy stories, pictures, and distant internet intercourse. Or they may offer a way to increase the possibility of the real thing, as with the New York fag and his Norwegian lover who found each other on the internet and started an actual relationship. See Internet, Webcam sex

Dance love

Choreophilia or the love of dancing is a sweet perversion. My first love was very much influenced by the entranced way my beloved danced. Wild but also elegant dancing turns me on. Dance offers erotic sensations in movement, the flow of clothing, or the scent of sweat. A variation of dance love is love of the ballet, which was very much a hangout for old-fashioned queers. In a city like Amsterdam, New York, or Paris where there are many ballet boys, a ballettophile can get quite wound up. The names of Nijinsky and Nureyev still stir the hearts of many gay men.

Dark rooms

Since the 1950s, leather bars have had dark rooms, separate spaces or basements that are used for kinky gay sex. It is a practical solution to have sex there: you have no qualms about where to go with a new partner. The darkness of the room can add to the excitement of anonymous sex. Some entire bars became dark rooms: their visitors were allowed to have sex everywhere. Since the 1970s some of these sex spaces were equipped with SM material, from slings and cages to bath tubs for piss sex and medical equipment for doctor’s games: Mineshaft in New York, Boots in Antwerp, Lab-oratory in Berlin, kinky bars with names like Eagle and Argos At the same time, some gay bars also created dark rooms for simple, direct sex on the spot. In the 1980s with the quick spread of AIDS, these rooms were sometimes closed, often through local ordinances. The intention was to slow down the epidemic, although the gay movement often protested that AIDS was not spread through certain practices or situations in such locations, but through unsafe sex. These regulations led in some places, such as San Francisco, to a differentiation in gay bars where men could either have sex, or drink, or dance, while bathhouses were closed. These various functions are still combined in Europe’s major gay capitals. From the beginning of the epidemic new cruising bars opened their doors, some bigger than they had ever been before, like Blow Buddies in San Francisco or le Dépôt in Paris. The new epidemic that threatens the dark rooms is same-sex marriage and the ideology of monogamy that often comes with it. In the meantime, dark rooms have themselves become very diverse, from high quality places that are not so dark and attract a yuppie public, to the traditional sleazy places that kinky men continue to visit. Attempts to create dark rooms for heterosexuals failed because of the gender imbalance – there were always more men than women – and the very few for lesbians did not survive because of their clientele’s preference for chatting and love above silence and straightforward sex. See Cruising

Dendrophilia

The love of trees is dendrophilia. It has developed to a remarkable degree among gay men who make forests, parks, and wooded parking areas along highways their favorite cruising places: Central Park in New York, Land’s End in San Francisco, Vondelpark in Amsterdam, Hampstead in London; the Bois de Boulogne, Vincennes, and Verrières in Paris, to mention only a very few of the most famous. Trees can be used to hide behind, to rub against, to tie your lover up, maybe with his hands trussed to a branch. Willow branches are used as whips. As boys, most gay men built tree houses that were their first dark rooms, long before they had ever seen the real thing. Some people simply make love to a tree because they love its softness, or alternately, its harshness. Among those who love soft trees, the young birch has a good reputation, while its branches are famous among spankers. All these things fit under the title of tree love.

Diaper sex

Lovers of diapers have to be differentiated from those who love “infantilism” – the pleasure in practices that belong to baby times. Neither do piss and diaper sex overlap because the guys who go for diapers may not always love the variations of piss sex. The preference for diapers is mainly focused on the modern versions that are no longer made of cotton, but of synthetic material. The pleasures they provoke are the softness and thickness of the material, the cracking noises of the plastic, the queerness of the preference, the excitement of the forbidden, the feeling of liberty by being able to piss without going to the toilet and the piss that is warm and makes the diaper wet – and so even more soft. Although there are specific websites for gay diaper lovers www.diaper-bois.com, www.diapergays.com or www.nappyguy.com, most websites for this specialty are mixed and serve men and women, gay and straight. Sex may be practiced alone, and with one or more partners. The acts that go with this interest, are rubbing and self-stimulation. In some places there are special clubs that cater to this preference, often also admitting people who are into baby play. Like infantile sex, diaper pleasures may go together with s/m-interests, like toilet training, parental discipline games or being punished for being incontinent. For many the mirror plays a major role to show the results of having laid on a diaper. The baby clothing, diapers and toys that go with these preferences are available on internet for the adult lovers of these forms of sex. See Infantile sex.

Dicks

The phallus is the symbol for male power, the penis is the organ for coitus, and the dick is the master of lust. Gay men have cocks, as they rarely partake of the power of the phallus or the straight sex of the penis. Their lust tool is an object of much adulation and adoration, not only from men interested in “grandism” or “macrogenitalism,” but also from those with lower expectations of size. Books are devoted to the celebration of the dick. All over the world, specialized sex parties are organized for size queens. The Amsterdam party of the “Horsemen and Knights” requires that the horsemen have to show a dick of at least six inches to get free access. Those who do not possess such an illustrious cock can find solace in the old saying, “Better a small one that gets hard than a big one soft as lard.” In Dutch it goes, “Beter een kleine die stijgert dan een grote die weigert;” better a small one that prances than a big one that wilts. See Cock

Dildo

The best-known Dutch example of dildoism is the now deceased journalist Ton Kors who constantly handled the subject in his thick, largely autobiographical novel De tijd van Anton de Lange (1995; The Time of Anton the Long). The Marquis de Sade asked his wife to smuggle dildos into his prison, which as a confirmed sodomist he used anally for his solitary practices. Dildos come in all different sizes and shapes, straight and bent, thick and thin, long or short, and they can be made from all sorts of material, the most popular being rubber and silicone. In Amsterdam sex shops they have artsy wooden ones of various dimensions, not for use but to show off. Sometimes dildos are added to pants, torture chairs, gags, bicycle saddles, or put on a pole so the user can wiggle standing on his toes with a dildo in his ass (see the work of painter Bernard Montorgueil in Peakman, 2013: 226). Masks can have dildos pointing outside and inside. The one pointing outside makes the slave behind the mask look extra stupid, while the one pointing inside prevents him from saying stupid things. For lesbians in a faraway past there were double specimens for mutual pleasure. In the late-nineteenth century an anthropologist reported on such a device he encountered among the Arabs of Zanzibar. With some imagination, you can use them to make two slaves “dildo-kiss” each other.

Dildos are made for shoving in cunts or asses but most can also be used orally. Playing with dildos is considered safe as long as they are not too big, do not cause damage, and are well cleaned beforehand. The same goes for bananas and cucumbers. Vibrators are dildos with motors. The Dutch transsexual SM master Betty Paerl once gave a surprising exposé on Dutch television: for her, one of the most important features of such a dildo was its sound -- too much noise becomes distracting during sex. Women’s journals now do just the same: testing vibrators for their readers. Gay men are hardly interested in vibrators: in their leather stores you will hardly ever find one.

Didascalophilia

The puppy love of schoolchildren for their teachers is didascalophilia. Although more than a few gay men develop sexual interest in some of their teachers, the phenomenon is better known among lesbians. The typical erotic school novel for gay men is about sex among boys, while for lesbians it’s about the infatuation of a schoolgirl with a female teacher. Nowadays if the teacher returns the love of the adolescent, all hell breaks loose, even if the child has invented it all: see the film Jagten by Thomas Vinterberg (2012).

Dippoldism

The exact opposite of didascalophilia is dippoldism or committing SM acts on unwilling children. Mr. Dippold was a German teacher who beat, tied up, and starved his pupils. If he discovered they had masturbated, they got very cruel punishments. These penalties cost the life of at least one of the boys. Dippoldism is perhaps a better word to describe people who do inhuman things to others for fear of sexual pleasure.

Dirt love

Under cleaning sex we dealt with variations on the desire to clean what is dirty. A cleaning freak can also be a dirt freak, since excitement is brought on by the dirt he has to clean up. Saliromania is the complicated expression for dirt lover. Cleaning up dirt can be done in many ways, with vacuum cleaners, mops, or rags, but most of these horny bastards prefer to use their tongues. They are dirt crazy, and get their kicks from the crud between toes, mud on boots, or dung on stone stable floors.

Disaster sex

There are people who attract disasters and people who get horny from disasters that happen to them, but more often to others. In fact, the lovers of disaster should try to find guys who attract disaster, but this rarely happens, to the great detriment of society. Because the stubborn practitioners of this preference do not like waiting until mischief happens before their eyes, they help a bit so disasters come about. These are the pyromaniacs among disaster tourists. Disaster tourists among queers are men who find a boy with a bleeding head or a bandaged arm more lust-provoking than a healthy lad. I once came across a guy who had just lost a boxing match. With his arm in a sling and a black eye, he could only repeat in whispers, “I lost it, I lost it.” This cute loser mesmerized me, but I didn’t dare approach him from fear of becoming myself the loser in his next boxing match and a fresh target for disaster queens. Warhol gave his inclination for disaster sex an artistic twist by turning pictures of accidents and electric chairs into works of art.

Discipline

Discipline is an SM specialty – the D in BDSM. It makes one horny because it requires complete surrender to a beloved or bewitching disciplinarian partner. It goes particularly with slavery, bestiality, school, and military sex. Prisoners of war and military men are subdued by discipline. Uniforms not only of soldiers, prisoners, and police officers, but also of nurses, athletes, pupils, sailors, workmen, and butlers, are all different forms of discipline through clothing. On a naked body, the signs of submission to rules and rulers are tattoos, handcuffs, branding, and a shaven head or body. You can often tell that a gay man is interested in discipline because his house is neat and tidy. There is a well-known cliché about the Prussian mind being destined to discipline after centuries-long training. For a lover of discipline, Berlin is a good place if he goes for dogmatic and over-tidy leather men.

Dismorphophilia is a sister of ampu-sex and refers to the love of deformities such as harelip, acne, or crossed-eyes, what Germans call a “Silberblick,” silver gaze. See Ampu-sex

Docking

A special variation of doraphilia (see below) is docking, which can only be practiced between men. One rolls his foreskin over his partner’s dick, or the other way around, so as to rub and ride to reach sexual climax. It is the practice closest to straight sex and is rarely practiced by gay men. I have never seen anything about it in any safe sex information though it seems no more dangerous than a blowjob. You do, however, need at least one foreskin; a circumcised man can only experience it one way.

In some cases, men stretch their urethras with reeds and toothbrushes or other tools (as Australian aboriginals did) to make it possible to enter the penis, thus transformed into a kind of vagina. The aboriginals did so with youths, who became their receptive partners. Modern-day perverts turn themselves into receptive partners in both gay and straight sex and enjoy playing the female part as a sexualized transgender, using their dick and not their ass. If this kind of docking or urethra enlargement interests you, be sure first to seek the advice of a physician or reliable body transformation specialist who will not spoil your small playmate.

Doctors

Doctors invented sexuality, homosexuality and all the other “perversions” in the nineteenth century and did so in close collaboration with the perverts themselves. So it comes as no surprise that there are perversions about doctors. If you have ever read a penny doctor novel, you know what sex with physicians means for straight women – all dreams and romance.

Homosexuals seem to have a completely different idea of doctor sex. There is a tradition of preferences surrounding operation tables and dentist chairs. The surrender of the patient to the surgeon or the dentist has inspired many a sexual game. It is the perverse continuation of the medical inspection games of childhood. Not only do patients have such fantasies: doctors have been known to have sex with their patients while they are anesthetized. At some sex parties and in certain clubs there is a cot or operation table ready for willing recipients of medical mishandling.

Doraphilia

The preference for skin, leather, or hair is called doraphilia. When someone is into bald men, it could be called “dismorphic doraphilia.” Some, like the American Ed Gein, go so far that they kill people. Gein was a man with transgender fantasies; he murdered women, flayed them, and wore their skin. Aztec priests used to practice a similar custom, covering themselves in the skins of human offerings brought to the temple. The Roman emperor Nero went a step further and dressed in lion pelts. He indulged not in transgender, but in trans-species desires. As a lion, he slaughtered the people he had condemned to death. But most doraphiles have less murderous desires and simply enjoy their lover’s skin, hair, or leather clothes, or dock his foreskin.

Dove sex

The twin sister of acoustophilia, or the love for sound, and brother of blind sex is dove sex. The shutting off of both eyes and ears creates a spectacular feeling of dependence that gets most masochists very horny.

Duo-sex

Duo-sex is a more common sex act than heterosexual intercourse. Mono-sex is very likely practiced even more in modern times than duo-sex, but most people only take sex between two - or more - people seriously. It is sad that in their close-minded egocentricity they deprive themselves of the pleasures of self-stimulation. Duo-sex, both gay and straight, will be a perversion when solo-sex becomes the main sex act of postmodern cybersex times. See Trio-sex

Ears

Sexual preferences are located between the ears and, for some people, also in and around the ears. Just as eyes and teeth are subject to experiences of lust, so also the ears. Some men go crazy over small ears, while for others they cannot be big enough. Once I shared my bed with a young man who immediately got a hard-on when I touched his earlobe. In Chinese acupuncture, the ear represents all the organs of the body so its love must be widespread among Chinese. Ears are not only to hear with and thus an essential aid for the acousticophiliac, but, like feet, they are also a fetish and have sensitive points, some of which, when touched, can arouse lust.

Electricity

The nineteenth-century founder of the uranian movement, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, believed that sexual attraction was a kind of electrical power that jumped from one partner to the other. He was dead serious that he had seen the electric spark that jumped from penis to penis. We still use the metaphor that love is ignited by a flash, but electricity does not play much of a role in erotic life. In SM, there is electrosex for a select group of aficionados, for whom it is a special kind of punishment. Others use it as a kind of cure, like viagra. Connecting the contacts to your penis and anus is said to be horniest. One should be careful when choosing voltage and amperage, since we all know how some nations have electrocuted their convicted criminals sentenced to the death penalty. Apart from electric gadgets to be found in sex shops, on the agricultural market you can find electric devices to give livestock a shock. These are meant to chase cattle and in bed are good for people who do not want the full load: they offer a combination of electrosex and bestiality. You need to be extremely careful with voltage and heart conditions if you use a cattle prod or other device above the waist. Ask first for advice before applying electricity.

Endytophilia is the preference for having sex in clothing. Some people are more excited by fur, leather, rubber, satin, uniforms, underwear, or corsets than by sheer nakedness. That makes laws on pornography that forbid nudity so stupid. See fetishism

Enema

The enema lover often likes to have a very clean butt, and uses the device to clean up his ass before engaging in anal sex. He can also use the enema to fill his intestines with wine, coffee, smoke, or other stimulants. He must be careful because alcohol and drugs are more quickly absorbed when stomach acids do not break them down. In some SM games enemas are used to humiliate the masochist, who can be required to keep the liquid up his ass as long as it pleases his masters. In the nineteenth century, enemas were believed to stimulate good health; now they are used more for sexual fun. The specialist work on this issue is Barton-Jay (1982).

Eonism

The English sexologist Havelock Ellis coined eonism for transvestism, after the Chevalier d’Eon. This eighteenth-century French ambassador to the courts of Saint Petersburg and London had a great preference for women’s clothes. In London there was so much questioning about his sex and betting on which sex he was that his life was endangered. After a medical expert declared that he was indeed a woman, the French king allowed him to live as one. It did mean he had to give up his diplomatic and military functions, which she did with reluctance. For d’Eon her change of sex had no sexual implication, for apparently, she just wanted to be a woman. The question of what her sex was remains unsettled, for after her death the doctor said he was in fact a man! Even before Ellis coined the term eonism, Hirschfeld came up with “transvestite” and “transvestism,” which have been generally adopted for the wish to wear clothing of the other sex. “Transgender” is the latest word, used now for all people who feel they do not fit into the categories of male or female.

Ephebophilia

Ephebophilia is love for a youth (ephebos) who is older than a boy (pais), from which we get the word pedophilia. Age boundaries are magical tools that have little to do with biological development. Notwithstanding, laws on age of consent have defined a minor as someone who has not reached some age between 10 and 18 years, depending on period and jurisdiction, while ephebes might then be somewhere between 14 and 21. In ancient Greece one became an ephebe at the age of seventeen, and remained an ephebe for two years. Ephebophilia is a preference that seems culturally determined, as it was widespread in the past but is less so today. It often occurs not only among men, but also among women. The current youth cult reflects the desires of many adults, who crave young, fresh persons who are still “innocent” for their sexual fulfillment. Gay porn and prostitution idolize the lascivious adolescent.

A prime example for women and gay men is offered in The Boy (London 2003) by polysexual Germaine Greer, who displays, but queerly denies, any sexual interest in lads. See Pedophilia, Pederasty

Erotographomania

An obsession with writing love letters and erotic graffiti is called erotographomania. It is a mania I practice by writing this encyclopedia. See pornography.

Erotomania

The first sexual phenomenon that made it into the books of nineteenth-century psychiatrists was erotomania. In those times it was the insanity of spinsters who mistakenly thought that someone was in love with them, a kind of reverse stalking. Their unfulfilled and hopeless obsessions landed them in the hands of doctors. If we see erotomania as the unfulfilled dreams of people who are not getting the sex they like, or sex in general, it can be recognized as a widespread insanity. The lack of a lively sexual culture results in erotomaniac cravings.

Essayeur

Essayeur is French for a man who “tries out.” It can be seen as an expression of a poor sexual culture. Such men worked in bordellos and demonstrated things clients desired, but did not dare to do. The essayeur is a human and practical instructor of sexual variation, a sex-game coach. We could appoint them to schools so the adults of the future will know how to find their way in the mazes of sexuality.

Exhibitionism

One of the earliest perversions identified by psychiatrists was exhibitionism. In 1877 it was named by the French psychiatrist Charles Lasègue, who was the first to write about it. Its opposite was agoraphobia, coined at the same time. While agoraphobia describes the fear, experienced mostly among women, of open spaces, exhibitionism is the desire, mostly among men, to show their genitals in public places. For more than a century, flashers have been arrested and imprisoned for “public indecency.” While this law was created mainly to combat public sex, it has been used since the late nineteenth century against exhibitionists. In the aftermath, one wonders why such innocent acts were, and sometimes still are, persecuted so aggressively. Before that time, it was quite common all over the world for swimmers to bathe nude in seas, lakes, or rivers. In some places that continued well into the twentieth century, but in many it was by then considered “public indecency.”

When nudity is indecent, sexual pleasure is seen as even worse. German and French people have again taken up the habit of nude bathing since the sixties and have developed a lively nudist culture. Regrettably, nudists often deny having any sexual interest in nakedness. Happily, gay men are not put off by such flat denials that sometimes simply make their little friend stand straight up.

Ben van Weelden published interviews with fans of this sexual variation in Pronken met jezelf (1993; Show Yourself Off). He included the typical flasher as well as modern forms of exhibitionism. There is a woman who likes to dance naked in front of an audience, and a drag queen who lifts her skirts up to the shoulder along highways. Such diversions neither harm anyone nor make anyone sex-obsessed. A man sitting in a window in Amsterdam’s red light district in the smallest possible bikini became a tourist attraction. The police first forbade him to do this, but after he complained of sex discrimination—why wasn’t he allowed to do what women had done for a long time?—he got permission. A classic flasher combined his showing off with a calculation obsession: at the time of the interview, he had exhibited his dick in nearly every Dutch place with a train station. He had to pursue his obsession in Belgium and Germany as he was running out of Dutch stations. There is the female exhibitionist who, late in the evening, drives next to trucks, lifts up her skirt and shows her genital area by the dashboard lights. It is all about exposing herself, for she does not wait for the trucker at the next highway stop for a follow-up. As a real exhibitionist, her desire is for the show, not for a sexual act.

The Dutch Society for Sexual Reform (NVSH) has special evenings for exhibitionists in several towns. At one in Utrecht, the wife of a traditional flasher went with her husband and came back refreshed. She began to understand her partner better and she made some new friends. This modernization of showing off may terminate the role of the traditional flasher who always produced great problems for the police because he was a habitual and unrepentant criminal. After more than a century of research, psychiatrists and psychologists have still not found a cure nor any way to control exhibitionism. During a hundred years of this sad history, probably thousands of exhibitionists have repeatedly been held in prisons and asylums. Their self-organization might prove the best solution. The taboo on showing the genitals probably contributes more to exhibitionist desires than the wish to confront women and girls. A supportive environment with like-minded people may be a better solution than the failed medicalization. Also, the scare that flashing produces in women should diminish in a world where nakedness on nude beaches, in the media, and on the internet is more accepted and becomes less special. Better to have some place to celebrate the beauties and faults of nude bodies than to hide them at all costs. Gay men are rarely the kind of exhibitionists that frighten the horses by flashing because they have many cruising areas where they can show off.

Eye

Eye-love has the genteel name of oculophilia. It is hardly a perversion: virtually everyone comes to sex and love by way of looks and eyes. Even blind people know how to appreciate eyes by touching them. About the gaze, books have been written, often in connection with love and sex. A daring glance straight into your eyes, a look of contempt, eyes bespeaking fear or curiosity, a twinkling smile - these can all be unspeakably exciting. My beloved goes completely wild over a Silberblick, eyes that don’t quite cross. In SM porn you sometimes see men in bondage gazing up at their master with a look of eager and half-frightened expectancy as they try to fathom what he has in mind for them.

Fat love

Fat love is a variation on and perhaps a more serious version of bear love. There are always people who love what others find disgusting. While modern Western ideas about female beauty stress thin girls, fat lovers like the weightiest partners who can’t see their genitals because of the belly and care less about age. In African and other cultures heavy wives are seen as a sign of the fortune of their husbands. But that has changed in the West where weight is seen as a medical problem, obesitas, rather than something alluring. Fat love often goes with eating obsessions: feeding the partner or seeing her or him being fed to greater bulk creates horniness. Don Kulick edited Fat. The Anthropology of an Obsession (2005) with Anne Meneley and himself wrote an article on porn where he discusses bigcuties.com and other “obscene” material for the lovers of big bodies.

Fear

The Greek phobophilia indicates that the fear of others turns you on. It is an imaginable but not always nice emotion. This lust must have attracted the masses to the public punishments and executions of the Ancien Regime and to the gladiator fights in the Roman theaters. People showing their fear evoke the worst feelings of desire and cruelty in others. Most soldiers would have resisted - but some didn’t - the temptations of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where “innocent” guards sexually abused the inmates. Media, books, and artists speculate on the love of fear by showing images of war, crime victims, or the captives of Abu Ghraib. Death and disaster attract erotic attention, as Andy Warhol knew very well. Masochists like to incorporate the fear that others project on third parties.

Felching

Felching is an unsafe perversion that means licking sperm out of a vagina or anus. The word is virtually unknown, but Brenda Love’s Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices gives a second meaning: the insertion of small animals like fish or rodents in vagina or anus. The rodents seem to me the most dangerous in those places; the animal rights groups probably would not be too happy either.

Fetishism

The word fetishism comes from an old Portuguese word, feitiço, that related to the ritual and magical idols and objects of Africans. For eighteenth-century philosophers and anthropologists, these amulets showed the origin of religion. For Africans the world is magical and fetishes embody the soul of life. Transforming religious icons into sex objects was easy for nineteenth-century psychiatrists, for they saw perverts as the primitive people of the modern world. Black people, who believed in fetishes and not in God, were the same as male perverts who got turned on by objects instead of women. The doctors followed in the steps of Karl Marx, who used the word in his economic theory. The fetish was the excessive value capitalists exhorted from their workers and made poor people heavily pay for their products. The perverts were excessive in a similar way, attributing more importance to an object of sexual pleasure than they should.

The Frenchman Alfred Binet was the first to grasp the concept of fetishism in love; he wrote Le fétichisme dans l’amour (1888). Around the end of the nineteenth century, doctors such as von Krafft-Ebing and Freud began writing about sexual perversions. Most of these doctors saw sexual variations as symptoms of degeneration. People with sexual fetishes either got them from their parents or through some accident in their childhood, from nature or culture.

While most doctors were looking for a physiological explanation, Binet was looking for a psychological one. According to him, perversions originated in an association of lust with objects. He used the example of a young man who was turned on by sleeping bonnets. The theory went that as a boy he lay with his grandmother in bed and associated the titillation he felt with the bonnet his grandmother wore. The specific form of his sexual idol came from the incidental link that was established between feeling lust and seeing the bonnet in a moment of strong emotion. A coincidental impression created an unshakable sexual preference in him. Following degeneration theory, Binet assumed that such “associations of ideas” only took place in degenerate persons.

Except for this last point of a degenerate basis, I still find Binet’s theory of fetishism fascinating. One could add to it that fixation on the idol occurs when the fetishist cannot act upon his preference and becomes obsessed with it. This is largely our present situation. Because of a lack of sexual space and partners as well as freedom of erotic expression, people have little chance to experiment with their fetishes, and thus get stuck in their hang-ups.

Binet described three subforms of fetishism: for body parts, objects, and psychic states. Under the first category fall fixations on breasts, feet, hair, dicks. For objects, the list includes clothing, fabric, and toys; and for psychic states, slavery and religion. He also distinguished minor and major fetishes, comparable to the distinction between perversity and perversion (see Introduction). Everyone knows the minor variations since everyone has an attachment to special things. Major fetishes play a leading role in one’s life. To the list of subforms I would add personal characteristics (boyishness, masculinity, rudeness, slavishness), acts (oral, anal, coital, cumming, whipping) and situations (beaches, bedrooms, chapels, prisons).

During the nineteenth century the police had problems with certain types of fetishists, such as braid-snatchers and underwear thieves. The first kind was turned on by braids and would snip them off unwary women in busy places whenever they had the chance. The thieves grabbed women’s undies from clotheslines and went some place to jack off with them. The first group has virtually disappeared, but the underwear fetishists are still around for women’s as well as men’s undergarments. In Japan there is a market for used girls’ underclothing: girls drop them off at a sex shop and make huge profits. Dorus, a kind of Dutch Tom of Finland, made some extra money by selling his filthy jocks. To me it sounds like a business worth looking into.

Every gay man knows the fetish most valued in the scene. A beautiful face and a good character are fine, but we all know the bigger “it” is, the less other qualities matter. A nice ass, a tight hole, a supple mouth, shaved balls, hairy or smooth chest, muscles, earlobes, hands, feet can each awaken someone’s lust. For some, ugliness is a turn-on. There is something for just about everybody. A queer variation on this theme is for people who are missing body parts, as we discussed with ampu-sex.

Those who do not have much of a body can try clothing or shoes as an option. First there are types of dress such as uniforms and work clothing: soldiers, officers, sailors, athletes, nurses, cowboys, blue-collar or construction workers, schoolboys and skinheads all have their ardent followers. The 1970s band The Village People displayed some of these fetish types, including an Indian and a police officer. In the past, black-and-white striped prison uniforms got people worked up. Underwear, blue jeans, Manchester pants, and caps are all fetish material. In the second category there are many kinds of fabrics and other materials for fetishists: leather, rubber, fur, velvet, silk, satin, corduroy, wool, or even cotton. Often there is a combination of some sort, like leather chaps, rubber boots, fur coats, velvet pants, or satin shorts. After clothing there are of course shoes: the “pink soldiers” need army boots, while transvestites go for high heels and sports fetishists for sneakers. Just hearing the spikes of soccer shoes on stone makes me horny.

When acts, situations, psychic characteristics and mental states are fetishes, then all sex is a fetish. We all know about overwhelming preferences, for fistfucking, shitting, pissing, smoking, cum shots, anal sex; for parks, barracks, saunas, toilets, beaches, or bedrooms; for boyish, macho, intelligent, ironic features; and for slavery, seediness, romance, submission, equality, brotherhood, twins, or mirroring lovers. It is impossible to put anyone’s fantasies in one-dimensional categories like gay, straight, bisexual, or pedophile. Fetish is an old and beautiful understanding for the narrative that sociologists now call sexual script. They might have chosen a more interesting word than the totally boring script. A concept such as fetish is much nicer because it cuts to pieces descriptions such as gay, straight, or lesbian, which focus on the all too human object of choice. Terms like these take for granted a non-existent community because most humans are not turned on by men or women in general, but by the specifics of body parts, qualities, properties, objects, situations, or sensations. Each person has his own form of fetish.

Unfortunately, most people cannot get past the genitalia to open a new world of erotic possibilities. In the USA some 80 percent of men and women have a preference for coitus. They would have to dig a bit deeper into their fantasies to see what other variations exist. Because there is not enough mental and physical space for sex play, the 80 percent may never engage in what they might like most. For me, fetishists are not the primitives of the modern world, driven by hormones, but guides to a postmodern world of sexual specialization and cultivation. Through their creative inventions they set examples for others searching for pleasure. They create the new sex tribes that will go far beyond the categories of homo-, hetero- and bisexuality. Leathermen, rubber fans, gay soldiers, horsemen, SM people, and watersport addicts are not crazy, but artists painting the canvas of an ever-shifting sexual culture. The people who lose out are actually the ones who suppress their fantasies. Fetishists, with their performances and preferences, promote a livelier, sexier, more colorful and possibly saner and safer street culture (Squires 1993; Steele 1996; McCallum 1999; Streff 2005).

Fingering

Fingering is twiddling with a finger in one of the orifices of the human body. You can do it to yourself or to someone else. Though some morons think this technique is only for lesbians, it is a stimulating variation in gay and straight relations.

Fistfucking

Deeper than fingering goes fistfucking. It developed with lightning speed over the last decades. Before 1970, fingering the anus was not unusual, but even in the oeuvre of de Sade, which describes many sexual variations in minute detail, fucking with the fist is rarely mentioned. It is mainly the homosexual leather world that gave fistfucking its huge popularity and initiated the sling as its ideal instrument. Fistfucking demands a great amount of care. It is best to learn from somebody with experience. Wounds from sharp nails were already undesirable before AIDS; these days handballers use latex gloves with a (water base) lubricant to prevent HIV infection – which shouldn’t be used together with condoms!

It does not matter with whom you do it: neither asses nor fists are very gender-specific, so homo- or heterosexual becomes irrelevant. The difference between a male or a female hand in an ass, or between a male or a female ass for a fist, is not major. In the leather scene of San Francisco, fistfucking was a sexual technique that dykes and faggots shared and in which they discovered the relativity of sexual preference.

Flagellation (religious)

The Belgian religious scientist Patrick Vandermeersch wrote an in-depth study of flagellation in French, The Flesh of Passion. On the cover, Luca Signorelli’s “The Whipping of Christ,” depicts two nearly naked men whipping a well-built, tied-up Son of God. If this raised hopes for a book about Catholic SM, sorry! Vandermeersch treats the sexologist study of sadomasochism, quoting from the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Sigmund Freud, but the central question remains the place of body and passion in (Catholic) faith; nonetheless most of the book is a historical survey of whipping in Catholic theology and practice.

The man who gave a strong impetus to a heavier penalty for sodomy, Petrus Damianus (1007-1072), at the same time inspired the whipping of oneself as a religious technique of repentance. Though he was very successful in execrating sodomy, his call for flagellation did not meet similar approval. Maybe monks and nuns were already flagellating each other - not themselves - in those days, but some two centuries later a veritable whipping rage began. It was not about erotic satisfaction or an alternative to sodomy, because all sex outside marriage was strictly forbidden.

Still, lust must have been an unavoidable side effect for many beginners and some die-hards, though the aim was repentance. Because Jesus had been whipped naked, worshippers were supposed to do likewise. A believer who tortured himself shared physically in the suffering of Jesus, without the intervention of priests or others. Many religious scientists objected to Damianus’ beliefs about this form of repentance, seeing this desire to imitate or even outdo Christ as pride, for flagellants inflicted on themselves what was done to Jesus by others. Damianus criticized this argument, because ultimately Jesus wanted flagellation and death by crucifixion. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the prominent theologist Jean Gerson opposed the flagellation mania because God is love, not suffering. Moreover, His Son had sacrificed himself for the sins of mankind, so following in his footsteps was out of the question.

With the transition from Platonic to Aristotelian thinking in the Middle Ages, a shift occurred from spirit to body, from Jesus as the word made flesh to a man of flesh and blood. God and man approached each other more closely. For mystics like Hadewijch and Ruusbroeck, spiritual love culminated in a near-erotic union with their God of worship. Such thinking left more room for the body and for flagellation.

In 1349 large groups of flagellators were seen for the first time, roaming Europe from Hungary to Holland. They adhered to heretical views, refusing to recognize the authority of the cloth, and so the Pope himself banned these sects. Yet later they appeared again, here and there. In the sixteenth century a countermovement got the upper hand again in the Catholic church. Flagellation as a form of repentance became a regular, but highly secretive practice in convents, and brotherhoods were formed whose members flagellated themselves in parades on religious festive days.

In 1585 the French king Henry III, notorious for surrounding himself with “mignons” (catamites), founded a “Brotherhood of Death,” whose members congregated each Friday night for some serious self-flagellation. Although libels paid ample attention to his pederast pursuits, his opponents never made the link between whipping and lust. In those days self-flagellation was not recognized as a sexual appetite of masochists. Flagellation brotherhoods, quite popular in Spain for instance, did meet with disapproval now and then. Their processions would not bridle, but inspire lust. Some young men courted girls by whipping themselves below their beloved’s window until they bled, to demonstrate their religiosity and virility. Not-so-Catholic excessive eating and drinking at times followed a good Catholic procession. Despite irregular criticisms of these flogging customs, and despite religious and sexual modernization, the custom is practiced in Spain up to this very day.

The early seventeenth century saw the publication of the first book to present flagellation as a medicine against impotence. Beatings would stimulate lust. This line of medical thinking would be popular until the nineteenth century. From the eighteenth century onward, a concurrent theory saw flagellation as sexual expression, especially in Britain, where men visited brothels, wanting to re-experience the excitement brought on by the spankings they received in boarding school. All kinds of queer theories developed about why spanking would inspire the male member to rise. Most explanations were physiological and in the nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing referred to them. While monks and nuns kept on flagellating themselves into the twentieth century, most sexologists and Protestants agreed with Freud and saw the practice as a sexual perversion. The medial specialists found the cause in early childhood. Vandermeersch emphasizes different forms and explanations of masochism. In imitation of Freud and quoting Anita Phillips (1998), he considers linking sadism with masochism an impossibility, because a masochist needs one of his own to help him get his satisfaction, not a sadist who puts his own pleasure first and abuses his masochistic victim to this end.

Vandermeersch needs this Freudian detour to reach his conclusions, which diverge into several directions simultaneously. His main plea concerns the physical aspect of devotion. In imitation of Aristotle, he presents the physical as happy and chthonic. The body offers possibilities to be used, not to be forbidden. That is why he recounts with pleasure his visits to the last place in Spain where flagellation is still practiced, San Vicente de la Sonsierra.

His theoretical considerations, turning into redundant abstractions, emphasize that believing (or not) is only interesting when it can be discussed as freely as he does in his book. Belief cannot do without a bit of skepticism or ambivalence. It is about a growing understanding of traditions, like the love of flagellation, which these days is even abhorred by believers.

Almost simultaneously with Vandermeersch’ book another title, In Praise of the Whip by the German language professor Niklaus Largier (2007), came out. The lengthy quotations make it a lot thicker; it also has pictures that are not in Vandermeersch’s book. Where the latter follows a psychoanalytical-religious line, which I sometimes find hard to follow, Largier’s book is a mishmash with neither logical head nor historical tail. The title might tickle a masochist’s mind, yet Vandermeersch offers food for thought for all persuasions and commends physical practices that have been developing from medieval and religious to post-modern and sexual. For this reason I prefer his book.

Flogging

Around 1907 Graauw published a translated compilation De geschiedenis en de praktijk van het flagellantisme (The History and Practice of Flagellation) by the authors Querero and Aléra – probably a pseudonym of a French pornographer. The title promises something scholarly but the book is more like a novel. And although the book appears to be a translation, I have never been able to locate an original, which should not have been too difficult with these two rare names. To my knowledge this book is the oldest explicit SM novel in Dutch. The contents and illustrations may not offer what a modern-day fan of whipping would expect; in 1907 it was doubtlessly a revelation.

The novel opens with a historical introduction in which the author goes through a bird’s eye view of the world history of the whip. Beating was a penalty, a medicine, and a form of penitence. There is a funny remark about the religious version: “the flagellants [...] have been busy whipping to keep the flesh under control and to do penance, but perhaps as sacrifice to the same diligence [...] they have continued in a kind of furor the cruel torment, which compensated the enjoyment which their loneliness denied them.” To summarize: the ones who were whipping themselves got excited trying to fight off horniness.

The authors develop an interesting theory about the origin of this interest. They point out that the genital nervous system is closely connected with those of sphincter and the lumbar area. The first link explains why some people, especially women “who commit indecencies with their companions and those who willingly stimulate the sphincter with their finger,” receive pleasure by inserting objects in the anus. The Italian doctor Paolo Mantegazza had already formulated such a theory for receptive sodomites, men who readily get taken from behind. Their pleasure nerves connect the brains not with the dick, but with the ass. The connection with the nervous system betwixt lumbar and libido explains the lust for flagellation on the buttocks. The theory is funny but not very convincing, because only a hard whip, not a soft hand, arouses horniness. And why only the ass, and not other body parts that are also flagellated?

After a brief historical and theoretical introduction the novel begins with two gentlemen sitting apart in a posh Parisian restaurant (where else) to dine. A mistress storms in and begins to scold and hit her rival, who is sitting with their shared male beloved. Waiters and guests hurry to put an end to the catfight, but the gentleman prevents their peacemaking efforts with a generous gratuity: he wants to see this cruel pleasure to the end. The ladies indeed go forward with their scuffle and arouse the lust of this gentleman so much that he gives the winner a helping hand and also starts hitting.

After this uproar the two gentlemen, both fans of whipping, get acquainted, begin to exchange their knowledge and discuss their perverse dreams. The English lord and the French baron, main characters of the novel, thus confess their sexual preference: “What thou and I, valued gentleman, find dearest in roses, are the thorns, right?” Both love thorns as a passive and active experience. After deciding to travel the world together, they conclude they will both make a trip around the globe in search of the pleasures of flagellation. The lord starts the trip westwards; the baron goes east for a typical oriental story of pleasures not to be found “at home,” but only among heathens.

We follow the French gentleman who makes the acquaintance of three court ladies in Madrid. They specialize in the rod and are beating, in particular, a black servant. Via Portugal he arrives in Egypt where a foremost eccentric lets himself be beaten by an electrically driven mummy in the tombs of a pyramid. He is keen on the idea that the old Egyptians excelled in cruelty. After a stop in Russia, where women can only become sexually aroused by the knout, he lands in India. In Pondicherry the baron is present at a Hindu party where people are whipping out their faith. He penetrates a temple where he witnesses the highpoint of a ceremony. He is discovered and beaten, but escapes with the guiding “belle dame sans merci,” whom he loses just as fast. The baron escapes India, ignores China and Japan, countries known for their cruelty, and arrives via Sydney in San Francisco. At present that is the “gay capital” of the USA, but then it was the capital of lewdness. He meets a compatriot who runs a “theatre of grief” where, for example, suicidal people, against payment, make a stage performance of their self-killing. That brings the audience into a horny fury. The baron obviously visits the earliest possible show. A man tortures two women who then take revenge and give him a very hearty beating. By the look of enjoyment on the bloodily beaten man and the sounds of his cries, the French baron recognizes his English friend.

When the maso-lord’s wounds have healed, both gentlemen visit the final whipping paradise together. In the Chinese quarter of San Francisco there appears an enormous underground city, where the Chinese honor their traditions and customs. There are tortures throughout the day and slavery is the valued institution that it is in China. This makes for a queer and dissatisfying end of the book, because nothing horny or sensational happens, notwithstanding the promising start.

The novel part of the book consists of a series of sometimes brief, sometimes drawn-out episodes of flagellation in various countries. The experiences and emotions of the baron are on the whole briefly described; we learn nothing of his social or sexual background. A psychological twist or the building up of a story is beyond the authors’ interest. This makes the book quite common and outdated SM pornography, which surprisingly already existed in 1907 in the Netherlands.

Flogging or flagellation is a practice that was widespread far before anyone knew about perversion. In primitive and classical religions such as Christianity and Islam, believers hit each other or themselves with whips and belts. For some, such beatings were symbols of true belief, a way to kill the sinful flesh, or an imitation of the pains of Christ’s final journey to his crucifixion. For others it was considered a method against impotence. From the seventeenth until the nineteenth century, many doctors prescribed a good whipping as a way to awaken lust in people who had lost it. It was also used as a severe punishment: a very painful example is bastinado, the victim being beaten on the soles of his feet until he cannot walk. At English boarding schools castigation was so popular that bordellos gave former students the chance to re-experience the spanking on a wooden horse, the famous “Berkeley Horse.” Ian Gibson, the biographer of Federico Garcia Lorca and Pisanus Fraxi, wrote a rich history in The English Vice: Beating, Sex, and Shame in Victorian England and After (1978) with lots of illustrations.

The current Dutch club Castigatio specializes in spanking. The hit on the buttocks can be with anything: a bare hand, whip, reed, rod, cane, stick, twig, or even nettles. For most people, their bum is the perfect place. With more sensitive areas like the head, genitalia, wrists, hands, knees, and feet it is recommended to use a little caution, for it makes a big difference how hard the master hits. The Marquis de Sade loved to get hit with a whip while he had to count the number of blows. It is amazing that punishment turns into an erotic experience, that pain awakens lust. History has made large jumps with flogging: from a religious experience of flagellants, a medicament for impotent males, and a punishment for schoolboys to a sexual turn-on for perverts. What will be the next step? Flagellation as everybody’s morning gymnastics?

Foot love

When you dig feet, you are a podophile. These days it is more popular to love shoes (Nikes! Adidas!), or toes, rather than feet. Foot sex comes in many guises. Some people like to kiss feet or lick the dirt between toes, others want to be satisfied with the foot of their beloved on their dick or with their cock between his feet; some want to feel a foot, with or without a boot, on their neck. Feet have toes which you can put in all kinds of holes. The love of feet offers inexhaustible possibilities.

Charles Fourier (1771-1837)

The French “utopian socialist” Fourier was remarkable for his book Le nouveau monde amoureux (The New World of Love), published in 1967, long after he died. He not only gave a place to sapphists (lesbians) and pederasts (gays) in his utopia, but more interestingly, developed a new theory of multiple or rallying love, what some people nowadays call polyamory. He found it crazy to reserve one’s love and sex for only one person and emphasized that a multiple love life creates more social cohesion, because such lovers will not enclose themselves in a home, a nuclear family, or the egoism of the couple as he called it. They will open themselves to other people and create networks instead of a dual bond. Rallying love promotes social cohesion which is a positive force in a world that suffers from excessive individualism. He realized that people had many different preferences and would have liked to create a system to meet each other, even where only 200 people shared a specific interest. It would take nearly two centuries until Internet made this sexual utopia possible. Apart from its divine and social aspects, satisfied love produces art and culture. A century later, Freud would argue the opposite, that art and culture are based on sexual sublimation. Decide for yourself what is more convincing.

Frottage

The more serious term for rubbing against each other is frottage. If the Greeks did not invent it, they certainly popularized it and immortalized it in their art as their favorite way to make love to their boys, frontally between the thighs, or “diamerizein,” as they called it. It can take place in anonymous locations like the subway or at a bar or disco. The best chance for frottage is an overcrowded site like the metro in Tokyo. Frottage can also be a different bed technique instead of oral or anal sex or hand jobs. It is possible to do it with willing and unwilling others or just by yourself. Frottage is my favorite technique, especially with soft materials like silk or satin. Other people prefer rougher stuff like leather, jeans, or velvet. And some prefer nothing, just the feeling of soft skin. You can do it dick against dick, with or without clothes. Frottage offers a lot of variation as you can squirm against any part of the other’s body, from the pits to the hollow between the buttocks, or with a bed, pole, shoe, tree, or whatever you fancy. Frottage has been seen mostly as a lesbian technique. Tribadism (Greek for rubbing, at least that is what most scholars think) was always another word for sapphism. Frottage, however, does not make gay men lesbians.

Fusion

Fusionism is the wish to be coupled as one with the beloved while having an orgasm. This desire, which is not perverse, has become so common that it may be necessary to point out that the best sex is not about becoming one, which is only an illusion, neither about having a simultaneous orgasm.

Gag

A gag is an instrument to close up the mouth. The device comes in many forms. In SM sex, a slave’s mouth is gagged, making it impossible for him to talk impudent rubbish or to cry out. Ideally the gag does not seal off the mouth, but rather opens it wide and depresses the tongue with the ball of a dildo-like device which rules out bragging. The wide-open mouth renders the masochist extra obtuse. Another variation is a gag that opens the mouth wide yet leaves a hole through which the master can stick his dick. Take care that the gag has a rim so the slave cannot sink his teeth into his master’s member.

Gamophobia

The fear of marriage is gamophobia, only recently seen in the gay world. In the past, gays turned away from nuptials because they were not allowed to marry. In those times, rejection of marriage had a soft form: gay men might refuse to attend weddings of family and friends because they did not like to participate in ceremonies that were forbidden to them. What queer man would consider being involved in something called matrimony? Now that official unions are possible, gays can develop strong aversions to marriage and coupledom, and perverts can express their gamophobia in gangbangs and group sex. Or might they be seduced by “wedlock,” the cage of marriage? See Incest

Gang bang and jails

Two birds with one stone: Gang bang and jail! During demonstrations against the Vietnam war, Donald Tucker, a normal straight guy, was arrested at a rally in front of the White House. In the States you can avoid going to prison by paying bail, but Tucker refused to do so on principle, even though the police strongly advised paying. As an uprising was going on in the Washington, D.C. prison, the authorities did not want to throw a young man like Tucker to the lions. He was stubborn, however, so the police thought they could teach him a lesson by putting him on the floor where the agitation was taking place. Maybe the guards thought they could stop the revolt by making a peace offering with this peace activist. That same night the innocent angel was victim of a true gangbang: fifty prisoners acted out their lusts on his body.

When Tucker was released from prison, he gave a press conference accusing the government of being too slack, but there was a seed of longing pumped into him. In the article that he contributed to Anthony M. Scacco’s Male Rape (1982), he wrote about seeking to repeat the experience in the SM world of San Francisco. He could not find the same sort of pleasure; it was voluntary and too easy for him. In his search to repeat his experience as punk or slave, he committed a crime in order to be jailed again. It is a fascinating story, proving that true facts are often more exciting than fiction. Unfortunately, calling up experiences of the past is usually doomed to fail. What was once sweet will never be so sweet again. A copy can never replace the original. It is better to develop a new variation on an old and loved theme.

Sexual emancipation has not yet reached the point where police can subject petty criminals to a horny punishment or a gang bang in the cages of a leather bar rather than police station cells, or open jail doors to SM-men into punishment. See Prison

Gentlemen’s love

There is a word in Dutch for homosexuality, “herenliefde” that should be translated as “gentlemen’s love.” It is a posh word for queerness. Of course it is not a perversion unless you see it as the chaste love of gentlemen in pin-striped suits who smoke cigars, drink cognac, speak Oxford English, drive Daimlers, and have little paunches because they cannot resist the minor pleasures of life. The kind of gentlemen you would not imagine to be into fucking or being fucked, who would rather like, at most, some caressing and pillow talk. At the Vagevuur (Purgatory, a Dutch SM-club), they had special parties for gay men who are like this, or love such men. Once out of their suits and their gentlemanly environment, they can turn into ferocious animals!

Genuflection is knee sex.

Glory holes

When you want to get old queers to reminisce, ask them about glory holes. These holes belong to the recent past, the time of cottaging or tearoom trade. The glory of the hole is the dick that is put through it. Gays used to drill holes in the walls between toilet stalls. The iron stalls in Amsterdam are not so easy to drill into, in fact I have never seen or heard of a glory hole in any of Amsterdam’s urinals, but there are glory holes in saunas, darkrooms, or between video booths. Once a friend of mine picked up an old glory hole from the darkroom of the much regretted Company bar in Amsterdam. How many guys shoved their dick through that museum piece? How many men found their glory sucking on a hard cock coming through that hole?

Golden shower

A golden shower or golden rain sounds even more beautiful than glory hole. This has a more erotic tone to it than piss sex or water sports. But tastes may differ here. Piss sex may sound more real, filthy, and vicious than golden shower. It depends just on how you want to describe the vision of urine raining down on you.

This perversion has quite a long history. The English sexologist Havelock Ellis not only described it, but also got horny from seeing women who lifted up their dresses and pissed. The German writer Hans Henny Jahnn went one step further: he not only enjoyed pissing on boys, but also loved drinking their piss. He came up with the theory that there was nothing more healing and rejuvenating than drinking the fresh urine of a pubescent boy—full of growth hormones. Lately the most important form of this variation is men pissing on each other: on rubber sheets, in urinals, in baths and showers, in dark rooms. The leather bar Boots in Antwerp has a special room for this inclination, equipped with several bathtubs. Other bars organize evenings for lovers of golden showers.

What would gay swimming clubs think of a 50-meter butterfly in a pool of piss? Others like Jahnn would rather drink it up than let it go. I have never read about someone combining piss sex and bestiality. No matter how much beer you drink, a human bladder can never outdo the bladder of a cow or horse. It also offers deeper humiliation than human piss. In hanky code, the color code of sexual variation, yellow is the obvious choice for all forms of this preference. See Scat

Grandism

The love for tall people is grandism or anastemaphilia. The Netherlands is an ideal country for such feelings as the Northern provinces of Friesland and Groningen produce the tallest young guys in the world. It is even possible that those giants are themselves petitists, or lovers of small men, which could lead to “matches made in heaven.” Some people define grandism as macrogenitalism, or the love of men with big dicks. This is probably the most widespread fetish among queers. Size-queens are the most common breed of the homosexual tribe. The objects of their desire are the well-hung “horsemen.” The real macrogenitalists, of course, go not for horsemen, but for real stallions, donkeys, and bulls.

Grooming

This is a criminal offense in many countries. The Dutch police defines grooming as the effort of an adult to make contact with a minor by way of internet with the aim to meet them for reasons of “sexual abuse” or to produce child pornography. Often the adult poses himself as a minor or a much younger person than he really is. The conversation starts with sexually loaded language and the groomer uses the “natural curiosity” of minors regarding sexuality, according to the warning the police offer parents. From words it goes to images when the “offender” encourages the minor to undress or to masturbate in front of a webcam, sometimes in sexual poses, or to meet in person. It was made a crime in Dutch law in 2010, with a punishment of up to two years and/or a fine. There have already been several “major cases” but although sometimes hundreds of victims (girls and boys) were presumably created – it is apparently easy to use their “natural curiosity” – few victims were willing to come forward to pose complaints with the authorities, The claim is often made that the victims felt guilty, were too shy or traumatized due to the abuse and its discovery. Yet the possibility that presumed victims might have enjoyed or learned from the experience, or were not too concerned about it, is rarely suggested. The perpetrators are most often portrayed as lonely middle-aged men married to their computer(s), and fits the way that queers were looked at in the past, or pedophiles these days. When the groomers use blackmail – threatening to make the nude images known to others, to have the youngster engage in further “lewd” activities - that should be the crime attributed to them. It is a question of time before they get a psychiatric classification of paraphilia or sexual insanity, and I am curious what will be their new academic name. Very remarkable is the number of presumed innocent youngsters, the “victims”, that apparently search the internet for sex. The main question concerns what exactly is the crime, the “grooming” or a government that refuses to engage with the curiosity of young people and does not provide comprehensive sex education? See Internet, Webcam sex.

Group sex

No queer needs an explanation of group sex because it comes naturally to them. In the 1970’s it was popular with straights and gays and several books were written on the subject. For real bisexual sex you need at least three people so it is also a kind of group sex, but of course most bisexuals will claim they are monogamous. Some say that gay men used to be more relaxed with group sex in parks and saunas than they are nowadays. I do not believe a word of it. They must be the ones who always complain about “the good old days when everything was more fun and hornier.”

Is there a difference between an orgy and group sex? I do not think so, although orgy sounds more perverse and varied than group sex. Group sex seems to be more about an intermingling of bodies that is planned beforehand, while an orgy is a practice that develops spontaneously when a sufficient number of men lurking for sex is present. Orgies can take many forms such as a row of men fucking each other in the ass, a group that gathers around a good sex scene, or situations of SM sex. It is not always perverse, but many perverts like group sex. It certainly offers pleasure to exhibitionists and voyeurs, and chances to youngsters who want to learn more about sex.

Gynemimetophilia

The love of men who imitate women is gynemimetophilia. It is not the same as drag or transvestism but speaks of men who dig chicks with dicks. This is a funny word that does not do justice to lovers of drag queens. The word is too complicated. Usually the transvestites demand all the attention and their lovers get lost in all the excitement the drags create. There are many words for most variations of cross-dressing: drag queens, drag kings, boy-girls, transsexuals, transgenders, crossovers, third sex, etc. But the lovers of transgenderism have only this unpronounceable gynemimetophile. Anyone have a good suggestion? What I have already come up with sounds only mildly appetizing: drag lover, cross(dress)-crazy, transophile, tra-slut.

Handicaps are dealt with under ampu-sex.

Hanky codes

Kinky men of the past sometimes used hanky color codes to indicate their preferences. A handkerchief in the back pocket of jeans generally meant being top or active (left) or bottom or passive (right). Keys were also used, but only indicated top or bottom. The most important colors for handkerchiefs were black for SM, yellow for golden showers, brown for scat, grey for bondage, red for fistfucking, and pink for tit torture. Variations on the silk or linen handkerchief were fur for bestiality and kleenex for people who like smells. Brown satin is for men who are cut (left) or like the circumcised (right). Some people would rather fill in the long questionnaires that detail all kinds of preferences, like those published by Larry Townsend in the many versions and translations of The Leatherman’s Handbook since 1972. Such lists enable them to set up a satisfying scene, and to learn about mutual likes and dislikes.

Hanky codes offered a practical and immediate way to recognize the various preferences, but are seldom used today. Have the kinky men been silenced, or did they get better at speaking about what they once said in symbolic language? The internet has for sure also taken away a lot of the urgency of such hanky codes.

Hair

Hair gets tangled with all kinds of variations, with matching difficult expressions like trichophilia as the common term for the love of hair, while hirsutophilia relates to hair in the armpit, pubephilia to pubic hair and tricholagnia (hairpain) to being pulled by one's hair. Shaving hair is seen as a humiliation or an initiation with many variations for the pervert: with slaves, cadets, prisoners, fraternity students. There are people who love blond, black, grey or – a rarity – red hair, want to see it straight, curly, short or long, in military style. Others adore punk and mohawks or rasta with braided styles. Others have a predilection for beards (see bear love). Once there were braid cutters, men who cut the braids from girls’ or women's heads and collected them. The most common type of hair variation nowadays is no hair, the love of bald or shaven men. This desire comes in some variations, the most important now being hairless on the head or in the genital area. See Shaving

Haughty love

Hybristophilia is the difficult word for haughty love. It refers to queers who have a preference for dangerous or murderous men. Some homosexuals of the past walked with their nose in the air right to their unwholesome destiny, while others knowingly did so from sheer preference for petty criminals. Dutch author Jac. van Hattum has written beautifully in De Ketchupcancer (1965) about a queer with a predilection for dangerous boys. The more accessible work of Jean Genet has the same theme. Butcher boys, soldiers, sailors, and crooks with blood on their hands aroused queers of times past who loved the look and the feel of their beloveds’ murderous weapons. The French writer Colette once described a nice party with many queers where one asked another who that cute butler was. The answer was whispered, “The killer of so and so.” The gay gentlemen got lumps in their throats from excitement. Houston is no different than Amsterdam, Brest, or Paris. In the early 1970s there was a serial killer who preferred murdering young hustlers. His dangerously close proximity was very helpful for the catamites’ trade -- their customers doubled. Their perversion was the lust of desiring the potential victims of the killer, the hubris of the queer who knows that he himself may be the victim of prejudice and violence.

Haul sex

An American pilot developed a very complicated type of kinky autoeroticism. A reconstruction of his accident showed the man tied himself with a chain to the bumper of his Volkswagen. He turned the wheel of the car so it would ride in circles over a stretch of grass, but not for too long, because he put a limited amount of gas in the car. Next he started the engine and put the machine in first gear, whereupon he was dragged behind his sedan. One time things definitely went wrong, as the chain rolled up around the rear axle and the pilot was crushed against his own car. Other people dream about being hauled behind a cart or a horse, with ankles and wrists tied, dragged through the grass or the mud, along a forest trail. See to it that the ground has no dangerous obstacles and/or have good protective clothing. This technique has been used to murder enemies, so let it be a warning to take great care with such kinky games.

Heterosexuality

For straight men who think the one true perversion is to desire a beautiful male figure it will come as a surprise to find out that historically it is almost unheard of for men to deny the beauty and attractiveness of other males. Even in cultures that banned male love it was compared with banning theft – you were supposed to refrain from it despite your desire, not because you lacked the desire. Exclusive and compulsory heterosexuality is anything but natural, in humankind as well as in the natural world.

For queer men the one true perversion is self-evidently straight sex. For a faggoty fairy it is inconceivable to do it with a woman. Unfortunately it is always complicated with desire. Lust is often about inversion. The things that are most difficult to imagine can be the horniest. Some time ago many people often thought that gay sex was hot because it was prohibited. That prohibition came from church, state, and science. At present we know that such prohibitions are quite unnecessary to make gay sex hot because it is great in itself. We also need no institutions to forbid gay pleasures because people now follow straight rules without any compulsion. They simply follow the stupid examples of their family, friends, or the media. But when it comes to explicit taboos, it becomes very exciting to transgress boundaries. I should say, try it out. You will notice the more you forbid yourself something, the more you will want to do it.

Holy love

Hierophilia is the difficult term for holy love. The love for holy or sacred objects offers an excellent theme to try out the transgression of taboos. Everything that is sacred, the church has prohibited for sex. People like the Marquis de Sade and Gerard Reve discovered the secret working of religious taboos: de Sade was obsessed with all sex acts forbidden by the church, everything from blasphemy and sodomy to desecrating the host. One of his scenes describes the fucking of a priest in the ass with the host on the inserted dick, combining the sins of rape, sodomy, and blasphemy in one feat. The more taboos he could break, the hornier de Sade was. Dutch novelist Reve has a famous scene in which he imagines ass-fucking God in the form of a donkey. In 1966 he was brought to court for blasphemy for this, but in 1968 the Dutch High Court acquitted him because this was the way he expressed his Catholic belief, and in 1969 he received the highest literary prize of the Netherlands. One of his novels also has a scene of him masturbating in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary.

In 1908 another Dutch poet, Jacob Israël de Haan, produced a short story in which the narrator sodomizes an unwilling Jesus on the request of Satan. First, this Golesco feels compassion for the mediocre humane love of the savior, but soon enough he feels stronger and gets angry about his message of virtue and forgiveness. It ends with a violent rape, Golesco lying on top of Christ. The words that de Haan uses are rather vague, but they all point to brutality and sexuality; the scene ends with the tiredness of Golesco from this wild, ferocious communion. The problem of abusing Christ, says de Haan, is that he likes it, not only in public on a cross but even in the privacy of a room. It remains the typical problem with masochists.

Holy has various more common forms because few people ever had the chance to rape God. Many fellows will have touched their holiest member or that of another guy in a dark corner of a church. The Dutch sodomites that were prosecuted by state and church in the eighteenth century met and had sex in churches. They were murdered because they fertilized the churches with their sacred fluids. Now some churches have turned into discos, some even equipped with dark rooms, and holy sex has again become as common for gays as it was for sodomites three centuries ago. See Saint sex

Homophilia

The love that did not dare to speak its name was homophilia. Benevolent doctors and prudent activists spoke in the 1950s and 1960s of homophiles as “just the same.” Gay men were fellow citizens who wanted something different in bed but were otherwise completely similar to straight men. Unfortunately this does not help many homophiles, certainly not when one lives in an insipid suburb with a backyard full of sexy young guys who are bored to death in their desolate neighborhood. If the homophile starts showing interest in his underage neighbors, he just will become the pedophile, the sex criminal that his adult neighbors will chase away. The homophile’s supplication to be seen as just the same gets inverted by straight people who only see the difference.

The word homophile has an interesting history. It was used for the first time by Karl-Günther Heimsoth, later the private doctor of Nazi leader Ernst Röhm. Heimsoth introduced this dichotomy in his dissertation, Hetero- und Homophilie (1925), to indicate the desires of people who look for someone different or similar. He stressed that a manly queer could love another manly queer, while Magnus Hirschfeld, at that time the leader of the German homosexual rights movement, was preoccupied with feminine homosexuals who often fell in love with “normal,” masculine men. For most sexologists sexual desire was “heterophile” and needed gender opposites -- the feminine woman and the masculine man were the straight ideal. Gays and lesbians often kept to this gender dichotomy with pairings of a feminine man (gay) and a masculine man (straight), or masculine woman (butch lesbian) and feminine woman (straight femme). Heimsoth, who probably thought about himself and his lovers as masculine homosexuals, invented this new word to become a homophile homosexual. Through the queer turns of history the prewar Nazi term became the preferred postwar term among liberal same-sex people because they identified more with the “phile” (love) of the homophile than with the “sex” of the homosexual.

Homosexual

Homosexual is a strange mixture of Greek (homoios=same) and Latin (sexus=gender). Why this word, invented in 1868 by the Hungarian writer Karl Maria Kertbeny, is still in use after more than 140 years is a mystery to me. There are so many interesting alternatives: faggot, catamite, ganymede, queen, queer, uranian, aunty, sissy, salamander, sodomite, bugger, pederast, Greek lover, and so forth. Only the abbreviation homo sounds good because it is so straightforward and direct.

Humiliation

To the true pervert dirty means horny. What he wants least might excite him most. Tight-ass queens, at home all spick and span, turn into sleazy pigs when it comes to sex. The fetishist keeps his beloved sex toys, shoes, clothes shipshape and mortally fears the slightest stain. Yet he might be totally turned on when his partner tears up his fetish apparel, shits in his favorite boots, or drags his gear through the mud. Not only conquering a loved one but also being humiliated by him proves to be horny. Holland’s number one gay writer, the late Gerard Reve, loved his sailor Vos (Fox) as much as he did because Vos liked making a fool of him in public.

In matters of sex and love, most people think of things and persons that are beautiful, good, and fun. A hot guy combines for them the three elements of good, cute, and nice and what’s more, holds his own in the bedroom. Exciting sex is the fusion of two bodies incorporating aforementioned qualities and finding mutual sexual fulfillment in a stimulating variation both agree upon. Marquis de Sade roared with laughter over this ridiculous idea. According to him, what is lustful has little to do with generally accepted ideas of good and beautiful, with mutual consent and shared enjoyment. To him desire was first of all linked to unequal, often forced sex between people, who were not in the least nice and decent and whose beauty would turn into an obstacle when they presumed they could derive certain privileges from it. The violence that according to Sade is part of all sex is not necessarily something which turns against the other. He much rather wanted to be abused and maltreated. Like Reve, he was looking for humiliation.

Sade’s argument is constructed like this: People who believe in the good and virtuous only know half of the world, since the other half is marked by evil and vice. They reject sex that is forced upon them and also do not want to do that to others. But their rejection of unwanted intimacies makes them blind to the horniness hidden right there. They do not see virtue in vice, beauty in ugliness, or lust in displeasure or vice versa. Because of their one-sided belief, they miss half the world and half the pleasures and thus do not know what life and lust really mean. Virtuous people are unworldly, lousy in bed, and boring in contact. They are conformists, slaves to the ruling morals. To them virtue is a lesson they have learned, which they had better forget as soon as possible.

Sade offers a simple solution for the problem of slavery to virtue. Such slaves should be maltreated, abused, and humiliated. The sadean submits them to his virtuous vice. With his deeds and philosophies he teaches them the ambiguity of moral categories as in La philosophie dans la boudoir (1795). He does his best to enslave such upright souls to lust, pain, vice, and worldly pleasures. He shows them the freedom of wickedness and lust and the tastelessness and dullness of social conventions. Humiliation is the golden road to the complete experience of sex. He turns slaves of virtue into slaves of lust who derive pleasure from slavery and mastery. In Sade’s everyday practice this turned out differently and for long periods he was incarcerated against his will and with very little pleasure, charged with abuse, sodomy, and blasphemy.

Humiliation knows many faces. These days it is generally something you have done to yourself and is not forced upon you by someone else. Some men find their well being in babies’ and children’s clothes like diapers or little sailor suits. Others show a preference for female attire. The magazine Forced Womanhood is devoted entirely to a combination of transgenderism and masochism or “men transformed into female slaves.” Steel chastity belts and penis casings keep them from having sex while hormone treatments with “feminique” and “mammary” result in well-shaped breasts. When thinking of humiliation, most male masochists do not think of forced feminization, but of chains, cages, cuffs, galleys, of slavery and captivity, of bondage, spanking, and torture. They think of kneeling and licking or the use of mud, shit, and piss for degradation, or of being trained like a dog, horse, or milk cow. Others lust for the “disgrace” of being fucked or forced to suck, or dream of their lovers having sex with a third party while they, in chains, bound up or in a cage, are forced to look on.

Slaves of virtue cannot understand the pleasures of humiliation and submission. They do not understand the reversal. Postmodernists, on the other hand, prefer breaking through deadlocks like gay and straight and the reversal of hierarchies of male and female or young and old. Sade long ago came upon the magic word that captures such ideals: degradation. Maso-men like Sade wanted nothing better than to be the slutty wives of male fuckers breaking through the rigid system of male/female, gay/straight, like other men who want to be trained as female servants. From hetero men they become lesbian slaves. A supreme “debasement” fulfils a dream wish for them wherein horniness culminates in a ban on sex. They long for a sexual straightjacket, which transforms sexual pleasure into a state of eternal excitement without a chance of relief. They are not fools yearning for a past of abuse and slavery, but rather are heralding a new age in which sexual pleasure is less one-dimensional.

Creating pleasure from humiliation can be an effective answer to all the misery befalling mankind. Hurt pride and humiliation are experiences nobody escapes. The macho generally answers with rage and violence directed against the other, a dandy reacts with indifference and superiority, and a maso-man enjoys the refined art of degradation. It is said that masochists often hold high positions in society and let off steam in sexual subjugation. Perhaps it is the other way around and their lust for humiliation prepares them for the offenses of the workplace. Lust in submission, then, is no weird foolishness, but an adequate preparation for the crude realities of life. See Masochism

Hunting

Being taken prisoner and catching prisoners call up wild dreams in the kinky scene. The click of cuffs on wrists or ankles always sends shivers down my spine. The petty criminals the police take to their precincts look even better in handcuffs. Taking prisoners can also be combined with animal love when the victims are not seen as petty criminals but as hunted deer. In my youth I dreamed of hunting grounds where men and boys were the quarry. The deer-men would be assembled in a pigsty or horse stable, then whipped off into “liberty,” naked or in some sexy uniform, perhaps with a deer or pig mask, bound or unbound. They were to run away and hide from their hunters, who would start the attack an hour later. Think about the possible variations: with dogs, on horses, with lassoos, whips, or rods, how resistance to the chasers would be punished. The capture is one of the nicer parts of the game; even when the slaves willingly surrender, some violence is needed to get the real feel of looting. A bit of resistance is much nicer, it is the spice of the chase. Then the hunters would humiliate their catch, probably tie them to a tree until they capture the other deer, then bring them back to the stable in chains or as a rope gang. Or they might harness them to a carriage and have themselves driven home, or drag them over the ground behind the horses. Back home the victors would put the quarry on display, to celebrate the good haul by getting drunk and abusing their game without sparing any part of the captives’ bodies. Imagine the display of the deer: tied up to a pole, hanging upside down in a stable, lying as a stack of game in the mud. They might even sell the animal sluts to share their catch before they proceed to further sexual and physical niceties.

Hyperphilia means more sex than average and hypophilia stands for subaverage quantities. The average seems to be twice a week, so count your blessings.

Hypoxyphilia means loving a shortage of oxygen. There is a “prettier” term: strangulation sex.

Ice sex

Alternative terms for ice sex are psychocrism and cold deed. Some people get aroused by ice and coldness. In one of Amsterdam’s cruising areas I once watched a man walking around bare naked in the middle of winter, casually strolling through ice and snow. You do not have to wait for winter to get the sensation of ice sex. Ice cubes, a washcloth, or some favorite item that has been kept in the freezer can also transfer this icy excitement. Having sex in a freezing environment creates a special feeling: warm seed in cold weather, a frost-shriveled cock slowly growing with desire. Alternating hot and cold with candle wax and ice cubes can stimulate your desires even more. Patagonian Indians who went out to the seas in the past did so naked because wet clothing would make it colder than what they did: smearing their skin with animal fat or oil. Could be a good idea for psychocrists as it combines more fetishes: cold, oil, smell and whatever can be connected to these preferences.

Impaling

One of the most cruel and horrible punishments is impaling. The victim is placed with his arse on a pole, so that he is penetrated slowly from below and dies of internal bleeding. The thickness, sharpness, and smoothness of the spear determine the duration of the suffering. The punishment is a disgrace since that is what being penetrated in the arse means to most people. Vlad the Impaler, after whom Dracula was patterned, enjoyed doing it to captured Turks, some think in payment for what he received from them when he was their hostage. It is a perversion, which masochists only dare to contemplate in their wildest fantasies. But one can try it out with a dildo on a pole. Take care somebody is around because impaling is life-threatening. The same goes for nail beds. A fakir might lie down on it comfortably, but for masochists it requires a certain practice to enjoy the pain inflicted by the nails.

Incest

Now that same-sex marriage and adoption are allowed in many countries, newly created gay families will give gay incest a new chance. A friend of mine once made a distinction between hetero- and homosex with children: heterosexuals, having access to kids through families, commit incest, leaving pedophilia to be a mainly homosexual matter. The pedophile is imagined as that perverse man in a park who lusts after little boys. For heterosexuals, pedophilia is about gay men who live outside families. Incest is bad, but pedophilia is worse in their perspective. Of course this distinction makes no sense, but it expresses the straight mind. Parents hardly ever do wrong and only rarely have incestuous relations, while gays always are evil because they have to recruit boys unknown to them for sex and to continue the homosexual community. In fact, the main difference between a father having sex with his daughter and a pedophile fooling around with a non-related boy is that the father often abuses his paternal power, mixing up familial and sexual relations in a damaging way. So incest is generally rather worse than pedophilia although incestuous relations can be loving, pleasing and mutual, more often so between siblings than between parents and children. It is remarkable that gay sex is seen as so very tempting if it is so easy to seduce young male strangers to homosexuality, compared to the apparently undesirable silliness of decent straight family life.

Gays have always had children. Until recently, largely in a heterosexual context; but today also in a homosexual context, so incest can also be a completely gay affair. The kind of incest in which gays are most frequently involved is the love of brothers. Many gay men have their first sexual relations or felt the first stirs of love with their brothers. They often look back on these experiences with romantic longing, not with the disgust that is generally evoked by such relationships. Some boys learn how to be gay from their brothers and can only express gratitude for their incestuous gay socialization. Brothers and sisters, and sisters and sisters can have similar pleasant relations. In a world where plural parenthood and poly-amory get more common, possibilities of incest will grow exponentially.

The great incest taboo, of course, is to have sex with your father, but that is not the case for everyone. A summary of François-Paul Alibert’s novel Le Fils de Loth (1998, The Son of Lot, written in the 1930s) opens thus: “Two young men romp on the beach. They are beautiful, they love each other. The one asks the other a question: ‘Who has initiated you into love?’ The answer comes uneasily: ‘My father.’” And then the novel tells the engaging love story of a father and a son who adores his father’s cock. Here incest is more of a pleasure than a vice – once more a Sadean inversion, and very logical at that, for how could a father not love his son? Much better than to subject him to a lustless crucifixion.

Inequality

Inequality was for a long time the main principle of lust. Difference was needed to achieve sexual arousal. The difference could be between man and woman, male and female, man and boy, master and slave. Thus queens used to go for “tule" (Dutch for trade), normal hetero boys who, for some cash or a warm bed, suspended their objections to gay sex for a night. These days equality is the sexual norm. I often wonder whether this egalitarian ideology does not mean death for lust and pleasure. Leading French feminist Elisabeth Badinter is of the same opinion but doesn’t care because equality is good for feminism, but she mixes up politics and sexuality. To me, submission and humiliation are much more stimulating than trading roles or, even worse, striving for complete equality. Are coercive or slavish glances not much more lustful than neutral ones? The ideals of sexual equality, only recently in existence, are much less exciting than dreams of submission, coercion, and slavery. Equality might sound great in politics and socialists and feminists may push for it, but in matters of lust it is a killer. It is amazing to witness such a sexual tsunami which flips from lust based on inequality to the idea that sexual partners should be as alike as possible. They should have similar desires and social and educational status, and as much as possible the same age. It also shows how dynamic sexuality is, and how such major transformations, often unnoticed, take place within a generation. People nowadays believe strongly in erotic sameness and become critical of sexual pleasures that were common and often accepted in the past, such as prostitution, relations between queen and trade, sex with teenagers, bestiality. Sadomasochists do their best to get us to believe that their relations are really not about power differences but are based on the consent of the masochist. Why can’t we simply accept that desires have nothing to do with democratic ideals of equality or liberal beliefs about consent? These may be good for politics but are much less so for sex.

Infantile sex

The conversion of childhood games and habits into adult sex practices is seen as infantile. Often the term is used in a prejudicial way. Psychiatrists often denounce gay desires as infantile sex or baby games. Infantile here means backward, returning to youth. But of course, child games can be very exciting. Many kids have played Cowboys and Indians and enjoyed all the bondage that came with such games. It does not make the adult love of bondage in any way stupid. Why should one not keep to the practices that once were and still are lustful?

There are many more specialized forms of infantile sex, apart from homosexual and bondage games. Lovers of infantile games may return to breastfeeding, potty training, spanking, or love clothing like diapers, schoolboy outfits, young sailor suits. Such inclinations do not make someone a pedophile or childish, as psychiatrists and other moralists may say. A more sensible approach is to see these childhood games as groundwork for later sexual interests. A good example of this is a young boy who was rescued in the 1953 flood in Dutch Zealand by a man in rubber hip boots. This experience made him into a rubber lover. How nice of him to honor his savior by making his boots into a sexual fetish. The basics of many people’s sexual preferences are laid down in their early years, and will develop in their adult years. The more chances people have to act upon their desires, the more they will change. What is not acted out will remain stagnant. Maybe the lack of opportunity for acting out infantile sexual pleasures makes the few efforts to practice them look childish. But with more space and more training, the awkward feelings aroused by infantile sex may turn into something completely different, exciting perverse practices.

Insects

The most common way to include insects in your sex life is to have them walk over your body as a way to turn you on. Lie down on an anthill with a bit of sugar or syrup on the right place and you may feel what it is to be a phormicophile or lover of insects. For a variation, see Bee sex.

Internet

Internet is perhaps not in itself a perversion but produces a real sexual revolution as it offers information on all the variations described in this encyclopedia and many more. Information and possibilities to find like-minded people have exploded in the last 20 years compared to what was available in earlier times when some underground organizations, zines and sex shops offered a small range of all kinky possibilities. Some people may have liked the charms of this hidden underworld, but all the options of internet have given a chance to many more perverts all over the world to find friends, texts and images. Now one can connect with persons who share similar preferences all over the globe. Many people stumble more or less by accident on all possible sexual variations and discover new sexual worlds that would have remained closed to them in the past. For internet users it can be a problem to find the right words to discover one’s delights, but that was even more true in the past than now. It may, however, be the case that all sexual possibilities of the internet may inhibit engaging in erotic practices and politics away from the screen. Internet sex may become closeted as homosexuality was in the past with pleasures that people enjoy on their own in front of screens – rarely meeting like-minded people in person. See Cybersex, Grooming, Webcam

Interrogation

Interrogating is exciting. You should not do it with a really slavish boy, because he will confess right away what he should only own up to after some pressure. Due to such behavior you miss the interesting phase of verbal abuse and rough beatings, forcing your prisoner to confess. The best solution with meek slaves is to not believe them and accuse them of lying, so you have the chance to get the truth out of them after all with rough language and a strong hand. The most in/famous interrogators for kinky people were the awful priests of the medieval Inquisition who made interrogation an art form. They are rightfully hated because of the realism and dogmatism of their puritanical persecution of mostly innocent people, but could deserve some conditional praise for their inventiveness when it comes to torture.

Jealousy

The expression and the feeling of possessive love is jealousy. True love, through, is never of a possessive nature. Still, many people have the strange notion that being in love gives them the exclusive right to their beloved and permission to treat him as a prisoner of their desire and wishes. Dutch writer Gerard Reve found a much funnier expression for his kind of love: revism (after his own name). It means offering boys or young men to your lover, who is allowed to abuse these gifts. No jealousy, but multiplied excitement. Love as a gift instead of a possession. Gay men have been the best at separating sex and love, which has made their relations more enduring and deeper. The occasional one-night stand did not endanger their love but rather enriched it. Some men cruise together to pick up a third party or to share each other’s pleasures. Basing love on mutual sexual excitement does not offer a stable basis because sex in steady couples eventually becomes boring and the passion that started the love will wane. Better to base love on the small pleasures of daily life than on the fickleness of momentary lust. With so many sexual variations, the chances are slim that both partners have desires that go in the same direction. Better move on with sex that lives in the moment and stay with love that is for eternity. For couples that separate love and lust, jealousy is the awkward feeling of lack of trust in a long-time beloved.

Although one might expect gay men to be able to move beyond possessive love and jealousy, there are still too many caught up in this feeling. Let us hope that it is about the passion of early love while the lovers are learning to trust each other. But some cannot cope with the loss of a beloved. Around 1880 a 44-year old Dutch man wrote this suicide note to his 19-year-old former lover: “I have taken revenge … after having fed you all winter long, you thought me too old, but that other gentleman of 60 years, he is not too old! My heart is too filled up to write you more.” This letter shows all the ugly feelings associated with jealousy: the man thinks the boy is his property, as he has fed him; the revenge is intended to produce guilt; and finally the successful but horrendous suicide. It shows how far jealousy is removed from love.

Kinsey, Alfred C. (1894-1956)

In 1948 the sociological study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and five years later Sexual Behavior in the Human Female were published from the hand of Alfred C. Kinsey and his collaborators. They worked at the “Institute of Sex Research” of the University of Indiana in Bloomington, on the border of the American Bible Belt. The books, needless to say, shocked the puritanical United States. It appeared that most US citizens engaged in sexual activities that were crimes for the state and sins for the churches. Masturbation, homosexual acts, bestiality, oral, anal, premarital and extramarital sex, and prostitution were all much more widespread than most Americans expected. Kinsey’s studies showed that some 4 percent of males were exclusively homosexual, 35 percent had engaged in homosexual pastimes and 50 percent had fantasized about such.

Kinsey began as a specialist in wasps and ended up becoming the sociologist who put sexual statistics on the map. He always swore that he stumbled accidentally on this theme. In 1938 he was invited to take part in a marriage course where he discovered that very little information was available about the sex life of the average American. According to Kinsey’s biographer, James Jones, the real reason was Kinsey’s own sex life which was frustrated by American puritanism. Even before the marriage course he had ventured into sex research.

Kinsey himself was a married man with children. His true sexual feelings were, however, mono- and homosexual. He fell in love with his colleagues and students. Another of his preferences was to walk around naked. On his long hikes looking for new kinds of wasps he would take his students with him and make them swim nude together. His two greatest loves were straight guys who offered him little pleasure. The discovery of his sexual preferences brought Kinsey to the study of classical German sexology. He was opposed to the pathological interpretations of “perversions” such as homosexuality and missed the “facts” on the sexual life of normal people.

As a wasp expert, Kinsey had collected an enormous pile of information on this species. After his marriage course he decided that he wanted just as much or even more data about the American sex life. His first research interviews were with students, but he quickly found his way into the Chicago gay scene. He took a glance at a world which few scientists had ever studied. As a married man still in the gay closet, he wanted to learn as much of it as he could. He set his path through many contacts and became friends with well-known homosexuals like Glenway Wescott and his lover Monroe Wheeler, their friend photographer Platt Lynes, pornographer and tattooist Samual Steward, and psychologist Clarence Tripp. As a scientist he studied cruising areas quite regularly but according to the biography he did not have many sexual experiences there. In their Institute, in the utmost secrecy Kinsey and his colleagues made pictures and films of sexual activities in which they themselves participated.

His first book on male sexual behavior brought Kinsey instant world fame. His data may have been shocking to the public at that time, but even more radical was his plea for less rigid sexual standards when it came to adultery, divorce, prostitution, masturbation, or homosexuality. Kinsey not only spoke up for gay but also for pedophile sex. Through his studies he became less and less opposed to pedosexuality. The biographer Jones keeps to his prejudices on this topic and calls it “sexual child abuse” in the puritan language of today. In his quest for more sexual freedoms Kinsey did not see anything wrong in sex between adults and children. In his studies he made quite a few observations about the sex lives of pedophiles and prepubescent children. Jones just could not handle this topic. Since Kinsey’s time there has been a lot of progress on most sexual territories, except that of child sexuality. The attacks of pedophilia have carried some Americans in recent years so far that they have accused Kinsey of promoting “child sexual abuse” because he made use of data from men who had sexual relations with kids. On several occasions Kinsey indicated the legal boundaries he proposed to draw: no forced sex, no sex with dependents, and an age of consent that he did not specify.

Kinsey always seemed to be a respectable married man to the outside world so as not to discredit his very controversial studies. He let his wife, with whom he no longer had sex, do whatever she pleased, and she surely used her sexual freedoms. Few people knew of Kinsey’s homosexual interests and even fewer knew of his masochistic side. In his youth he had experimented with sticking straws in his urethra. He went from small to big and ended with the handles of toothbrushes. In connection with this cock-torture he loved to tie up his balls as well. He liked it so much that he constantly thought up new ways for doing so. Some of his colleagues even say that he once hung himself by the balls. Biographer Jones is somewhat unclear about what exactly happened. It must have been something like Kinsey standing on a chair holding a rope thrown over a pipe in the ceiling that ended on a cord to his balls. Then he could push the chair away and hang there by his testicles for a short moment. It remains, however, a mysterious act that only can be explained by someone who has done it himself. According to Jones he had to seek medical help after performing this stunt. Some reviewers were so confused by Jones’ version of the story that they assumed Kinsey had tried to commit suicide. Such lack of understanding of perversion by “normal” people has contributed to a lack of esteem for perverts.

Kinsey’s fight for more reasonable attitudes towards sex came at the wrong moment. His books were published in the early stages of the Cold War and McCarthyism. Senator Joe McCarthy and his aides, Richard Nixon and closet case Roy Cohn, had started a witch-hunt for communists and gays. Before Kinsey died he saw the laws get stricter instead of more liberal as he had proposed. Gay men were persecuted more than ever and even Kinsey himself barely escaped becoming a victim of this hunt. His research slowly spiraled to an end, as grant money went into “more important” things like missiles and bombs. Kinsey ended his life disappointed that he had not reached his goals. The same American puritanism that got him started on his revolutionary projects became his demise. He paved the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s but did not live to see it (Jones 1997).

Kissing by itself deserves a laudatory poem. Kisses are pressed on cheeks, lips, genitals, feet, the nose, the butt. As this is no perversion, I leave the possibilities to your own imagination.

Knee sex

Men who practice knee sex or genuflection rub their cocks on, around, or between the knees. There are many variations, such as the armpits, behind the knees, elbows, or ears, in noses, or between the toes. Putting the dick between the thighs or right under the balls, the way ancient Greeks did it, is called “interfemoral” sex and can be subsequent to genuflection. Some gay men dislike knees because of their ugliness, but others love them precisely for that reason.

Giving a knee can be a part of SM games. Such “knees” can serve for attack or self-defense; the aim is most often the belly or the genital area. To prevent prisoners from giving a knee, their ankles or knees should be bound tightly: the ankles to keep them from walking, the knees if they are allowed to totter around. See Frottage.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von (1840-1902)

Squire Richard von Krafft-Ebing is considered the founding father of sexual science. His Psychopathia sexualis, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Stuttgart 1886; Sexual Psychopathology with special attention to contrary sexual feeling) was the first reference book of sexual abnormalities; it was reprinted many times and translated into several languages. As the subtitle indicates, it deals mainly with homosexuality, which is the exemplary perversion in his work.

Krafft-Ebing was one of many psychiatrists who became interested in sexual variations in the second half of the nineteenth century. He established his reputation as a professor in Strasbourg and Graz and as the author of standard works in general and forensic psychiatry. He wrote several articles on sexuality, but it was Psychopathia sexualis that brought him world fame. In the English-speaking world (where most translations of his book were published, the last one in 2006) he was in poor repute because he wrote too openly and too sympathetically about perverts as “the stepchildren of nature.”

Nonetheless, his division of sexual variations laid the foundations of modern sexology. He distinguished deviations according to the age at which people had sex (too young, too old); to the strength of the sex drive (too much, too little); and to the aim, which was not the coitus. The norm of his day was heterosexuality between adults. Procreation was losing its place of prominence in the sexual theory among psychiatrists: Albert Moll would say some years later that reproduction was only the incidental result of coital sex. Pleasure became more important as a sexual aim. In biology, however, Charles Darwin made sexual reproduction and coital sex cornerstones of his theory of evolution.

Krafft-Ebing dealt mostly with the third variation and subdivided it further. The “contrary sexual feeling” embraced not only men going for men but also women going for women, men who felt like women, and women who felt like men. The term combined gender and sexual inversion. The terms transvestism, transsexuality, and transgender appeared later, but Krafft-Ebing came up with sadism and masochism and devoted lots of attention to fetishism. He discussed exhibitionists, voyeurs, lust murderers, pedophiles, gerontophiles, coprophiles, and statuophiles, along with many of the other variations catalogued in this “encyclopedia of perversions.” After Sade, Krafft-Ebing was the second collector of special sexual preferences.

While Sade was mostly interested in pleasure, the lust for pain, and the politics of sex, Krafft-Ebing was a doctor who wanted to explain and cure. The second subtitle of his book was “Eine klinische und forensische Studie” (a clinical and forensic study). He was a psychiatrist who at first saw perverts as psychopaths, but in the course of his life his views changed. First he mainly got to know madmen and sex offenders, and later he increasingly met men of his own class who were not in prisons or institutions, but who came to his private practice or wrote letters to him after reading his book. The upper middle class had its own deviant preferences and defended them fervently. Krafft-Ebing received letters from all parts of the Western world. Sometimes they were entire tracts in which “the stepchildren of nature” explained and analyzed their sexual lives. In the first edition Krafft-Ebing thanked Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), founder of the gay movement and advocate of the theory that “Uranism” (his neologism of 1864 for what would be named homosexuality in 1869) is natural. In later editions of Psychopathia sexualis, perverts themselves explain that they are not insane or criminal. With this wider view of sexual variations, Krafft-Ebing’s attitude changed. Procreation as the sexual norm was reinforced by Darwinism, but he recognized the role of lust. With this shift in attention, from getting children to having fun, a stronger emphasis was given to sexuality as a male urge.

Harry Oosterhuis, the author of the best book on Krafft-Ebing (2000), stresses the psychiatrist’s importance for the development of sexual identities. Historians of gay and queer culture still debate the question of when the “homosexual” as a person with a special identity was created. Many authors in the footsteps of Michel Foucault claim it was the late nineteenth century with doctors like Krafft-Ebing and gay men like Ulrichs. Others maintain that even in the eighteenth century there were worlds of sodomites who showed specific, often feminine, behaviors. Oosterhuis is very clear about this discussion. The enormous success of psychiatrists, especially with perverts, is the indication of a fundamental change. These men recognized themselves for the first time in the case histories of Krafft-Ebing. Oosterhuis speaks of “self-reflexivity,” the realization of and thinking about one’s sexual life, which leads to the formation of one’s core personal identity. Autobiographical awareness and self-analysis came with the modern age and found in matters sexual a temporary culmination in the Psychopathia sexualis. If “case histories” of perversion were rare before 1886, by the time Krafft-Ebing died they had become a veritable flood. In these cases it was no longer about (sexual) behavior, but about identities that shaped personal life, sometimes without sexual expression. The difference between homo and hetero became almost as important as the difference between male and female. According to Oosterhuis, the homosexual, together with other perverts, was indeed invented in the late nineteenth century. In this the “stepchildren of nature” themselves played first fiddle. They whispered in Krafft-Ebing’s ear what he later told the world out loud. This production was more the doing of homosexuals than of doctors.

Krafft-Ebing developed a better understanding of homosexuals as well as masochists and fetishists. He sometimes copied their stories and theories literally into his books and articles. His study does not contain a completed view or the final word on perversions; it is more like an encyclopedia of a new science in its turbulent initial phase. Freud made a greater effort to pin down sexual life in a theory of developmental stages and resulting neuroses. Oedipus would reign supreme with Freud. Oosterhuis presents Krafft-Ebing as a psychiatrist who understood sexual variation, rather than an evil genius responsible for the pathologization of perverts. It is not his fault that his book was used by later doctors to medicalize sexual variations.

About the person Krafft-Ebing, Oosterhuis has little to say. He was not a striking personality, but a bourgeois and respectable scientist, who could mainly thank his patients and correspondents for the originality of his work. He was a collector who compiled a bundle of remarkable sexual stories. His book would bring him the world fame that his patients never got. Oosterhuis has given them the attention and credit they deserve. Maybe it is a sign of the times: in 1900 psychiatrists spoke for perverts, and now they speak for themselves. An encouraging sign at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Lips are for kissing. That is a pleasure, not a perversion.

Looking

In literature about porn it has often been pointed out that women in general take an expectant stance and lower their eyes. They offer themselves humbly, as it were, to the onlooker. For men it is the opposite. They often have a daring look that forces the onlooker into a subservient position. I myself once experienced how transsexual whores changed the roles of client and whore around with their audacious looks and gestures. They simply grabbed my crotch in the Parisian Bois de Boulogne, with the double aim of testing my hardness and giving me a preview of their sexual capacities. It gave them the lead in sexual transactions. With their glance, many people establish the division of sexual roles. In an age of increasing equality between sexual partners we can unfortunately expect that audacious and submissive glances will give more and more way to a waiting, neutral, and indirect way of looking.

Lust murder

Not all men are nice to each other when lust ignites them. Most queers are quite civilized in expressing their sexuality. It is mainly for men who are driven into a tight corner that lust goes with murder. Although we call it lust murder and some culprits indeed kill out of sexual desire, the perpetrators are more often repressed idiots and closet queens than anything else. Holland has seen very few lust murders, but in the USA they are quite common. The names of Ed Gein, Dean Corll, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer at some point gained great fame and were whispered all over America. Gein was a transgender man who enveloped himself in the skins of his female victims. The other three made the streets of respectively Houston, Chicago, and Milwaukee unsafe with their hunt for boys. Corll and Gacy each murdered approximately thirty young men, Dahmer made it to seventeen. Wayne Williams murdered 27 mainly black hustlers in Atlanta. The Rostov killer Andrei Chikatilo made it to 52 victims and Colombian Luis Alfredo Garavito to 140. The police-informant Fritz Haarmann killed two dozen hustler boys in Hannover, Germany, in the 1920s and sold their remains on the local meat market. Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century companion of French heroine Jeanne d’Arc, beat them all: he is reputed to have slaughtered 150 boys. He could have modeled for the Bluebeard legend. Most cases look like a mixture of wild lust and internalized homophobia of not always closeted gay men. Sade, to whom many lust murders have been attributed, probably never killed anyone. SM people who lust for violent games may in fact be a good examples of decent behavior because, let us not beat about the bush, lust murder is the despicable behavior of lunatics.

Machines

American Sex Machines (1996) by Hoag Levins is devoted entirely to devices for which US patent applications have been submitted. The book starts off with examples of anti-sex devices. Invented to prevent lonely pleasures, these early anti-sex-aids served masochists just as well. Much money and effort has gone into designing apparatus to prevent procreation and venereal diseases, but the stimulation of lust also grew into a thriving industry. In the nineteenth century quacks not only sold pills and potions to cure male impotence, but also offered cock-rings of iron and rubber to get and keep a dick hard. A later generation would have pumps at their disposal to stiffen up their members. Little electrical jolts offered extra stimulus to harden soft meat. In the field of dildos, Levins documents striking inventiveness, from dildo/cock-ring hybrids to a pseudo-penis of steel with little balls on the outside, which add extra excitement to the penetrated body part. In a similar way but with the intention of producing pleasure in pain, a Dutch “art house” in the 1930s sold fat corks with added big drawing pins. In 1974 a Soviet citizen was the first to get a patent on an apparatus that had to be inserted into the penis. No chance that a dick would soften with such a tube inside. Stimulation is nowadays much easier due to Viagra and similar pills.

Patents for remedies to prevent sexual diseases and aids have been in greater demand than for machines to produce pleasure. How American. Yet in San Francisco I met a woman whose company specialized in electrical appliances to stimulate lust. And I once met a man in Amsterdam who converted a slide projector into a masturbation machine. The mechanism that changed slides produced regular jerking motions. He had designed it for his own use but could have turned it into a business: there is a broad market with shiny future prospects for sex machines.

Mask

In the past, homos had to wear a metaphorical mask. They had to hide who they were. For parties they often used real masks, so they could enjoy gay life and remain unrecognizable. In the kinky scene masks are used for similar reasons but also as a variety of bondage, by closing off the eyes to create blind sex. With masks, masochists stand out less. Shaving off their hair or putting them in uniforms has the same cute result of making them into exchangeable slaves. Masks come in many forms, from a simple device to cover the eyes to leather and rubber disguises that cover the whole head. They can come with or without holes for eyes, nose, and mouth, with dildos and tubes for piss sex. Gas-masks have been used and elaborated upon for various kinky games, combining army and masked sex.

Masochism

The word masochism stems from the name of the knight Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895). This Galician nobleman came from Lemberg (now Ukrainian Lviv or Lwow) in the northeast of the Habsburg Empire where his father was chief of police. There, in his early youth the son experienced the Polish uprisings against the Austrian regime and its atrocities. In those days he is said to have developed his preferences for fur and pain. After his law studies in Prague, Sacher-Masoch devoted himself successfully to a literary career. In addition to regional and political-philosophical novels he mainly wrote about women dominating men. His book Venus in Furs (1870) brought him fame that has now lasted over a hundred years (Exner 2003).

Upon completing his studies, Sacher-Masoch went to work at the University of Graz. Celebrity-to-be Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of the first standard work of importance on sexual perversion, was living in the same town and working at the same university. In 1886 this psychiatrist published Psychopathia sexualis; a revised and augmented edition was published every year until his death, and in each of them Krafft-Ebing described additional perversions. The first edition dealt with sexual cruelty and murder for lust, but in 1891 new words, sadism and masochism, appeared. This made Sacher-Masoch even more famous than he already was, but turned his fame into notoriety. Krafft-Ebing probably did not pull this dirty trick on purpose. Although Sacher-Masoch apparently protested, his eternal fame is ensured by the single word, masochism, which is more widely known than his published work. Still free from these cares, Sacher-Masoch wrote about what would be known as masochism. He also had women and girlfriends who, clad in fur, worked him over with the whip. He did not have the least notion that the pain he craved would later stigmatize him as a lunatic. On the contrary, he would sometimes use the poor excuse that he needed the whip to be cured from diseases. Several women were caught out and thrashed him unscrupulously. Medical men would turn what to him was an erotic game into a dangerous mental illness. To this very day we have not been able to rid ourselves of this: in psychiatric manuals masochism is still listed as a mental aberration.

This knight was not, as befits a true masochist, purely heterosexual. In the first place he had written an early homosexual novel, The Love of Plato (1870). And secondly he tried to get women to cheat on him with “Turks” and “Greeks,” in which games he liked to play the role of servant. A thrashing by rough rivals was part of his wildest dreams. Unfortunately his greatest difficulty was to get his beloved Wanda to commit adultery - the chosen men did not have the courage to cheat and thrash him upon request.

The desire for submission was an enigma for psychiatrists where it concerned men like Sacher-Masoch. According to them women were by nature masochistic, but this could not of course be the case with the lords of creation. As with male homosexuality, doctors dished out explanations of femininity or passivity for sufferers of this pathology. Freud developed a theory that masochism was a specific effect of a universal death wish. Doctors kept looking for the origin of what they considered a pathology to find a cure or therapy for it. They had difficulty imagining that pleasure comes in many guises, masochism being one of them.

Since the 1950s, starting in the gay world, a leather subculture developed of which sadomasochism has become an established part. In the leather scene sadists and masochists have found a place all their own. Yet the fetishes are totally different. The fur Sacher-Masoch and his fellow masochists liked so much has given way to leather, rubber, and army green, and rarely anything else, for gay kinky men are very dogmatic about their choice of fetishes. They generally go for one fetish and abhor others. How fashion finds its way into sexual desire and manages to subject people to its tyranny remains another riddle to be solved. In other entries many subforms of masochism and fetishes have been dealt with. Patient, prisoner, soldier, schoolboy, thing, slave, brat are all personifications in the rich world of masochism. The desire can focus on ropes, restraints, cuffs, cells, crosses, blocks, branding, submission. Tying up, beating, humiliation, hanging, suffocation, selling, pissing are all part of the abundant repertory that can be used on masochists. Restraining and hitting instruments are various. Stories and novels by Larry Townsend, John Preston, and Tom Shaw, photos by Tom McGurk, the magazines Bizarre of John Wiley (Pine 2013) and Bound & Gagged, videos by Grapik Arts and Bob Jones offer an instructive and salacious survey of the many forms of humiliation and pain.

According to Krafft-Ebing the desired pain is more mental than physical. People pleading for masochism adhere to the thesis that it is not at all about real pain but mainly mental humiliation. Another means for making masochism more acceptable to the outside world is the story that it is about a voluntary relationship and that the partners use code words by which the slave indicates to the master that he has reached his limit. Such codes would indicate that not the sadist, but the masochist is running the show. They have named this SSC (Safe, Sane and Consensual), or better, RACK (risk aware consensual kink). The consent is in agreements beforehand (Sacher-Masoch made contracts) and in the code words that the masochist can use if the game is going too far.

It all sounds too polite to me. Especially since such arguments result in a distinction between “good” and “bad” masochism and for sure sadism. Of course, such distinctions exist, but the code and contracts don’t help against bad guys. That problem needs other solutions. The idea that such relations are voluntary takes the tension out of them. The masochist enters of his own free will into a situation that only gets hotter when the sadist stretches his boundaries a bit. The idea of free will is the worn out ideology of liberals (see Noyes 1998), understanding nothing of deep running social coercion or the salacity of sexual power games. Rather than stimulating, their politically correct ideas dull the SM game.

One of the main questions regards the relationship of fantasy and reality. Many people find SM representations and practices too realistic. Sadism should be unacceptable: sexist when men dominate women, racist when whites dominate blacks, when SM-clubs organize auctions, the use of shackles and whips. They sometimes consider it as an internalization of sexual repression or of violence in society. Preferences often stem, however, from the social and historical context, whether they are heterosexual, fetishist, sadist or masochist. It is biased to reproach SM people on their sexual preferences, and not to do so with normative interests. In fact, sadists and masochist are often conscious of the social and controversial backgrounds of their preferences. Outsiders don’t understand either how pain becomes pleasure, but it does so because fantasies are richer than any ideology. Fisher (1996) wrote an excellent story of himself as a black man looking for a white sadist; Weiss (2011) described such white masters with ethnic minority persons as racist, and criticized similar gendered relations as sexist.

A long-standing question is whether sadism and masochism go together or if they are separate phenomena. Medical doctors used the word sadomasochism to indicate that sadism and masochism cannot be sharply delimited. Many sadomasochists begin their career as masochists and after a few years continue as sadists. The Marquis de Sade liked to be whipped and fucked, but if his partners rejected his proposals, he thrashed and sexually abused them. Rage turned this masochist into a sadist. Other authors such as Gilles Deleuze (1967) have stipulated though that sadism and masochism belong to entirely different categories. Sometimes you get the idea that the best master for a masochist is another masochist. As with all desires: so many people, so many forms. In novels, movies, and pornography, masochism has won itself an important position. Unfortunately most people stick with sit, stare, and stay horny, and refuse to give the matter any further thought, missing out on important physical and mental experiences (Farin 2003;Weibel 2003).

Mass sex

Ochlophilia or mass sex often involves rubbing; it does not necessarily have to take place in a crowd. It is different from an orgy because having sex in large groups does not imply group sex at all. For men in the nineteenth century it was common practice to set out for the stir and bustle of markets, newsrooms, and theaters (standing places!) to rub against other people, as nowadays happens in busy metros and trains. This practice has practically vanished in the Western world since the person rubbed — against his, or more often her, will — is more likely to speak up than a century earlier. In Japan, however, the practice continues to such an extent that certain train lines have separate compartments for men and women.

Milking sex

Lustcraze comes in many forms. Some people get lustcrazy from other people’s horniness, others wallow in their own lewdness. For a consideration of the truly lustcrazed, let us limit ourselves to those nursing a sexual interest in male milk. This interest is age old. Among some Papuan cultures of New Guinea it was even institutionalized. The Papuans’ opinion was that one can only become a man by swallowing enough male sperm. According to them, male milk was the essential building block of the male body: without someone else’s sperm, one did not get seed of his own. Adolescent Papuans were ritually sucked by younger boys or fucked them, or rubbed their sperm over the children’s bodies so the semen would turn the lads into men. Often these sucklings were not more than about seven years old. For about five years the younger boys had to receive sperm from the older adolescents and subsequently they gave their own sperm to their younger peers who needed their sperm to grow. Five years later they would become sturdy warriors and good husbands who produced offspring in heterosexual unions. No harping on traumas, innocence, or inappropriate age for these same-sex initiations. It happened and was considered to help the boys to become males. Also here a certain belief created certain facts. Young boys only became real men by downing sperm and practicing other oral sexual habits and were not in the least traumatized by these juvenile pederast pleasures (see Herdt 1984). Curiously, as soon as these tribes came into contact with Western mores, the customs disappeared, and Papuans today are horrified to learn about their recent ancestors’ habits, which have been forgotten with lightning speed.

In the eighteenth century sodomites tossed off in a circle and had the curious habit of storing the seed in a handkerchief. In those days sperm was considered an extremely valuable fluid, forty times as precious as blood. At least, according to the honorable enlightened doctor Simon Tissot, one of the first physicians to raise his voice against onanism or self-abuse, as it was called then. Losing your sperm meant wrecking your body. The sodomites might have entertained the same idea on the value of sperm, of too great a value to just be thrown away. But in a world where fridges had yet to be invented, the question is, what perverted intention they might have had with this seed storage.

Funnily enough, Tissot, sodomites and Papuans alike had a similar idea on the value of sperm. Yet while the one proposed to store it all carefully for oneself and to have, above all, no other form of sex, the others aimed at initiating sexual activities as early as possible and endorsed the view that sperm was a gift to others. Well, give me the gay-friendly and humanitarian view of the Papuans.

These days people who are lustcrazy can engage in three kinds of activities. The men who want to get it in their arse are faced with the problem that this is just about the most dangerous form of sex. The tasting of sperm by means of oral sex is also seen as unsafe, even if you only take it in your mouth to spit it out again. Doing these things with a condom is for many men less pleasurable, but they might hang the rubber with the beloved content as a trophy above their bed to eat it with their eyes. That way the sperm might go straight to their brains and does not have to pass through their stomach. The third kind, smearing the seed over the body, also has its charms, adding luster to the skin, while being completely safe (unless there are wounds).

It is astounding how much Luc Milne in his porn novels (1998, 1999) makes of the milking on his “milking farm” of the sperm of boys and men. A whole book devoted to the idea of a luxurious hotel-farm where sperm-lovers milk, at times unwilling, young men. Bothersome boys in need of taming come to the farm via police or jail. The “cows,” not cowboys but boycows, undergo a training designed to develop a large tool and profuse sperm donations. A well-trained cow can give sperm four times a day. But with a little effort and some special training an expert milker may score even seven milkings. Important of course is these boycows’ diet, because their sperm should be tasty and profuse. The boycows are milked by the clients, but also have to be able to milk them, because most clients want it both ways.

The book offers a panorama of all possible options from the perspective of a candidate boycow, from the stables in which the cows are kept, to the kinds of services they have to offer and the punishments they get when they do not deliver the goods or enough milk. When the cows are milked dry, they disappear to the SM farm on which Luc Milne does not elaborate. The protagonist, who is not completely unwilling, is offered and eventually made over by contract to the milkfarm by his foster-father, an ardent visitor of the cowstable-hotel.

Next to the boycows there are boys and young men for special services and recipes. Of all the dishes and drinks there is a variety with precum or sperm. In the hotel itself boys are serving as pillows or fuck-animals. The training of the boycows takes six weeks; their lifespan on the farm is at the most five years. Whereupon they are ready for “The Last Resort,” a mysterious hotel that is no doubt the theme of a following story. The stretching of dick, the pumping of balls and the milking of young men may all sound rather SM-ish; for the aficionado of rough sex it all remains quite friendly in hotel Milklust with lots of big dicks, the necessary jerking off and milking, a bit of ass-fucking and some bondage. Luc Milne continued with a crueler story as hinted at in the last sentence in which the hotel “The Last Judgment” is described. The novel has become The S/M Ranch (2001).

Masturbation. See Solitary sex

Mirror love

Confirming their reputation for narcissism, gay men, not unlike women, really love mirrors. They use them while masturbating, exposing themselves in full view of their own image, or place mirrors above and around their beds to multiply their sexual acts and pleasures. Self-love has been regarded as a homosexual act, the man with his own man; similarly homosexuality has been regarded as an act of self-love. The looking glass is often used as a metaphor for the narcissism of gay men. But why should we care about such dry theorizing when the mirror adds to sexual pleasure by offering a completer view of the sex act, be it in love of oneself or another? The mirror offers a chance to experience twin love if you have no twin brother. It shows your back and ass that you could never have seen so well without it. But the full view of your front also is also made possible by the mirror. Masochists in bondage may also like to see their reflections that demonstrate their state of humiliation, but for some, feeling it is enough. See Narcissism

Money sex

Some people get off on paying for sex or being paid for sex. Let’s call it money sex. For many johns the climax comes when the money is handed over. A sensible hustler should get his payment beforehand -- perhaps his client will come without much further ado, simply from surrendering his cash. In papers sometimes you find advertisements from sluts who offer their services for as little as $10 for a house call, no matter where the customer lives. If they have to travel very far they take a big loss on their hustling business. These are not real prostitutes but lovers of money sex who get horny from being paid for their bodily services. Against their price no bordello or escort service can compete. The question is what kind of service they will offer when the money is handed over. Take care to pay only after he has finished his work. Hold the bills in your mouth so he can keep an eye on his beloved money: if he is licking your cock he will do a better job.

For men who are into BDSM, there exists a lively world of Dominatrices in cities like San Francisco and New York who often do it for money and pleasure. So not a bad and unattractive deal for their clients. There is a full-length book about the experiences of these sex workers (Lindeman 2012).

Morfophilia

Morphophilia is a broad term for the preference for physical discrepancies between partners. This ranges from long and short, thick and thin, no hair and much hair, to able-bodied and handicapped. Some people go for their look-alike counterpart (homoiophilia) while others desire contrast. Allophilia is the specific interest in someone of a different ethnic background and so does not fall under morphophilia, nor does heterosexuality, the love for a partner of a different sex. Actually morphophilia is a queer, messy category for leftovers.

Mouth sex

Mouth to mouth resuscitation is a means of saving people’s lives, often of those who have drowned. This technique was invented in the eighteenth century, but was slow to succeed: seen as being too sexual, it was abandoned for 150 years. Many people died because of this stupidity, another example of murderous puritanism. As a physical act, very much like deep kissing, it has become a fetish for some people. Best not do this with an unconscious partner, since that is a criminal offence these days. The mouth, with the lips, tongue, teeth, and throat, offers many more sexual possibilities, which will be discussed under these terms and under oral sex.

Mud sex

Discos are being redesigned for mud wrestling; for mud sex the Vagevuur (Purgatory) in Eindhoven organized special nights. Pictures of the muddy gold mines in Brazil give a good idea of what makes mud sex so exciting: the mass of good-looking men in dirt and sweat, with sparse rags clinging to the body, working hard in the slickness and shine of clay. Just as others use oil to enhance sexual pleasure, lovers of mud consider clay the ideal substance, for it offers the greasiness and slipperiness that enhance wrestling sex. What is more, you can throw it around so things can toughen up a bit. A dungier variation is offered by the Berlin sexclub Lab.oratory with sewage sex.

Mysophilia

Mysophilia or the love of dirt comes close to mud sex. Queens are often very tidy people, as we have seen under cleaning-sex, but in matters of lust, sexual preference often turns social preference upside down. In bed the tidiest queen might turn into the raunchiest mysophile. What we abhor in daily life we often desire, with a vengeance, in bed. Thus a stupid hetero creature can magically turn into the man of your dreams, a stinking stable can become your favorite sex place, so much so that you might end up liking nothing better than licking piss- and shit-covered boots. In former days doctors called homosexuality a sexual inversion and many religious leaders still say so. Actually they really understand what lust is all about: a reversal or transgression of the most ordinary and commonplace. But then again they show a stifling narrow-mindedness in condemning such lust-provoking practices.

Narcissism

Narcissus is the figure of classical mythology who fell in love with his own image, thinking it was another boy. I am not convinced that the bulb named after him represents his beauty. Nowadays narcissism stands for excessive self-love. Gay men are regularly accused of being narcissists. That can be attributed to the circumstance that gay men love men, not that strange “other,” woman. This makes straight people accuse gays of not being able to get beyond their own kind and of only finding love in men who most resemble themselves. Gay men know, however, that any man is an “other” and the more they look for copies of themselves, the more they find something totally different. That is what makes chasing for duplicates so delicious. Accusations of narcissism against gay men can only be made by people who have never experienced love.

Necrophilia

Really kinky is necrophilia, sex with corpses. It happens especially in circles of priests, soldiers, and undertakers who are regularly confronted with dead bodies. The most famous necrophile was sergeant Bertrand who roamed the cemeteries of Paris during the revolution year 1848, seeking graves of recently dead young girls. His case caused much consternation in an already turbulent Paris. Psychiatrists threw themselves on the affair. It led to the first modernist sexological article “Des déviations maladives de l'appétit vénérien” by C.F.Michéa, in which he proposed a categorization of pervert identities. At its center was “philopédie,” literally the love of young lads, here a neologism for the phenomenon that after fifteen years was called “uranism” and after twenty, “homosexual.” It is weird that a scandal caused by the violation of a female corpse by a male led to a new theory of homosexuality. Although Michéa did not have a sound explanation for the necrophile preference, which is as crooked as a corkscrew, he did explain “philopédie:” such men were perhaps saddled by nature with a rudimentary womb, so they had feminine tendencies, like a preference for sewing. Recent research indicated that Michéa was himself a “philopede”, condemned to prison for public indecency (Féray 2012, 248-9).

An innocent form of necrophilia could be seen in the rich Amsterdam eccentric Jaap Sietsema who bought a family grave in the cemetery of Sloterdijk. Now and then this millionaire sat for an hour in his heated little mausoleum with a good glass of wine and a fine cigar, pondering life and death. Sietsema became known through his Joffertjes Museum (a 1920s Dutch art group), but more so because of his quarrels with another rich faggot, his neighbor. He accused this former lawyer of the Royal Family of sadistic practices with boys under the legal age. In the garden of their canal house Sietsema had heard shots and seen a corpse being buried, but no evidence was ever found. Fantasy often runs wild when it comes to “queer” sex. Sietsema may not have been a real necrophile, but was no less a pervert than his neighbor, who at least received hustlers in his house while Sietsema remained mainly a necrophile dreamer. We could call him a death singer who sang his finale in 2004 (Downing 2003).

Necrosadism

A final step after necrophilia is necrosadism. This is lust murder by those who do not respect the physical integrity of their victims and maim private parts, chop off heads, or indulge in cannibalism. Jack the Ripper and Jeffrey Dahmer are examples of such necrosadistic monsters. Albert Moll writes in his Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften (Handbook of Sexual Science, 1912) that this destructive drive is generally not caused by sadism, but by excitement. The violence is a result of an excess of lust rather than the reverse. He describes necrophiliacs as imbeciles for whom the violation of corpses is a form of masturbation, as in other men who, lacking access to women, satisfy their lust in bestiality. The analysis of this leading sexologist does not sound very convincing.

Normophilia

As a word, normophilia is completely unknown, but as a practice it is as normal as one can imagine. The concept stands for sexual conformism and, in its worst form, for statistically standard behavior. There are people who believe sexual statistics do not show us the average, but the norm. We fuck twice a week because Kinsey established that the average inhabitant of the US did so. The term is also used as an alternative for heterosexuality and rightly so.

Noses

Some people strongly prefer noses. It is called nose love or mania and in the international Latin jargon for perversions, nasophilia. Noses come in many forms and sizes: big or small, narrow and wide, with big and little holes, straight and bent, plump or elegant. The nose is not a well-known fetish and that is probably due to the fact that the nose is the most visible body part. You can enjoy it without having to bother its owner. Touching it is an entirely different matter, because for most people the nose is highly sensitive. In gay circles you can regularly hear that the size of the nose is an indicator of the dimensions of that other nose one level lower. Nonsense!

Nosophilia

The sweet little brother of necrosadism is nosophilia: the love for dying people. We all know the nurse with the warm feelings for very old, very rich ladies. In the US, hookers extend their careers by imposing themselves on wealthy single gentlemen of advanced age who cannot withstand their seductive tricks. There are also, of course, nosophiliacs with honorable intentions. Anyone who has ever been in the presence of the dying knows the helpful people who suddenly pop out of nowhere and establish themselves in a fixed place around the deathbed.

Nymphs

A nymphophile is someone who is girl crazy and a nymphomaniac is a woman crazy about sex. Two figures that fit together like lid and pot, and happily promiscuity in such circles is not rare. Nymphomania in men is called satyriasis, after the Greek satyrs, half man, half animal, who could boast an enormous tool and were always ready for sex. In decent language we call such strong sexual urges, in straight women or faggots, men-mania and the people in question men-crazy. Nymphophilia for gay men means they love boys dressed as girls. The Marquis de Sade pointed out that boys inspire most lust when they look soft like girls with satin dresses and long curly hair while keeping to their insolent boyish behaviors. And he liked girls boyish in both ways: in dress and deed.

Object love

Object love is a new remarkable form of fetishism. It became a famous topic when a woman married the Eiffel Tower and declared her love for this inanimate object. It gave rise to much publicity and discussion on whether this is an orientation or a paraphilia. Because doctors assume perversions are diseases, the choice was for the second option. I would say it is the first because paraphilias may be seen as pathology, they are preferences or orientations, and very innocent in this case. It seems to be a female specialty that is close to erotomania because the beloved does not respond. Other examples have been the Statue of Liberty, the bells of the Notre Dame. In fact, trees, buildings, bridges, cars and whatever object can fall in this category. And why are men less involved in this fetish for a change? My guess would be that men expect a response and when they do not receive one, they will opt out and go for the next option. But there must male object lovers.

Ochlophilia. See Mass sex

Odontophilia means teeth sex. See there

Olfactophilia sounds only a hair better. It indicates the love for scents. See perfume

Onanism. See Solitary sex

Ophiodicism

An interesting but dangerous perversion is ophiodicism, placing a snake in the vagina or rectum. In de Sade’s The 120 days of Sodom this variation appears. Most people see this as animal abuse, but there must be snakes that would do very well in near-finished shit. Because of the intestines’ vulnerability and lacking knowledge about snakes, I cannot advise anyone about how to conduct such experiments and so must leave ophiodicism to ophiologists. Better stick with a snake sliding over your skin. Choose one that does not bite too hard and is not too poisonous.

Oral sex. See Sucking

Orgy

Orgy has already been dealt with under group sex. Orgè means inclination or rage; orgia stands for Dionysian feasts; these become orgiastic. Also orchis means testicle. It speaks well for the Greeks that balls, lasciviousness and rage were so closely linked. Our words orgy and orgasm indicate the lustful wild parties of the Greeks, where an orgy was a prerequisite for a real orgasm. In Holland most people do not get an orgasm in an orgy, though some faggots cannot get an orgasm without an orgy. In Projet-X there was a plea for sex parties without the obligatory house-drone, since the best music for an orgy is the moaning, groaning, and heaving of men having sex, with an undercurrent of whip lashes and rattling chains. Off to Berlin’s Lab.oratory, where they organize such orgiastic parties, which are a pleasure to the eye and the ear.

Pageism

Pages are men who submit to women; their perversion is called pageism. For a woman who submits to a man there is no expression since this is supposed to be natural. For a man who submits to another man, whether for money, lust, or power, there is not one real word but many expressions: slave, slut, captive, whoreboy, she-male, masochist. In gay circles I have never heard anyone use the word page. It just sounds too tame, too dull.

Passivism

Latino and Arab cultures make a strict division between passive and active, or maricone (sissy) and macho (real man). The active man fucks the passive man and does not lose in masculinity by engaging in such gay sex – he keeps to the “dominant,” straight role. We know from Don Kulick’s work on the Bahia travestis (1998) who have kept their dick and that many “straight” men like to be fucked in their ass and fear most to be called faggot. But also around the corner of my home in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, the demi-transsexuals or she-males (looking like a woman but still having their apparatus) quite often attract young men. When they are fucked from behind, they are the real passivists. Passivism stands for submission and also for the desire to be penetrated in the mouth or anus. In the works of Sade a perfect penetration is the cleaving of the sphincter muscle. No pacifism in such passivism, neither with Bahia’s travestis nor Amsterdam’s she-males. Penetration itself does not really belong to the perversions, whether it concerns the mouth or ass, or is done with a dick, dildo, vibrator, finger, or fist. But when it comes with some passionate violence, it gets close to kinky.

Pederasty

Pederasty is the ancient Greek word for the passion (eros) of a man for an adolescent boy (pais), of a lover (erastes) for a beloved (eromenos). There were major differences between cities and states; in some it was forbidden, in some it was an obligation and in others it allegedly ran unchecked. In Athens however it was finely balanced between young bachelors and men who, with everyone’s approval, courted boys, who were expected to play hard to get and be choosy – up to a point.

We also call it boy love, nepio- or, in street language, pedophilia, an incorrect use according to current academic definition. In the age of sodomy, roughly between 1000 and 1800 A.D., it became another word for sodomy, which meant mainly anal sex between men or with women, not necessarily between men and boys. In some countries, such as France or Poland the words pederast and pederasty, or abbreviations like pédé, are still common and mainly refer to what we nowadays call gays or homosexuals. Modern English dictionaries often still define it exclusively as “anal sex with boys,” a survival from the bad old days.

In many societies, sexualized relationships with minors were held in high esteem. Some ancient Greek men liked nothing better than to conquer the heart of an adolescent boy or young man, most often spending themselves between the thighs of the young men. In their gymnasiums they not only sported in the nude, but also cruised each other, the men the boys, but sometimes also men men, boys boys, or boys men. It was a public culture of sexual pleasure among males. Although erotics and sports came first, the gymnasium self-evidently also offered some guidance to the young men for life, culture, and politics. The same was true for the symposiums we know so well from Plato’s dialogue of the same name where young and old men congregated to dine, drink, discuss philosophy, and enjoy sexual pleasure.

The Greeks were not the only culture where men and boys enjoyed their bodies together; most Muslim cultures from Morocco to Indonesia are well known for it and celebrate it in art and poetry, with the area of Pakistan and Afghanistan still standing out. It was common among black Azande males of Sudan to keep a boy wife in times of war for housekeeping and intercrural sex, and mineworkers in South Africa also kept boys to care for those two activities replacing wives.

In the present world pederasty is seen by many in a negative light. In the Netherlands there was a short period with the sexual revolution when the emancipation of pederastic love, in the wake of gay liberation, had some support, even within the police force, but this came to an abrupt end shortly after 1980. Ideas of self-determination were more important than fears of risk and danger. In the flood of research done into rape, sexual violence, and sexual harassment, what got quite lost is the idea that sexuality is not only a destructive force, but also a constructive, healing one that brings pleasure, satisfaction, intimacy, fulfillment and social cohesion.

Today pederasty is seen as an erotic relationship between a boy of twelve to eighteen and an older male, usually an adult. Nevertheless, the pederastic dynamic can also occur with older youngsters in their late teens or early twenties if the man is significantly older, or between older and younger adolescents, since even apparently small age differences loom large in boyhood. In this sense, pederasty is more a state of mind rather than mere arithmetic, as leather daddies and their cubbies can attest. Though most civilized countries have legalized pederasty with boys above the age of consent by legalizing gay sex, we have not yet caught up to the Greeks. See Ephebophilia, Pedophilia, Boy love

Pediophilia

A funny word is pediophilia or doll sex. These days there are life-like dolls you can share your bed with, including holes for sexual contact. Psychologists use comparable “anatomically correct” dolls to help children confess sexual abuse. The Dutch Supreme Court has forbidden such questioning of kids because of the method’s unreliability. We never hear whether these children are stimulated sexually by such dolls. According to these psychologists, that is impossible because adults are offenders and children victims. Unfortunately the world is a bit more complex and many if not most children are sexually active beings, as we will see in the next section.

Pedophilia

These days one of the most controversial perversions is pedophilia, the erotic love of young children (from “pais,” a boy somewhere between 12 and 16 according to the Greeks). Oddly, a pedophile is defined as a person who desires and gets involved with children only up to 13 years old. It is called pedosexuality when actual sex acts are involved. It is also different from Greek pederasty and the modern word scholars use, ephebophilia, which deal with relations with adolescents up to 17 or 18. Although most people see pedophiles as men with an interest in little boys, the modern academic concept is gender-neutral. There are men who go for girls, and women who love or have sex with boys and girls. A special issue of Paidika was devoted to women and pedophilia (Sax & Deckwitz 1992) Pedophilia is a straight, gay, lesbian, and bisexual variation. Pedophilia apologist and scholar Edward Brongersma even advanced the theory that gay pedophiles are in fact straight because they love the feminine side in boys and lads. I wonder how the transgender issue fits in here, but will concentrate on the gay version. When it comes to ages, Hirschfeld (1914: 281) found among his homosexuals that 5 percent had in an interest in those under 14 years, 45 percent in those from 14-21 years and 45 percent in other adults; the remaining 5 percent being gerontophile.

In the Netherlands there was a short period in the wake of gay liberation when the emancipation of pedophile love had some support, even within the police force, but this came to an abrupt end shortly after 1980. In 1998 a Dutch newspaper reporter, whom I considered reasonably enlightened, wrote that this theme might best be erased from the social agenda. This was in connection with a debate on the consequence of pedophile contacts, which were explained to be not as negative as most people think. Why not talk about acts which are considered monstrous but which are not experienced as such by the parties involved? In former Queen Beatrix’ opinion the lie reigns supreme in the Dutch press, but when I read such a journalist condemning pedophilia out of the blue, I get the impression it is not the lie, but cowardice ruling. The cowardice of manufacturing normalcy. And pedophilia only became a hotter issue, but not in a very pleasant way.

All over the Western world, child abuse scandals have increased since the 1980s. The most notorious in Europe was the 1995 case of a Belgian heterosexual murderer, Dutroux, who became front page and prime time news. The condemnation of pedosexual contacts has increased considerably in recent years. In many cases the accusations turned out to be imaginary and not a speck of evidence could be found. Marc Dutroux was depicted as a pedophile devil, but turned out to be a father who, for money or pleasure, laid his violent hands upon young girls and also on young women, held them imprisoned in his basement and murdered some of them. They were easy targets for him. There are pedosexual monsters among us, but nobody will condemn heterosexuals in general because parents murder their offspring or men kill their wives (or vice versa). Most pedophiles, like most gays or straights, are good souls. The violent behavior of a few might even be explained in part by the fact that they are portrayed as villains. Any sociologist will tell you that belief creates reality. If you tell pedophiles they are monsters and murderers some will become just that.

In news coverage of pedophiles it is striking how often they are seen as just another kinky subdivision of the gay community. After the heterosexual Dutroux murders the Dutch television and the largest newspaper went after the homosexuals instead, coming out with accusations aimed at gay bookstores in Amsterdam, gay brothels in Rotterdam, the Spartacus Gay Guide, and gay studies at the University of Utrecht. Brongersma and Sandfort, who had written in positive or neutral terms on boy love and pederasty, were attacked as instigators of sexual child abuse. The explanation could be that straight men go unnoticed because they can have pedosexual contacts with girls within the family. It is not easy to attack the family, but boy lovers can be demonized as dangerous outsiders who do not hesitate to walk in Dutroux’ footsteps. Feminists did blame the family, in particular fathers, for incest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but their criticism was then redirected to pedophiles. However, many gay men feel that these “dirty old men” were the one stroke of good luck in their whole childhood. For many a budding gay youth, a pedophile or a pederast did not signify danger but the enticing possibility of an outside world not so rigidly straight as the family. Perhaps due to the social stigma they still suffer, gay men and lesbians in general show more understanding of sexual preferences that straight people often disdain. Jan Hanlo and André Gide fell for the seductive practices of 11-year-olds. I have interviewed men who started hunting for gay sex play at the age of six, had not lost their appetite, and were not traumatized by it in any way. They never thought they had been too young for such boy games. Reading the life stories of people like Hans van Manen, Edmund White, David Wojnarowicz, and many other queers, we see boys actively out for sex. Sometimes they do it with peers of the same age. Often they look for older boys or men who in many respects have more to offer.

I know lots of men who regret having been kept in the dark for so long or who did not get the chance to pursue their desire. They would have given anything to come across an older guy to lovingly launch them into the gay world. The French lawyer René Guyon should have said long ago, “Sex before eight or it is too late.” From the statistics drawn up by Kinsey we get the impression that people never make up for the time lost due to a late sexual initiation. It is the same with language, sports, music: if talent is not encouraged at a young age, it will never make it to the top.

The philosophic works by René Scherer and the empirical ones by Theo Sandfort make comparable conclusions: sex between young and old does not have to be harmful at all; on the contrary, at times it will help the young sexually and socially on their way. In the flood of research done into rape, sexual violence, and sexual harassment, what got quite lost is the idea that sexuality is not only a destructive force, but also a constructive, inspiring one that brings pleasure, satisfaction, intimacy, and fulfillment.

The US researchers Bauserman, Rind, and Tromovitch recently confirmed what we knew all along: as a rule sexual contacts of minors with grown-ups are most often harmless. Harm may result when incest or force is involved (this coercion we discussed in the entry on humiliation). The research was published in the prestigious Psychological Bulletin and evoked an outcry among local moralists. They got the US Congress to pass a bill condemning all sex with children as abuse and stating that only objective research based upon this crazy supposition would be allowed. Few people breathed a word of surprise about this blatant violation of children’s rights and scientific standards. But relationships with 16-year-olds are legal in many American and all European states, and ages of consent in the early teens exist or existed all over the world.

Seeing the history and anthropology of erotic relationships between adults and minors, we can deduce that the harmful effects of such relations depend entirely on the cultural context. Unfortunately, the media have whipped up the fears of mothers and fathers everywhere over the possibility of a pedosexual attack by a stranger. Such attacks however are extremely rare, affect few children, and will take place regardless, as do all violent crimes. The result is that instead of protecting the few, all children are now exposed to an unhealthy climate of commotion and hysteria that closes off their access to a universe of people who in the past would have been seen as generous and kindly friends, neighbors, and distant relatives, who offered the intimate education that no other person or institution offered, but who are now viewed with suspicion and shunned at the first sign of benevolent interest in any child not of their own making. It is far worse for the child who does end up in an erotic relationship and is discovered, with the trauma of an investigation far overwhelming any benefits of the relationship, or of cutting it off. As a result, the Dutch pedophile organization Martijn decided to suggest abstinence from any sexual expression with minors in order to protect them from harm – caused not by the intimate contact itself but by present-day moral panic and hysteria. This group does not exist any longer as it was forbidden in 2014 by the Dutch High Court, because its 80 demonized members would pose a threat to the family and the innocence of young people while parents would no longer dare to bring their kids to school or the sports club. The reason: it was “objectively” proven that sex with minors was always bad for them. The judges had apparently never met a Papuan man or a Greek pederast.

When loving or intimate attention is seen as dangerous, children suffer from emotional and physical deprivation. Where erotic acts and images are seen as a danger to the innocence and well-being of children, and they are raised in an artificially desexualized environment (Mickey Mouse has no dick), they can develop negative feelings of guilt and shame regarding their own erotic impulses. These can turn into lifelong sexual neuroses and they may never really get to know about the many different variations of sexual pleasure, let alone understand how to deal with them. The fear of pedophilia ultimately equals fear of sex. In a society and with media sexualized through and through, such fears lead to hysteria, hypocrisy, and violence, and for children sex turns from a potentially exciting, empowering experience into a needlessly traumatic one. Ideas of risk, danger and protection have replaced those of self-determination.

The sexual revolution has not changed the negative attitudes towards sex. Pedophiles as well as youngsters suffer the consequences. Politics, education, families, in short all (sexual) citizens should take a different tack. Instead of demonizing sexuality for kids we should open up to their erotic dreams and experiences. Instead of trying to shield them from sexuality, it might be better to let them see it at an early age as a natural part of the world. The silence surrounding the sexual fantasies and pleasures of children that governments and some citizens want to enforce so desperately, only perpetuates a lie that alienates children from themselves and each other and will produce terror about all other kinds of sexuality. The healthy development of budding gays (and straights and lesbians and so on) is not served by these boogie-men in any way (Zucker 2002; Hekma 2013).

Penetration

The Romans knew of anal penetration as a punishment for cowardly soldiers. In American prisons, almost every minute a boy, young man, or queer is victim of often violent rape. To some queers outside the prison walls this may sound exciting, but to be a victim yourself is quite another story. The sexual abuse of “punks” and “queens” is part of the sexual power game of prisoners among each other which the guards encourage – or they may participate in it. This adds some color and excitement to their job and makes the prisoners more manageable. In this way the authorities encourage behavior which is punishable under many US laws. Logic in matters sexual is not one of the strongest aspects of American authorities. See Sodomy

Perfume

When I smell perfume, I am outta there. It is rightfully banned from sex parties and leather bars. Yet some perverts’ eyes get veiled and their organ rises from smelling scents. For queens these are perfumes or sweet soaps, for perverts sweat, sperm, shit, piss, cheese.

Petitism

The opposite of grandism or the love of horsemen is petitism, the love of small genitalia. Some people define it as the love of small men, whether their dicks are small or big. A size-queen prefers them big, but the English language does not have an expression for the lover of “petit.” For grandists it must be strange that the old Greeks depicted genitalia so small on their pottery. There are many possible reasons for this, the simplest being that the ancient Greeks simply preferred small cocks and were petitists. Maybe they figured “Rather a small upper than a big downer,” or being true esthetes considered small more beautiful than big, just as they preferred lads to men.

Phormicophilia is the love of insects (phormikos). See Bestiality, Insects

Phygephilia

The desire to hide or flee is phygephilia. A very cute story comes from Dutch author Gerard Reve who in his novel Melancholia (1951) describes a raid by the Germans in World War II. The main character is hidden in a closet and gets horny as the Germans get closer until he finally achieves orgasm. As the soldiers leave and he is safe again, he tries a second orgasm but without success. With fear, the orgasm comes much more easily: that is the advantage for masochists who need less viagra to get hard. Part of the excitement in hiding is of course the lust that comes with being caught. I remember once in my young days hiding from a rival boys’ club. Being concealed produced strong feelings, but I suppose the experience of being caught and tied to a tree (what happened to my friends) would have been much more exciting. Fear made me horny, but being fastened and humiliated would have been even sexier.

Pictophilia is the love of pictures and films. Maybe pornophilia would be a better word. We will come back to pornography shortly.

Piercing

Body manipulation begins to assume enormous proportions. For the younger generation, tattooing has become a normal body decoration. Piercings are also a matter of course and not only among gays: straights have piercings and rings in their cutest spots. It all began with ears, now they run through noses, chins, cheeks, lips, tongues, nipples, belly buttons. Men adorn their dicks with them, women their clits. The rings have also developed from paperclips to artsy steel objects, from nearly invisibly small to enormous. Most people see piercings and rings as an adornment or fetish; some use the ring (or have it used) to hang all sorts of objects. The rings can also be used in bondage. Ever daydreamed about two young men chained to each other by their piercings? Cock to tongue, for instance.

Pig

Not only police officers but also gay men are called pigs, cochon in Spanish. For Arabs, nothing is worse than being called “baser than a swine or dog.” Pig is an ugly word, but vicious terms can incite lust. Some leather shops offer pig masks so gay men can show off as the dirtiest (but also loveliest) animal. Things get even better if the prison of the police pigs could be a swine sty for gay cochones. In accordance with the law of perversion, the dirtier the better. A pigs’ cage, for most people the ultimate of filth, offers perverts the summit of lust. We await a kinky disco, decorated like a stable with swine where several forms of SM can be experienced right next to bestiality. A pig sty/disco would be an ideal place for dirt licking, cleaning sex, and slave trade. Men addicted to dirty smells and sounds could sex their hearts out here. From swine stable to auction and sale is a small step. If you like to be humiliated and sold as a slave, then it is an extra kick with no distinction between slaves and animals on the market, if the sale takes place in a stable where the bleating of sheep and the grunting of pigs, the sight of farm lads, the stench of bulls, straw, and shit are mixed with the sounds of bidding and scent of seed.

Pillory

A pillory is a bar of wood firmly planted on two poles in the ground, formerly in public places. The hands and head of wrongdoers were secured in holes in the pillory as a punishment, their shame exposed to the eyes of decent citizens. The best-known version consists of two wooden beams on top of each other with three holes cut out between them for the neck and wrists of the criminal. In most cases he stands in a fixed place, but sometimes scoundrels have portable pillories. The “cangue” is the Chinese form of this. The felons had to walk around with it, sometimes placed for a longer time in a public place where they were dependent for food and drink on the clemency of fellow citizens. These cangues were sometimes a cage for the head, or took the form of a wooden body cell that left no space for any movement. Some pillories also had holes for the ankles so the feet could be secured as an extra or separate punishment. These penalties were meant to humiliate the victim, as a deterrent for potential criminals, and sometimes as an entertainment for the public, who pelted the pilloried with rotten eggs, tomatoes, or mud, often maiming them for life or killing them. Nowadays, pillories are sold in leather stores, or found in the basements of leather bars and at kinky parties. Try it once for yourself, because, as the saying goes, learning the hard way not only gets you hard, but will wizen you up as well. Whether criminals in the past also got horny in a pillory remains one of history’s many secrets. If you do not want to tempt fate by being pilloried (which can be very tempting in itself), build in precautions before submitting to the embrace of the pillory. Do it with an acquaintance, in a leather bar, or at a sex party where there are other people so it is more scandalous but less risky. Or take care that someone will come by (with the right key) at the end of the scene.

Piss sex was already discussed under Golden shower.

Pocket-fumbling

Fumbling in the pocket stands for self-stimulation or mutual masturbation through a hole in the pocket of boys’ trousers. In 1792, a book against onanism by B. C. Faust was published in German: Treatise concerning the necessary improvement of clothing, wherein it is demonstrated, that the moral and physical deterioration of mankind is caused by dressing in trousers. It dealt with the sexual dangers of pants. Not only were most trousers too tight, but in order to piss, boys had to use their hands to take out their dicks. This was a sure way to learn the horrible sin of Onan. And the pockets, with or without holes, enabled the boys to fondle their genitals, or those of their friends, continuously. Much better to have boys walk around in the skirts of the Scots. These were not so tight, did not require genital manipulation when urinating, and had no pockets. That was why, according to Faust, Scottish men were so much healthier than the Germans or Dutch.

I think these Scottish blokes were simply a lot dopier, since I can picture lots of sex pleasures with boys’ skirts. They allow easier access to dick and ass than the cursed trousers and pockets. Not to mention skirts blowing up in the wind and exposing the forbidden parts or the possibility of spying under them by means of mirrors or from lower positions. Compared to skirts, pockets are really a slow way to get to the real thing. For the specialist, however, this is no problem but an asset. In my youth, I really was obsessed with all kind of holes to put my fingers in, and especially the holes in the pockets of my trousers. Today I regret we had pants, not skirts.

Police sex

Weird maybe, but cops leave me cold. Soldiers and slaves, soccer-players and wrestlers, yes, they tickle my fantasy. But with cops my dreams stagnate. And yet it is a small step from soldier to police officer. Even tentatively putting out my feelers to a crossbreed like the military police, I do not turn a hair. American cops, English bobbies, Dutch riot police, Canadian mounted police, Spanish Guardia Civil, all leave me cold. Latin American death squads I find repugnant. Not that the policemen roaming the Amsterdam streets are unappetizing, and there is not much wrong with their uniforms. Maybe it all comes down to a dislike of the silly job they often are forced to do, which makes them less attractive. Fining people for stupid offences, running in shoplifters, chasing illegals, homeless people or drug addicts, does not titillate me much. The same could be said of other uniformed types like soldiers and soccer players. What they do is as insignificant and often even more inane. Firing off grenades at an enemy they cannot see, chasing after a ball while on no account scoring a goal.

From my childhood I can only remember old rancorous cops. The police sergeant in my hometown was fat and pretentious and liked nothing better than having me on toast. He stopped me once for passing with my bike on the wrong side of the road. I remember him badgering the life out of me interminably, trying to make me confess this world-shaking offence. Later his successor had me on the carpet, since he suspected a much-wanted so-called criminal had been sleeping in a farm that we country-boys used as our hangout. I did not know a thing and his tedious drivel was insufferable. I must have met the wrong cops in my youth. It is no different with names. As a boy I met bastards named Fritz and hated boys with that name. As an undergraduate, Fritzes suddenly became attractive types and the name Fritz called up a whole new range of feelings. I might yet have to meet the right cop. Or maybe I am just peevish since not one of them ever put me in irons and took me into the station.

Let me be honest: cops evoke everything sadists and masochists dream of. Prison cells, handcuffs, belts, boots, sticks, uniforms, prisoners, power and abuse, discipline and butch demeanor. A while ago I had the privilege of visiting a police station in one of Amsterdam’s poorer districts, which displayed abundant potential for a sizzling hot sex party. There were day cells for runaway boys and bare cells for riotous loonies and aggressive alcoholics. A cabin for photographing criminals and a fingerprint machine. Men and women had their own separate paraphernalia. The cops had horses, bikes, scooters, cross-country bicycles, and regular vehicles at their disposal. And handcuffs in abundance. But unfortunately even here my imagination failed, as it was all a bit too realistic. The prisoners in their cells were pathetic little heaps of human misery. The cop giving us a tour on his crutches was more like a welfare worker than a sturdy bull. At the counter white cops were talking to black chaps about the most depressing subjects. What looked fun from the outside, appeared dreary and miserable from the inside. My little nephews who were with me will forever shun the professions of criminal and crime hunter alike. For me it was no different from usual: I did not hanker after policemen and cells, but for open space and fresh air.

With the help of our national gay oracle and novelist Gerard Reve, let us try once more to penetrate the more salacious aspects of the police force. In his world, cops torture and abuse boys. “Revism” is a triangle of a young man in uniform invested with power like a soldier, constable or policeman and a boy who needs punishment on his buttocks and elsewhere; and Reve himself helping the bully discipline his victim. He chooses soldiers or policemen because they are hot, tough, and unpredictable and are dressed in glorious uniforms. He does not care whether they are black, white, or yellow, as long as they wear his fetish garb, use their truncheons, and are virile.

A variation on Revism that finally evokes an acceptable hot image of cops for me is when they play the role of Reve himself, serving a sadist who instructs his uniformed assistants to guard or punish sissy-boys, prisoners of war, criminals. As auxiliaries with no identity they might have something, but no further. I disagree with many people that there is not enough police blue on the streets. As far as I am concerned the street may become more blue, red, yellow, or green, as long as it is not police uniforms. Isn’t it a cop’s task to limit us in our freedoms? If only they were willing to gratify our desires. But cops will not hear any of that. Try to seduce them and all you might get is a beating with their baton at a place and moment you do not fancy it. Or you will have to listen patiently as your erotic call is answered by the silly stammering of a politically correct cop who knows he cannot be rude to his homosexual fellow men, but has not learned to combine friendliness with clarity.

There are also gay cops these days. Most I met were bores. There was only one most charming and seductive fellow. It is tiresome that one cannot tell these gay policemen apart from their straight colleagues because of their uniforms, which erase difference. They are not the least bit more feminine or unmanly, but they are also not more virile. They do not have pink stripes instead of white and they do not wear a nametag saying, “fag.” They are not allowed to exploit their profession sexually. It is nice to have them around, but for a pervert they have little lust-inciting value whatsoever.

Polyiterophilia

This very weird word polyiterophilia has an interesting meaning. Some people climax only after a number of partners. The French writer André Gide knew this problem well. To him, satisfaction meant half a dozen ejaculations in a row with two or three boys. He was not interested in penetration or mutual masturbation; for him it was enough to put his hand on the boys’ shoulders. He explained his orgasmic preference as follows: In his youth he had been forbidden to masturbate. He dealt with this problem by getting a hard on without cumming and repeating this several times. As an adult he kept to this rhythm and only ejaculated after several dry starts. A more familiar kind in darkrooms and saunas are the men self-pleasuring themselves only after having satisfied a number of sex partners with their mouth or their ass. What is a better expression for this polygamist interest: polypartnersex, plurivirism?

Pony sex

A special form of bestiality is pony sex that can be practiced without any animal. There are two main variations that can also enjoyed with other beasts such as donkeys, horses or camels. The idea is to treat humans as ponies, that can done by reining them before a cart or carriage, or they can be mounted like one would with a pony or horse. In both these situations one can play with a horse harness, holsters, saddles, spurs, stirrups, bridles, bits and reins while a riding-whip or leaping-stick will help to chase the animal a little. There are cute holsters made of leather and metal but a rough piece of rope has its aficionados. ‘Barebacking’ (to ride without a saddle) is less desirable because the excitement is often in being strapped, which makes the masochist feel like a beast. There are interesting ideas on how to further adorn the pony: rags to cover the genitals, a leather harness, painted brown, simply naked, with feathers on the head, wrapped in a rough blanket, with the coat of arms of its owner on it. Barefoot or with boots that look like hooves, with a horse mark. Probably there are no smiths who make horseshoes for human ponies. Does the animal walk on two feet or does it crawl on all four? The hayrack and trough are other toys to dream about, as well as the food that that they get to eat: grass, old bread, dry rice, rotten tomatoes? Other elements focus on the cart, the way to connect the pony to it, the number of ponies reined in or the combination with a real donkey. Rental or selling of beasts and coaches is another source of fun. How to mark the animal’s body to signify it belongs to the master? Do the ponies spend the night in the pasture, in a stable, in a cage or perhaps in the master’s bedroom after all? Are there poles to tie them up and how will this be done? The owner again has his own clothing and attributes with riding boots, spurs, trousers, jackets, caps and rods. Should his outfit be made of leather, rubber, corduroy or coarse cotton? Another question regards the dressage of the animals: the walk, the reins, the ways to castigate or lash them. Horse and pony races with or without carts and drilling games sound attractive. Should the winning horse be sold off and the loser delivered to sexual abuses? When perverts start to consider all these possibilities, they become endless. For a change, just check a real or internet equestrian shop and it is surprising how much is available to assist you in breaking in a pony. All these bits, halters, stirrups, straps and switches are very arousing, even to people who don’t want to be a horse. Looking at the popularity of horse games among teenage girls, pony sex seems to be the perfect perversion for straight men who are usually confronted with a shortage of females in their field of sex sports. Or for lesbians, to whom there are women’s worlds to discover with endless possibilities of female horses and ponies (Gates 2000). See Bestiality

Pornography, pornophilia

Many US feminists fighting porn like to see themselves as the keepers of morals. Robin Morgan invented the slogan “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice” that the most prominent anti-sex-worker fighter, the late Andrea Dworkin, promoted. But sociologists, including other feminists, maintain that free distribution of porn will prevent sexual crimes or promote sexual pleasures. The frustration caused by not having free access to “dirty” pictures proves to be a much greater threat than the stimulus it presumably offers to potential rapists. Both views are somewhat simplistic.

Sociologists too easily denounce the influence of images on social prejudice and criminal activity. But the cause and effect relation that anti-porn feminists assume between porn and sexual violence is also very questionable. Besides, their sex analysis, sounding most feminist, is nevertheless too one-sided, as their supposition is that only men produce and consume porn and rape women. But there are also women who are into making and using “lewd” material, as my late friend and colleague Dorelies Kraakman illustrated, that go back to the eighteenth century. Nowadays it is not very different. Nearly every generation worries about the end of the (civilized) world and the decline of ethics, since porn is supposed to undermine social cohesion and stimulate the deterioration of virtue in society. This concern arose on the heels of the invention of the art of printing, the rise of photography and a free press and later followed in the wake of film and television production. Recently, video and internet have been the main reasons for concern about the collapse of civil society, while moralists have always pointed at theater and nightlife as dens of vice. All the commotion flaring up time and again mainly tells us that sexual pleasure is still seen as deeply problematic. The so-called negative effects of porn on behavior should be reversed: the rotten attitude towards sexuality leads directly to sexual misery and makes lousy porn. The deplorable porn we see around these days is the direct outcome and not the cause of a sexism that also gives rise to homophobia, rape, and sexual violence. It also breeds the sordid situation the world of porn still occupies these days, and helps to reinforce the direct involvement of the criminal world in the sex industry. When a tight-assed electronics concern launched its excellent video system, they turned up their nose at porn videos; now their superior system is outsold by producers without moral qualms about making big money by selling porn.

The taboo on porn has surreal consequences. In Canada it was not allowed to show porn with exposed genitals, so in Canadian bars you would see videos turn dark at the beginning of a sex act and resume when it was over: a weird experience. Porn produced under the regime of this ban often had a touch of pathos. Yet the impossibility of showing “real” sex stimulates producers to be inventive, testing the boundaries of the laws by turning out half-explicit products, which are often quite hot, since they leave lots of space for the imagination.

The space for the imagination makes it difficult to determine what is and what is not porn. When I was young, boys playing soccer turned me on, or newspapers showing images of the arrest of cute hippies or prisoners of war, and even animals in cages. Or Anthony van Dyck’s paintings of Saint Sebastian that date back to the early seventeenth century. Many images not meant to produce sexual arousal are stimulating, depending on the way you look at them. Daily street-life and media offer stimulating images in abundance for those who are in the mood. There are certain words in everyday speech that cause a lump in my throat.

The fight against porn is hopeless and helpless, since a horny mind might see anything in a pornographic way. It does not matter whether talk or pictures or people are sexually explicit. In pederast magazines you will see boys dressed rather than naked these days, while looking into the camera with an innocent instead of a provocative gaze. It often only makes the pictures more titillating. The eternal fight against porn has a completely different aim, namely the ruination of sexual pleasure. It is similar to the implicit aim of the fight against “child sexual abuse” which is not just about saving children from actual molestation, but mainly to prevent kids from exploring sexuality.

The fight against porn does not leave the pornophile unperturbed, but he will not have fewer images or texts at his disposal. The inexperienced might have greater difficulty finding porn because he does not know the underworld of the commerce of illicit material, but for the experienced the storehouses of past and present offer such a rich supply of erotica that a horny browser will always have more than enough interesting material at hand. As said before, he does not have to rely on real porn only. Images and words most people would not interpret sexually can give him the desired stimulations. When police and justice were taking a strong line with erotica lovers, they simply took refuge under the counter or shifted to less explicit stuff.

The nonsensical fight against erotic material was started by the Amsterdam police at Easter 1996, in a sudden action against erotic postcards displayed on sidewalks in front of tourist shops. The anal retentive asses of the mayor and his puritan police corps came in full view, at one spot prohibiting what could be seen in the flesh and in broad daylight just around the corner in the Red Light district. The postcards were off limits, but not the half-naked prostitutes in their windows. The pornophile will pursue his pleasure anyway. Cutting out horny pictures from papers and magazines, buying serious and less serious porn in sexshops and supermarkets, looking in auctions and antiquarian bookshops for the old masters like de Sade, Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, Schertel, and Fuchs, spurred on by the internet tracing hot new images of lust, hunting for catalogues of their favorite erotic artists, finding toys at Woolworth, the hardware shop, or in the flea market. Advertisements for underwear of Calvin Klein and Abercrombie will stimulate his lusting thoughts, and in the dark caverns of libraries, archives, and private collections he will dig up images of the downfall of Sodom, Indian sex temples, or phallic symbols from Japan or ancient Rome. At times pictures from family photo-albums will melt his heart, or images of drunken hooligans, weeping boys, pissing men, swimming contests. Or he will soothe himself with the works of Von Gloeden, Platt Lynes, Van Vechten, Herbert List, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Bruce Weber, Robert Mapplethorpe, Hans van Maanen, Inez van Lamsweerde, Erwin Olaf, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, John Wiley and whoever else. Sexual pleasure is in the eye of the beholder who will find his dreams come true everywhere.

Pregnant sex

The lust for pregnant women or women giving birth is pregnant sex. When it becomes kinky, alarm bells go off because pregnancy is a holy state close to innocence. In de Sade, pregnant women merely induced the desire to produce violent abortions as he hated coitus and pregnancy. The sweet vanilla form is the love for pregnant women that has nothing perverted.

Prison sex

A large percentage of prisoners have homosexual or lesbian sex wherever they are, in the USA and even in the antiseptic juvenile institutions of the Netherlands. The essential question is of course whether they get a chance to meet intimately. In some jails where the inmates are kept apart in cells this is less often the case. In fact, the “cellular system” was invented in the nineteenth century to prevent men from having sex with each other, as was endemic in older jails where men were incarcerated in groups and had opportunities for sexual pleasure and abuse. Prison authorities found the dangers of masturbation in cells less grave than the homosexual promiscuity of the larger wards and so chose the cellular system. There is a rich literature on this topic that differentiates between the straight men who only have gay sex “out of necessity,” the young punks, and the queens. Both latter groups are easy game for older and stronger men who want to put their thing in male holes because female ones are unavailable. This system has been recorded for Russia, the USA, France, and many other places. Reinaldo Arenas has described it from a Cuban perspective in his poetry, novels, and autobiography Before Night Falls (New York 1993), made into a movie by Julian Schnabel. Another famous novel plus movie is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (New York 1979). It is a genre that can be found in all languages. An interesting example, Robert Musil’s Young Törless (1906), shows a boarding school as a kind of jail for young men who under pressure live out their feelings of love and cruelty. The work of Jean Genet is another tribute to rough male sex in prison.

Joseph Fishman wrote Sex in Prison (New York 1934) and registered how gay men in that period painted their faces with flour, used lipstick made from tomato-sauce, and tried to dress as much as possible like women to seduce the hetero men. There exists a book-length dictionary that summarizes the gay slang used in Soviet labor camps. A funny but sad story comes from Maryse Choisy’s L’Amour dans les prisons (Love in prisons, Paris 1930). An effeminate homosexual, Paul, and a masculine heterosexual, Joujou (you get the impression Maryse mixed up the names), have an affair in prison and promise each other eternal love. Joujou leaves first, breaks his promise and decides to marry a girl. When Paul gets out of jail some months later and hears about this, he dresses up as a lady, finds his love in a bar and asks him to have one more meeting. They drive off in a cab and Paul goes on his knees to suck Joujou off as a farewell present. This sweet moment he takes his revenge and bites off the cock of the man who left him for another love. Joujou’s life may be saved, but not his dick. He does not want to tell who is the culprit, as prison friends never betray each other. But Paul becomes remorseful, goes to the police, and is arrested. From his new prison, he continues to send love letters to his eunuch.

Prisons, jails, labor camps, juvenile institutions make the pervert dream of all the sexual chances that are missed, while the people who have such opportunities often do not like them. Dreaming and faking prison sex are more rewarding for most people than the real thing. But for a variation see gangbang and jail (Wooden & Parker 1982). See Rape

Psychrocism

The sexual preference for cold or ice is called psychrocism (psychros being Greek for cold or cool) in medical jargon. Putting your dick on an ice cube, having sex while it is freezing or in a snowstorm. Braving the cold in scanty apparel or totally naked. Once I was walking through a snowstorm all dressed in satin and to my surprise it felt really good. I could not figure out what was so erotic about it. I did not repeat the experiment and have not turned into an ice lover. In the sumptuous Bilderteil of Magnus Hirschfeld`s Geschlechtskunde (1930) are several sex dream pictures of cold fetishists, depicting people in scanty clothes in a chilling wind.

Public sex

A Christian right wing member of the Dutch parliament voted with his party against opening up marriage for same-sex couples. This person is seen regularly at sex parties in Amsterdam, Paris, and who knows where. In parliament he specializes in denunciation of the Dutch drugs policies and in requests for more police to beat down on crime. What haunts the feeble mind of a right-wing politician who votes against gay marriage by day and indulges in kinky pleasures at night? As a Christian, it is utterly unlikely he opposes straight marriages as well.

This case shows how difficult it is to separate private from public life. Everybody is entitled to his privacy and his own sex life, but for the gay sex life we have to roam the public world of parties, bars, and saunas. As soon as the queer starts looking for a partner, he has to hit the streets, the parks, or go surf on internet. Like heterosexual people he will only find potential partners in public spaces, because guys do not happen to stand on his doorstep or walk into his bedroom to offer him sexual pleasure. Every private sex life of necessity has a public side to it. For a long time faggots have tolerated the closeted life of their kind since they knew how dangerous it was to come out. But in Dutch parliament, the political body in the Netherlands with the highest percentage of openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, you have to be a fool to stay in your closet and vote against gay marriage. This man did not even dare to follow the shining example of the other gay guy in his conservative party, Joop Wijn (out of the closet, voting for gay marriage and in 2006-2007, himself a minister married with a male).

I think it is admirable he gets his rocks off by night among other gay men, but I am saddened by his choice for the right wing, and hit bottom with his incomprehensible vote against gay marriage. I can imagine that as a promiscuous gay he does not see much in marriage, but in that case he might add a statement in this vein to his vote. A left-wing Member of Parliament, no queer, yet Greek, did so. He opposed gay marriage because he feels the private life of citizens is none of the government’s business: another example of politicians who juggle arguments from the conjuring-box of private and public. Would he also oppose traffic rules, taxes, straight marriage, compulsory attendance at school, identity cards, legal prohibitions on carrying arms, police and justice, simply because they also interfere with our private life?

The distinction between private and public is an impossible one. Let me give some examples of the permeable boundary between public and private. The public government, at times rightfully so, at times going overboard, tries to control private life with numerous laws and rules about marital affairs, parental rights, financial transactions, working hours, living situations, public health, crime detection, fire prevention and what not. The media devote so much attention to the private lives of individuals that they have become intimate partners of many people. Most children get sexual education in schools that are public places, and people have to go out on the streets to find lovers and sex partners. For good reasons, prostitution was called public vice and whores were public women. These are some examples of situations where the distinctions of private and public become blurred.

Gays are faced with the impossible situation that their sexual preference is seen as private in a public world where heterosexuality is the norm. If you stand up for it, people whine that such private affairs do not matter and have nothing to do with your public functions. When you are not open about it, they blame you for hiding matters so essential to social conduct. Oscar Wilde defended his private life but during the court proceedings his sexual escapades became public knowledge and his right to privacy was completely ruined.

Speaking of public sex, most people do not think of laws, rules, or of texts but of deeds, of tangible sexual acts in semi-public places like dark corners in the park, back seats of cars, porches, or obscure sidewalks. Some people leave their curtains open so the neighbors can share in the fun. Not that long ago, residents of a high-rise in a suburb of Amsterdam sued two of their fellow tenants for their loud panting and crying while they made love. Many voyeurs get excited by listening or peeping into other couples’ sex lives, while exhibitionists enjoy having other people see their private parts. The internet offers an ideal, anonymous location for playing mutual peeping Tom.

Though many people get off on such public sex, the general opinion is that it should be forbidden. To me it seems an innocent pastime that blends as well with public life as driving a car, playing sports, gardening, or all those other amusements that interest only a limited part of the population but which take place in public. It takes up relatively little space and pollutes minimally. In ancient Greece, sports fields and gymnasiums were public locations where naked men and boys tried out their abilities both in sports and sex. Thus youth got an optimum sex education by way of the practical experience we lack so miserably in the Western world nowadays. We consider practical knowledge essential in technical studies, but unimaginable for sex. When US surgeon-general Joycelyn Elders suggested teaching kids about masturbation as one means to prevent AIDS, President Clinton instantly fired her. A government that would step back and loosen up its constant surveillance of citizens does not seem such a bad idea, especially if and when the public arena becomes available for sex.

There is an article in many laws against “public indecency” which has regularly been used against gay men having sex in public places. In 1998, famous pop singer Michael George was arrested in a urinal for making a pass at an undercover police-officer; he made a funny song and videoclip, “Outsider,” from this experience. The article against public indecency has rarely been used against gay men in the Netherlands since 1980. Nevertheless, many Dutch would rather have the police apply the law and get rid of gay cruising areas. The police are now expected to protect gay men at their public meeting places against fag-bashers, which they do not always like to do. In the winter of 2005, a local leader of the conservative-liberal party proposed to legalize gay cruising places in Amsterdam, to offer prevention in the form of free condoms, and to step up police control of those places, not to chase gays, but to protect them against straight violence. Within a week, he had to retract his promising proposals because of the hate mail and threats he and his party received. Even the local Gay Business Association opposed his ideas, and suggested that the police should prosecute gay men who were having public sex to protect “our innocent” children and the undisturbed straight life of neighbors. Other people told the gays that they no longer needed gay public sex spaces because they could now marry, as if straight people gave up their sexual pastimes to honor marriage. They continue to visit “public women,” and not unlike gay men, have sex in public places, only more widespread in lovers’ lanes, on beaches, on porches, or the back bench of their cars. Lesbians sometimes decry the public sex habits of gay men, but they do it as well, as the situation or the desire suggests this to them.

Nowadays Dutch public indecency laws mainly affect exhibitionists. As far as I am concerned, they can do away with this article altogether. To my mind, the dislike of the innocuous behavior of flashers and gay cruisers is one of the best examples that sexual liberation has not greatly affected most Dutchmen. Sex is in many ways a public affair: as a topic of politics, media, education, institutional regulations, because lovers and sex partners can only be found in the public arena, and because public sex is so much fun. It even offers an educational experience for not-so-innocent kids. We should rather facilitate than forbid the pleasures of pavements, pissoirs, and parks (Califia 1993; Dangerous Bedfellows 1996; Leap 1999).

Purgatory

Het Vagevuur (The Purgatory) in Eindhoven, extinct since 2008, was undoubtedly the best-known and most public space for kinky sex in the Netherlands. Strange that our gay capital Amsterdam did not have a similar establishment, since there it would be much more in place. In the same year 2008, it did get its own gay kinky sex club the Church, but this is tiny compared to the Vagevuur. In the past, even the second best known kinky sex place, De Schouw (this Dutch term has the very different meanings of fireplace, inspection and obscene!), was not in Amsterdam but in dull Apeldoorn. Whoever does not know the Vagevuur may have seen its trilingual magazine, Itch.

Long ago, in the early 1980s, there was a radical faggot group in Eindhoven, De Roze Driehoek (The Pink Triangle), organizing playful actions and sexy parties from squats, illegally occupied houses. At schoolyards, the members of this group distributed fun booklets to boys for free in which they made clear with explicit drawings that cocks come in a thousand varieties: small and large, thin and thick, straight and curved. They campaigned against the Catholic church and once with great success organized a theatrical demonstration around same-sex marriage, long before other gay groups picked up on this topic. Since so many sympathizers showed up for this action, the city council nearly jumped out of their skin, awakening to the large numbers of radical fairies in Eindhoven. A request for a subsidized gay center for De Roze Driehoek was soon granted, and the action group, which wanted to finish its activities, suddenly found itself with a real house on a street with the remarkable name Hemelrijken (Heavenly Kingdom).

De Roze Driehoek accepted the council’s offer and named the building Vagevuur (Purgatory). Here they began organizing cozy evenings for all kinds of sexual minorities and had special events focusing on the Marquis de Sade. They slowly developed from pink and red to black and kinky. They started to organize special nights for different perversions: SM, golden shower, scat, mud, rubber, army and police uniforms, slavery, spanking, sport, and nowadays even suit & tie. These sex parties met with a resounding international interest. With this success, resistance in the working class neighborhood, where the Vagevuur was located, increased: against all those dark gentlemen and against the parking trouble they caused. We all know how such things go in the Netherlands. When serious problems between two less privileged parties arise, the solution is not the endless haggling in line with the poldermodel (discussion until a watered down compromise has been made), but simply for one of the parties to clear out. The Vagevuur moved to a better location in an industrial zone, without neighbors to dream up leathermen trouble. And there they organized their sex parties until that fateful day in November 2008 that they decided to close down their premises. Under pressure from a media hate campaign and a local right wing party, an offshoot of the Pim Fortuyn List, they felt forced to stop. It is amazing that the followers of openly gay kinky dandy Fortuyn who probably visited the Vagevuur, did not respect their murdered leader and did not make the sex club a monument to the memory of “our” Pim.

The Vagevuur published a pretty photo book of the perversions acted out in their premises. Unfortunately it had no action pictures of the parties, but somewhat stylized stills of men expressing the desires they pursue, which at times makes for nice, and at times boring, pictures. Many photographs try to imitate Robert Mapplethorpe and fail to come even close, of course. Perversions do better, to my taste, in homemade pictures than as the sterile art of Mapplethorpe, because in their realness they are hornier.

The somewhat vague all-embracing theme of the book is “contradiction.” At times this is worked out as the opposition between day life (suits) and night life (fetish apparel). The introduction is made up by two quotes from the Bible, suggesting a link between Christianity and kinky sex. I would have preferred a survey of the past and present of the Vagevuur and the visitors acting out their desires, and a book with pictures of their parties with real, horny, and not biblical texts.

Pygophilia

The love of buttocks is pygophilia. Once I stuck a burning candle in the bum of a friend of mine. His gorgeous round derrière glowed in even greater beauty. Jean-Luc Hennig wrote The Rear View: A Brief and Elegant History of Bottoms through the Ages (1995). Only one chapter, though, is devoted to the male behind. The most well known but certainly not the most beautiful one is made of stone: the behind of Michelangelo’s David in Florence. For many a queer this is the place for a bum love pilgrimage. Whole schools gather around David, so the pygophilist can compare his marble behind with cute freshmen’s butts.

Pyrophilia

Change the g of the last perversion into an r and you have the reverse of psychrocism: pyrophilia, the love of fire. At times it concerns pyromaniacs who get horny from fires, blazing fires that create passionate fires. A notorious example was the Roman emperor Nero who got all excited by watching Christians burning at the stake. Some people do it to themselves and get turned on by singeing their skin or hair. Branding is one step further. The natural kind is love for the fire of passion, but no one of sound mind will call that pyrophilia.

Queening

There is only one perversion with a Q and that is queening. Although you might think this means that you are turning someone into a queen (an effeminate gay male) that is not the case and, moreover, this should not be a perversion but a profit to the masculine gender. No, queening means that a woman (and she is the queen) sits down on the face of the man as a form of humiliation, with her ass up his nose or her clit in his mouth. According to my sources, it is a European perversion. In Amsterdam gay circles I have never heard of queens queening queers.

Rape

Rape is a crime, and rightly so. But what is forbidden excites all the more. Rape isn't allowed, but playing at it is. Those who like such pseudo rape can be called bastiophiles. Blind dates often have the structure of a pseudo rape: an unknown gentleman breaks into a house where the occupant is waiting to be maltreated in a way he fancies. In the book Male Rape (1982), edited by Anthony M. Scacco, there's a story of pacifist Donald Tucker who, after a peace demonstration, was arrested by the police and was unfortunate enough to become the victim of group rape. Though he filed a serious complaint, he later committed minor crimes in order to land in jail and experience the forced abuse once again. He also tried his luck in the San Francisco leather scene, but thought the sadism there was too much play-acting. He preferred the real thing. In Holland it is better not to be jailed in the hope of being raped. Rape is normal practice in old-fashioned jails like those in the US, Russia, or Latin America, where the guards use it to keep criminals in check. There rape is a means of blowing off steam under a criminal regime; in Holland that is not the case. See Gang bang, Prison

Retifism

French author Retif de la Bretonne had a crush on ladies’ footwear; thus shoe fetishism received the name retifism. Under Shoe sex we deal with this interest, which involves brand-name sport shoes and high-heels. There are also queers who get their kicks from military or rubber boots.

Rings

After piercing holes through all kinds of body parts, you can put rings (or other objects) into these holes. Rings have been put through earlobes, noses, lips, tits, navel, tongue, or cock, just to name some of the most common locations. Many people, but seldom queers, wear golden earrings decorated with diamonds for esthetic pleasure. Others make their sexual lifestyle and preferences known by their rings. Or use them in bondage. A student of mine suggested a double finger ring, one used to put on the finger and the second for putting your penis through – marrying one’s real self. Ring sex, however, doesn’t ring a bell in my perverted mind. The story goes that the English prince Albert had a ring (or better a thick needle) right behind the head of his dick so he could better keep it clean. Connoisseurs say that the use of this device was to raise the sexual pleasure of himself and his partner. He gave his name to this ring-needle that queers now sometimes use for the second function mentioned. In the Philippines they went even further: there they put a ring around the cock that was kept in place with a nail straight through the head. Sometimes the ring was decorated with little knobs. Anthropologists wonder whether this prevented or augmented lust, and for whom it was lustful: the person himself or the partner. But why didn’t they ask? Now only some queers can tell you.

Rod

Rod refers to both dick and switch so one could create a variation on a famous saying with “don’t spare your lover’s rod the rod.” Love does not come without pain and your lover should feel the pain of love in his cock. This comes from the sadist side but we could also associate with the masochist side and say: “Whoever does not spare me his rod, please give me also that other rod.” No question of an eye for an eye or mutual exchange, but the desire to receive both rods. A rod plus a rod, the dream of kinky people. The most interesting version of the rod is the bull pizzle which has been prepared for a good beating by police.

Roman shower

A practice quite unknown today is the Roman shower, vomiting on a partner. It seems to have been a favorite pastime in ancient Rome. Fortunately boozers these days, when they are so drunk they have to vomit, do not throw up over others. I have never heard or seen people requesting Roman showers, but who knows what the future may bring.

Royalty watching

Caesarophilia or royalty watching is common among gay men. Some of them decorate their walls with royal iconography, the Almanac of Gotha, or subscribe to the volumes on Dutch, French, or British nobility. They drool as much over princess Diana’s funeral as over the marriage of Dutch crown prince Willem Alexander with Argentine beauty Maxima. Some keep things proper: dry eyes, dry crotch. Not the poet Jos Versteegen, who once expressed his excitement over the young Dutch princes on Prinsjesdag (Princes’ Day, the opening day of Dutch parliament) and described in metrical rhyme how he came, seeing the cute princes (this is long ago). Prince madness is probably a better word for this variation. The kitsch and camp of royalty like Ludwig II of Bavaria is probably what attracts gay men to royalty.

Rubber

Rubber is a recent addition to the spectrum of fetishes. Some men who are familiar with the life of fishermen or longshoremen along the canals and rivers of the Netherlands fetishized the rubber boots, pants, or other apparel of these sturdy men. Or perhaps they picked up their taste in a medical environment where rubber is used to protect against fluids and blood, or from soldiers who wore gas masks. These days it is more about specially made tight rubber clothing: pants, shirts, gloves, socks, body suits with or without boots. There are masks in all sizes and colors, with dildos on the forehead, or tubes for ample piss or limited air supply, with openings for eyes, nose, and mouth that can be closed. The preference for rubber is about the feel, the smell, the smoothness and shine, the sweat and heat, which develop underneath. Just as lovers of rain and wet clothes have a preference for water that comes from outside, others find the inner juices hornier. Sweat-madmen dream of the floods building up under the rubber. Lovers of water sports sometimes have rubber sheets to protect their mattress from golden showers. Next to rubber masks and truncheons, masochists will be excited by the suits which are the most confining cell for the body: bondage made to measure. The main leather cities nowadays have specialized rubber shops where you can find the clothing, toys and magazines exclusively for rubber fetishists. And there will be specialized rubber sex parties in those metropoles.

De Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis (1740-1814)

Along with Plato and Freud, the Marquis de Sade is one of the world’s most famous philosophers of sexuality. Most people think de Sade was a monster, but those who read his letters and books know better. He came from an old and noble family from Provence in France; at the time of his birth they were rather poor. Through the use of coalitions, such as marriage, they regained wealth and continued to participate in the highest circles of society. De Sade grew up in the Parisian palace of the Condé family. His mother was the lady-in-waiting of the princess de Condé, one of the grand ladies at that time, while his father had been her lover. The son got married to Pélagie de Montreuil, whose father, an influential judge, belonged to the new wealthy nobility.

Sade’s lively sexual interests did not come from strangers. His father was not only a womanizer, but also was once caught with another man in the Tuileries, still today a popular cruising park. He chose his male servants with an eye to their aptitude for sodomitical pleasures. His uncle, an abbot and friend of Voltaire, was another famous libertine. In his twenties de Sade had his first love pangs. His marriage could not stop the excesses of the young libertine so only four months after his wedding he made his first visit to prison. De Sade had picked up a woman and asked her to hit him and spit on a crucifix. When she refused, he forced her to spit on the cross and violated her. Due to the good connections of his in-laws he was released after only a short while. He repeated this scene several times with variations. His in-laws became less willing to help and eventually found it better to let him remain behind bars.

De Sade’s most notable affair happened in Marseilles in 1772. He had hired four whores and gave them all a stimulating drug. He could not get excited with these ladies, so he ordered his male servant to beat him and fuck him in the ass. The whores pressed charges because they thought they were poisoned. Found guilty of sodomy and attempted murder by poisoning, de Sade and his servant were sentenced to death, but they had fled so only their portraits made it to the stake: they were burned in effigy. Queerly enough, this death sentence did not make de Sade the most famous sodomite of his time. In 1794, during the French revolution, he was once again sentenced to death, quite queerly for political moderation. He now escaped the guillotine since the Jacobins who convicted him for this, themselves faced execution after they lost their power. About a third of de Sade’s life was spent in prison under the Ancient Regime, Revolution, and Restoration. There he became a great writer, more feared than the libertine by the authorities. Under Napoleon’s rule, de Sade was imprisoned not for what he did but for what he wrote.

His work is a typical example of libertine literature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It is a mixture of literature, philosophy, pornography, and subversion. In his first novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, published in 1904 in German and two decades later in French, Madams tell randy stories to get the libertine men going. The stories are beautiful and detailed while the actual sex in the novel is kept very brief. After the men are tired from drinking, eating, and fucking, they begin to discuss the political and philosophical issues of sex. The stories are essential for Sade because fantasy inspires sexual acts and puts the bodily functions to work. Without sexy images or words, no lust.

De Sade takes the thinking of the Enlightenment to its extremes. Nature is not a source of good over evil and corruption, but an example of waste, violence, and sexual excess. If man accepts the path of nature, then presumed crimes such as slander, thievery, murder, incest, rape, prostitution, and sodomy are in fact natural, so he says in his novel La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795, translated as The Bedroom Philosophers – although a boudoir is not a bedroom). He defends prostitution for everyone by everyone irrespective of gender, not only men with women, but also men with men and women with men and women. For him all sexual desires belong to nature. All people are able to perform sodomy, and some have a preference for it. De Sade was a precursor of the gay movement which defended homosexual love in all its variations, more radically than any successor. What was in nature should not be prosecuted by church or state. Some feminists have celebrated the work of de Sade as a radical plea for gender equality because he made no distinction between male and female drives, and analyzed how the church especially made women hypocrites. His books are full of lesbian scenes and he sees many women as masculine (and men as feminine) with large clits that they use for penetration with dildos as an alternative. Women also produce fluids with orgasm and enjoy sex perhaps even more than men.

He was an anarchist who struggled for individual and sexual freedom, and against religion and the police state. That he defended rape, murder, and theft as parts of human nature in his novels has made it difficult for social movements of anarchists and gays to see him as a predecessor. His idea was that the creation of new life went together with destruction of old life, so there was not much wrong with murder and destruction: it was all part of a violent nature. Even his supporters such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Klossowski, or George Bataille had difficulties with the entire message of de Sade. He showed the visceral human sides where one will find a lot of rot and muck, which is hard to digest for most people.

The word perversion only came into use a century later. For de Sade, all the kinky sex was not perversion or pathology, but pleasure. The 120 Days of Sodom could be described as a catalog of sexual variations. The missionary position is the act he likes the least. This is why sodomy takes on such a prominent role in his work – the exact opposition of Christian, reproductive coitus. In de Sade’s opinion the woman’s cunt should be sewn up after defloration. He strongly disliked coition and breeding, unless it was incestuous or adulterous and could lead to further crimes. He was much more interested in licking asses or shit sex. He does not elaborate on fist fucking and piss sex, probably because perversion also has its fashions.

There is an interesting aspect to the life and work of de Sade that sheds a more positive light on his philosophy. He and most of his libertines are not really sadists but masochists. They like nothing better than to be sodomized and to be spanked. They are only cruel when someone refuses to fuck or beat them. This is most true for bigoted women who make them angry and at the same time horny. De Sade’s work has two distinct sides, the libertines and the religious souls. God-fearing persons believe in good but will eventually succumb to evil. If they choose the other side then they are beyond good and evil as the libertines are – so preceding Nietzsche. Evil will no longer bother them, as they will find pleasure in both good and evil, in storm and shine. By force, the atheist libertines will pull the asexual bigots to their side. De Sade suggests that the greatest pleasures can be found not in beauty but in filth and humiliation. He and his accomplices degrade and torture their victims not only out of sadism but to teach them the important lesson that pain generates lust.

De Sade died in 1814, leaving his work as a beacon of hope for perverts in the Victorian underworld. The philosophical and pornographic revival of his work started in the twentieth century. Recently his work was published in the prestigious series La Pléiade, the hell in the heaven of literature. Many studies are dedicated to his philosophical and literary talents. Let us hope that in the new millennium his work will lead to a sexual revolution that uses his thinking as an inspiration (LeBrun 1991; Lever 1993; Edmiston 2013).

Sadism

For long time sadism among men was not really considered a perversion, since men were expected to belittle their partners and mistreat them. Sadism was, as it were, the natural expression of masculinity. Masochism in men and sadism in women was what needed explanation, according to the shrinks. Only when such behavior, rather than copulation, was the main aim of sex, would there be a question of perversion.

The word sadism is derived from the name of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814), whose life and works are discussed above. To call de Sade a sadist appears to be a misunderstanding, for his desires were more on the masochistic side. During his lifetime his name became synonymous with villain and rapist: when women declined to beat him up, he worked them over with the whip himself. It was for this that he was incarcerated three times. In the nineteenth century a sadist was a scoundrel. De Sade became the equal of the mythical Bluebeard, who was supposed to have killed his seven wives; of Gilles de Rais, who was executed for witchcraft, heresy, and the rape and murder of some 150 boys; and of Elizabeth Bathory, who was accused of something similar with her maid-servants. The marquis was also suspected of murder, but we now know this is not true. He nevertheless joined the ranks of a notorious and mainly homosexual gathering, because besides the whip he also loved getting it up his ass. To de Sade, sadism and sodomy were sisters in love.

In 1891 the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing changed the meaning of the word sadist. From a villain he became a sexual pervert, who experienced lust by torturing his or her partner(s). The sadists turning up in the work of Krafft-Ebing are of two kinds. On the one hand there are sex murderers like Gilles de Rais; on the other there are more common sadists, who did not want to kill their partners at all, who sometimes did not even want to hurt them. Psychiatrists discovered that sadism is usually not at all about the infliction of pain; more often it is about mind games and verbal humiliation. In many cases sadism remains imaginary.

The defenders of SM prefer to follow this train of thought. In defense of their perversion, which of course they do not see as pathological at all, they say that no harm or suffering is inflicted. They are not abusing their partners, who chose for it themselves in the first place. The relationship always has a voluntary character. Beforehand, sadist and masochist have agreed on what they are going to do and how far they will take things. In other words, the coercion is an illusion. The SM play unfolds in mutual consent. The partners agree on a code word, which the masochist will use when he cannot take any more. According to the apologists, it is unjustified that psychiatrists lump sadomasochists together with lust murderers and rapists. At this juncture, with people attaching major importance to sexual and gender equality and democratic relations, the arguments of the defenders of SM sound almost believable. The play comes out of free will, has certain rules, and stops when one of the partners has had enough. Real violence is out of the question. At the most there is some simulation, hardly worth mentioning. SM is Sane, Safe and Consensual (SSC) or, a step further, Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK).

My objection to this argument stems from its character of respectability. It takes the sting out of SM, which does not have to be so dull and democratic and does not have to go by fixed rules. The SM play becomes juicier when limits are not respected, but stretched. It is exciting to take things just one step further. And those code words, of what use can they be, when the masochist’s mouth has literally been stopped and his body put in bondage? Would it not be more sadistic and horny for a gay masochist, if his sadist boyfriend lets him be beaten by a woman and makes him lick her? It has been said before: precisely what you do not want and what may disgust you most, can turn you on immensely when you are forced to it. For many people what they abhor most is also most exciting. This exactly applies to SM.

The concept of sexual equality is very recent. Before 1900, nowhere in the world were equality and mutual consent the sexual norm. Well into the 1970s, men could do as they pleased with their spouses. Rape in marriage only became a crime in the Netherlands in 1991: hadn’t the wife sworn obedience to her husband? Relationships of gay men with errand boys, soldiers, sailors, servants, of queens with straight male hustlers, were unequal in terms of money, beauty, status, strength, sexual preference and gender. Young but poor devils with muscles who looked good, earned an extra penny with gentlemen who had nothing of the kind, and who were turned on by guys flaunting their heterosexuality and bragging about women.

In those days a certain degree of sadism came with most homo- and heterosexual relations. Sadism as a perversion cropped up at the very moment cruelty and inequality in sexual relations were put in the wrong. The new norm of equality brought about a new perversion. The liberal dogma got as its stepchild the perverted sadist, who tried to become legitimate again by all means and chimed in with the choir of free will, mutual consent, and democracy. He could better have put such ideas in perspective, emphasizing the horny importance of inequality and pointing out social coercion, which strongly limits the space of free will. Have you ever overheard somebody objecting to the strong pressure put on boys to become a hetero or a real bloke, or go to school?

Since sadism goes against the current beliefs in equality and non-violence and is so easily equated with lust murder and rape, it takes most SM novices a long time before they get down to brass tasks. With the coming out, it goes first gay, then sadomasochist. Many people will hide such desires from themselves as well as from their environment; they may never indulge in them, or only experience them indirectly, as when barking at their partners, scratching them, or overpowering them sexually. As some dykes from way up north once said: in the old days we played with belts and whips for a change, but how could we know this was called SM? (Weinberg & Levi Kamel 1983; Baldwin 1993; Thompson 1994; Elb 2006; Beckmann 2009; Newmahr 2011; Rubin 2011)

Saints

Sexy Sebastian is not the only saint the heathens tortured; there must be hundreds of them with matching pictures, like the Ugandan lads who switched to Christianity, refused to be sodomized by their king, and were executed because they would rather be dead and unfucked than alive and screwed. Similarly, the Spanish boy Pelagius refused to join the sexual service of the Andalusian Muslim king Abdar Rahman II, despite all the presents bestowed upon him, and died the death of a martyr. All the images and paintings of scantily clad saints – tortured, crucified, hanged, burned for their faith - must have aroused homosexual passions in believers and non-believers for centuries. The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima became a homosexual masochist when he saw an image of Saint Sebastian. Most of the instruments of torture included in this encyclopedia are mentioned in the Christian mythologies of saints and martyrs, which makes them worthwhile sources for kinky lovers (unless you dislike the hypocrisy of the Catholics producing sexy images that you are not allowed to act upon). This mythology of young men forced to gay sex was a staple of Christian homo-hatred. Most lads would prefer queer pleasures to Christian puritanism. Who will be the saint of sex to defend the sexual autonomy of youngsters against churches, states, and parents? See also Santa Claus.

Salt

The Latin word for salt love is salirophilia, which is close to the love of sweat (see Sweat craze). Let us not confuse the salirophile with the saliromane, who is in for dirt (salir is French for soiling). The love for salt brings you to the places that are most sweaty: neck, armpits, the region around and behind the testicles, between the toes.

Santa Claus

The mainly Protestant Dutch celebrate only one saint’s day, of Santa Claus. The sixth of December is his official day; the Dutch celebration takes place the day before. According to the myth, Santa Claus comes at the end of November from Spain to the Netherlands on his white horse and tours all towns of the country on the eve of his saint’s day, bringing presents to all the good children, and punishing the bad and evil ones by withholding presents, or worse, taking them back to Spain and not sparing them the rod. As he cannot manage all the Dutch children on his own, a small army of Black Petes escorts him. Recently the white saint served by a mass of black men has raised the question of racism in this tradition. The following fantasy sexualizes the saintly myth.

To Santa Claus, moral arbiter of the young, children are either sweet or bad. The good get presents, the bad get stiff penalties. Each year, on December 6, there is the obvious divide between those who get the rod and others who are showered with presents, because for a whole year they were obedient and nice. Like all the other kids, I was well behaved, so I got many gifts. I cannot remember hearing of a child who got no presents from Santa Claus because he or she had been evil. Santa Claus is a good man indeed, he turns a blind eye to all childish mischief. But in my time he was also something of a bad guy, who did not give all the kids the same nice, expensive presents. He was also a capitalist sucker who showered rich kids and cheated the poor. Of course he came from Franco’s fascist Spain.

Though I was a sweet boy, I thought the punishment for mischief was not all that bad. To me it seemed more like a first prize. Bad kids were put in Black Pete’s sack on the sixth of December and swept off to Spain to be subjected to all kinds of unmentionable punishments. Not one Santa Claus song provided any clues as to what kind of torments the scamps might be subjected, once in Spain, which made imagining these punishments all the more frightening and exciting. I found the known penalties quite attractive, for going from the icy and cold north to sunny Spain would be more of a treat than a torment. For good reasons, hordes of Dutch nowadays take off for winter vacations on the Spanish coasts. They travel by plane or bus, but bad boys went in a bag on a ship, among sailors and Back Petes, imprisoned on a real ocean-going vessel. To me it was more a boy’s dream than heavy punishment. Equally desirable was the sack, which you shared with other naughty boy brats – girls, of course, never made it to that sacred status. In hindsight I imagine the penalties in Spain as some kind of tough correctional boarding school or prison for young criminals. Strict discipline, heavy studies, lots of sports, tight schedules, with only bad boys and Black Petes watching over us, all in the best Franco style. The whole affair looked mighty attractive.

To me the far away land and the sack with rascals were especially desirable. I remember vague erotic dreams about older boys putting me in a bag with other bad boys. These were dreams without Black Petes, filled with mean white guys tormenting us for no reason. Such dreams still arouse me. It remains an enigma, why I did not fancy the Black Petes. They did not mean as much to me then as they might now. Of course the Black Petes in my white native village were not black at all, but whites, who smeared themselves with shoe polish. But what may have been least attractive was the fact that these Petes were not really boys, but girls doing their best to pose as boys. For the girls it was a stroke of luck to play drag king for a day. But for me, who dreamed of young and strict masters, it was a disappointment, as I was not yet aware of the lust in transgender games. The young men I fancied did not become Black Petes, for they considered such dress up parties as so much infantile nonsense.

The essential attraction of Black Petes, with their sacks full of bad boys, their rods, and the journey to a penal colony in Spain, was the unmentionable punishments. Unmentionable is what they used to call homosexuality in the past. I think I already suspected then that Spain was not a penal colony, but a homosexual utopia for naughty rascals and the likes of the Marquis de Sade. See Saint love

Satanism

Sex with satanic elements is satanism. The colors are the black of night or the red of blood. According to how satanists picture the devil, many elements such as purgatory and hell, spider webs, sacrifices, habits, tortures, tridents, subterranean dungeons, or super terrestrial churches being desecrated can play a role in it. Some paintings by Jeroen Bosch give a good impression of what satanists imagine. Since almost nobody believes in the devil or has an image of him anymore, it may get more attractive being less real. Amsterdam had a Satan’s Church that was a gothic bordello with altars, pseudo-priests and women who were sacrificed to the lusts of men. It was sexual commerce that hoped to be acknowledged as a church because Dutch religious institutions don’t have to pay taxes as normal business has to do. But this bordello did not escape the greedy fingers of revenue officials. The Gothic scene is one of the places that may offer new possibilities for a return of satanism. The question will be how to deal with the many forms and contexts of satanism.

Satin

Satin is not a special material but the result of a weaving method that creates its smooth and shiny surface. Satin can be made from cotton, silk, wool, polyester, or a combination of such fabrics. It must be an old weaving method, since paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), for instance, show women wearing the most beautiful satin dresses. Rich and prominent men also wore elaborate clothing that included satin. In the late eighteenth century, these men returned to simpler clothes and left elegant silk and satin clothing to women. De Sade described how exciting he found boys dressed in satin, for it brought out a feminine side that delighted him..

When I was a young kid, only lower class lads would wear satin soccer shorts. A club as chic as Ajax looked down its nose at them. In the Protestant milieu I grew up in, anything shiny, including satin, was considered obscene. To me it made the boys in their satin shorts all the more attractive. Feminine, unmanly, obscene, vulgar, smooth and shiny, they sent shivers of desire down my back. How I longed to fondle those soft gleaming trunks. But that could not be, no way. Their crotches were forbidden territory for me, as well as their soccer fields. So I had to opt for my second choice and buy myself one of these attractive objects. With the greatest secrecy -- there are more secrets than only homosexual ones -- I bought myself white satin soccer shorts. They were a complete revelation. They did not just feel good, soft like a peach skin, but were also great for rubbing. To rub and slide my dick in this satin covering was more stimulating than anything I had done before. I realized my love for satin at the same time as my passion for men. I created a collection of such satin shorts in all the colors of the rainbow. There are times I dream of a soccer field, with a heap of all the satin trunks ever worn there. I roll around in them, breathing in the smell of sweat and shit of the guys who used them.

Nowadays with a bit of effort you can find homosexuals in every corner of the land. But satinists are a lot harder to find, as I learned to my regret. So I decided to go down the gay trail first and start a boy hunt, secretly hoping to come across satin boys. But in those days satin was not fashionable for men and so I could not experience my preference. Only in the late 1970s, when satin trousers were in vogue for a while, did I find a young man who shared my taste and was wearing satin. In the basement of the gay hotel ITC and on the toilets of Amsterdam’s great disco DOK we rubbed and slithered in mutual delight over and around each other like a couple of slippery snakes. The two times we had sex were like minor strokes of lightning, horniness with no tomorrow, sans lendemain, as the French say.

Wearing satin clothes in those days made you a queen instantly, or at least a feminine creature. Straight blokes had to spout their negative comments, but also in the gay community the unmanliness of satin was not held in high regard. Real men were all the rage, led by the clones of the pre-aids era: men who sported crew cuts, tight jeans, t-shirts and maybe a lumberjack shirt. They were cotton boys who had the hots for rough and tough, not soft and shiny. Leather and a bit later army soldiers or skinheads were setting the standards and satin boys could only wish those others would mistake their black satin for leather, with the sad result of disappointment on both sides: for the leather freak since it was no leather, for the satinist because the other would not answer his call. Satin boys could start wearing leather themselves, but unfortunately one illusion is not like the other. Leather is smooth and shiny, but not supple, unmasculine, sensuous, and obscene like satin.

Sometime around 1995, satin came back into fashion again. First for ladies, a bit later for men. At first the satinist had to make do with the larger female sizes, but soon various labels like Diesel began manufacturing men’s clothes in satin in various colors. In those early years I bought myself silly, because there was always a chance that satin would be out of vogue again in the next season. The opposite happened for several years, and differently than in the 1970s: quite a few straight guys dropped their objections to unmanly shiny fabrics. At last they understood that women are turned on by young men in satin, as I found repeatedly when straight girls commended my satin trousers or even tried feeling them up. To my regret, the new millennium has brought a decline in the satin fashion for men once again, after five years of sensuousness, leaving the male satinist in the cotton and blue jeans desert.

When I came upon a sex ad from another satin freak in the paper one day, I thought the time was ripe for a club of satin lovers. I had a rude awakening. To my own ads I received several replies, but they came from a straight guy who fancied ladies’ underwear, several guys looking for a steady boyfriend between shiny sheets, or who already had one and could only stop by for satin sex after working hours. Other young men were horny for satin, but did not dare to come out with it and did not even have the courage to go to a shop and buy a pair of satin pants or a shirt. You could forget about turning the rest into a club, so my satinism remained a highly private affair. Even a website for gay satin lovers that I found a little bit later, was taken down within the year. Nowadays, other people have succeeded in forming a club of satin lovers, but it remains difficult, since so many kinds of clothes and sex interests can be linked with satin. Someone likes suits, another underwear, soccer trunks, pants, or shirts. I like it because it is sluttish and lewd, while another might think it is chic. For me it is linked with all kinds of perversions, for others it is an expression of their own frailty and tender feelings of love. Unfortunately fetishism drives people out of as often as into each other’s arms!

Satyriasis

Priapism or satyriasis is for men what nymphomania is for women: an excessive sexual interest. The first word comes from satyr, the insatiable half man, half animal of the ancient Greeks, often depicted with an enormous phallus. Priapos, son of Dionysos, is the Greek god of fertility and lust. Many books of poetry have been devoted to him, but regrettably we moved from paganism to Christianity, and from poetry to psychiatry. These days, doctors have replaced the priapaea of the poets with the sex addiction of psychiatry. It is not only less seductive, it is a sea-change from celebrating to hating sex. Though satyriasis is mentioned in the “psychopathia sexualis” and sex addiction is seen as a disorder, to me they seem neither perversions nor illnesses. Have you ever heard of someone being called an automobile addict because he sits in his car twice a day? According to specialists, laying hands on yourself or having sex more than twice a day is a sex addiction. When your trouble is craving sex too much, as a rule something is wrong: a dull partner, stupid ideas about sex, or an overdose of eggs, chocolate, viagra, or other stimulants. The best thing you can do is to find a sperm maniac, who can never get enough of swallowing your spunk.

Scarring

One of the many forms of body manipulation is scarring, literally the creation of scars. Piercings and tattoos are the simpler forms of scarring, but removing parts of the body like the earlobe, finger bones, or the tip of a toe goes one step further. Removing the cock’s foreskin is also a form of scarring when it happens voluntarily and not without consent as with infants or young boys. Here you can see how the same treatment can have opposite results. While the circumcision of boys is a means of scaring them away from sex, scarring sex is a horny consensual act between people who choose it. The aim can be esthetic or can raise one’s self-respect. Often scars are a symbol of love and surrender to a partner: love as a wound.

The most radical form is the removal of body parts like a toe or a fingertip for fun, love or pleasure (with the exclusion of transsexual operations where the removed parts are used to produce new organs and body parts). Earlier we discussed amputation-sex: the preference for people who are missing some body part. In Europe’s former days this was easier to come by since so many people had lost one or more limbs in wars. Now you have to travel to the sad disaster areas of the world for this, regions like the Balkans, Syria, Iraq, Cambodia, or several parts of Africa, but this type of sex tourism has a nasty look to it. I find it more straightforward if you put yourself under the knife. Let us face it, you have to sacrifice something if you like scarring. Also you must find someone to perform the necessary operations. Some men are so devoted to their beloved that they undergo such body manipulations for sheer love.

It looks like body art will see further developments in the future. Through all sorts of operations, men and women will mould their bodies after their own wishes and insights and become the cyborgs many perverts dream of. By that time we will consider an unmanipulated body, facelift, or transsexual operation a primitive affair. People will have their measure taken for pointed heads or double dicks, a womb with balls, or a sucking arse. For 200 years we erased all unevenness from the body; in the future we will add new parts or give fresh fetish shapes to it.

Scat love

A pièce de résistance in the early books of sexology were the variations of copromania, coprophilia, and coprofagy. These words refer respectively to being crazy about excrements, the love for scat, and eating shit. This passion has many variations. Some tops do not want a clean hole for fucking, but love finding a turd behind the sphincter muscle. Most unsafe sex! Others desire eating shit. They are the coprofagians. Much safer is coprographics, the writing of shitty texts. The vocalizing of dirty lines is coprolaly. A good synopsis of coprophilia in its various forms is still The 120 days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. His examples show very different variations of scat love: next to coprophagy, some people may like to take a bath in a tube of shit, want to have shit smeared on their skin or like to see other people do such things. In this book coprosadism also appears: boy-slaves are forced to eat shit and also to hold up their excrement for the pleasure of their masters. For the gourmets of de Sade, the diet of the shit supplier is of great importance. Must it be red beets, or is the taste of liquor, peaches, or rotten fish preferred? One must take into consideration that the stomach digests such stimulating ingredients greedily and little of them remains for the scat lover.

School sex

All disciplinary institutions such as army, asylum, marriage, slavery, police and prison inspire all kinds of passions. Pupils get chastised in schools on their hands with rulers and on their buttocks with rods – which fills the dreams of people who are into castigation. They were humiliated in front of the other kids and as a punishment had to stand stiffly in the corner of the classroom. Schools, like all places filled with boredom and cute bodies, incite various yearnings apart from the harder games. There are the kid loves for male and female (sports) teachers. For many people, educators embody the first objects of passion. The gym is an inspiring place with sports trainers, vaulting-bucks, racks and ropes. With sweaty sporting kids and with showers where all those bodies are exposed in the (near) nude. Schools produce violence and depression; insults for queers and sluts fill school yards and softer and harder loves belong to the games that pupils have learned to play to survive in this world, where they are taught to become normalized adults.

Scopophilia

The lust for viewing or looking is scopophilia. Dutch filmmaker, essayist, and novelist Eric de Kuyper once wrote an elegant article about the glance he had from a boy in a blue jeans suit waiting for his tram. When we say sex is located between the ears, we are talking about the brains. We could also localize the place of lust in the eyes, in our gaze. What you see makes you horny. And often it is precisely the gaze of the other guy that inspires lust. Some go for innocence, others for a tear. I go to pieces from young men with a look in their eyes speaking of powerless rage and fathomless sadness. Guys I can comfort and maybe save from their deadlock. A look of fearful expectation is also great. Unfortunately these days, most Dutch male youngsters have a dopey look in their eyes. They have it already and need nothing more than a nice chick. Luckily, besides these blond bores, other more exciting glimpses and glances can be returned. See Voyeurism

Scratching

I have always loved scratching and pinching. All these men scratching their crotches and balls make one so horny. To my dismay, most people are keener on the vanilla variations of fondling and kissing. My interest is not so much for the hissing and scratching cats of Van Hattum, but for nail-biting young men. I love the nerves the biting of their nails indicate and love their nails that would not leave even the smallest scratch.

Sensory sex

All the senses have a sexual side. Sensory sex happens by switching the senses on or off. Variations are dealt with all over this encyclopedia, for instance under blind and deaf sex, bondage, mask, scratching, and so forth.

Shackles

There are handcuff experts and handcuff lovers. These last ones, quite different from the experts, do not want to be freed from their shackles at all. They dream of steel or leather shackles, fetters and irons, neck-, wrist- and ankle-restraints, spreading-bars and chains connecting the restraints, of men put in heavy irons or chained to balls, of gladiators, chain gangs, and galley slaves. There are men who collect handcuffs from all the police forces in the world and others who like medieval dungeon irons and search antique shops and the net for them.

Shaving

One of the various ways to make recruits, prisoners, slaves, and masochists look more uniform is to shave them. It is an act of humiliation. This is done to the most visible part, the head, but also down in the crotch. A bald head or genital area can look very sexy. The shaving itself is an intimate act and gives a strong sexual feeling. Having sex after shaving is great because the skin is sensitive and a bit itchy. It combines the pleasures of pain, utter nakedness, and being debased. The shaving can be done in many ways: rough or gentle, with wax or cream, by pulling, cutting, or by depilating.

She-male

She-males are men who have changed into females but have kept their male genitals. So they are halfway transsexual. Often they make their money with sex work, as many straight men have a strong predilection for such half men, half women. They look like fabulous females from the outside, but they hide their secret which is their dick. They can sexually perform from two sides: their anus is their cunt and their penis is their arm for penetration. It is still a great mystery why heteros like to have sex with she-males. Are they so afraid of the queer label that they keep up a straight mask while having sex that looks so gay? All bigger cities have worlds of prostitution where trannies and she-males work. They are nearly never visited by gay men. What is this weird cleft that separates straight and gay men, and also queers and she-males? See Transgender

Shoes

Retifism is a posh word for shoe sex. Rétif de la Brétonne was an eighteenth-century French author, who in his work devoted lots of attention to his preference for ladies’ shoes. He was not alone, since other celebrities like Goethe and Baudelaire also had a soft spot for it. Goethe asked his lady friends to send him their shoes, so he could press them to his heart. William Rossi, author of a somewhat dated work on shoe sex, thinks Goethe did several other things with those shoes. Footgear is popular as a fetish. Women build up entire collections, the most famous one being Imelda Marcos. According to Rossi’s vulgarized version of Freud, men supposedly dream of feet as genitals sliding into shoes that represent vaginas.

What do men do with shoes? They can sniff them and get turned on by the smell of sweat and leather, or plastic. Some like to hear the clicking of high-heels and women’s shoes, or the opposite, of the nails in soccer sneakers on the pavement. Others cum in them, or ask their beloved to walk over them or place their shoe or boot on their neck or genitals. Shoes come in all kinds and sizes. One man likes big, another small feet. High heels, slippers, and military boots turn people on. For centuries the Chinese had a preference for small feet in women and bound girls’ feet into iron shoes that were too small – another instance of cruelty against women, as bones broke and the victims were often hardly capable of walking on their “lily” feet in “lotus” shoes. This abusive custom made the soles soft and rounded and some men liked cumming in this curve. They did not bind the feet of boys, though, and I have never heard of men who did so to keep them small (Rossi 1977).

Siderodromophilia. See Train sex

Similisexual is another word for homosexual. Other variations of this nature are intrasexual and unisexual. Linguistically these are all better words than the weird concoction of Greek and Latin that makes up the word homosexual.

Skinheads

Gay skinheads became popular in Europe in the 1990s. In many places they have wiped out the straight right-wing working class skinheads that preceded them and were apparently their objects of desire. Skinheads not only take to bald heads, but also to bomber jackets, blue jeans, Lonsdale shirts, and Dr. Martens boots with white laces. The gay version specializes in rough and hard sex. Skinheads are fetishes that offer a romantic ideal of masculinity and comradeship. They had to counter the criticism that other male fetishes faced before them: being anti-gay and slavish to straight masculinity. Amazingly, the skinheads have not become a fashion in the USA. Are they too British and of the kind of working class that does not exist among white trash in America?

Since the 1970s we have seen clones, cowboys, leather men, and pink soldiers; now skinheads are last in a line of utterly masculine faggots. In the past, there was competition among queers for being the least feminine, now the race is about being as masculine as possible. There remain, however, queers who debunk the masculinity of all these men by calling them leather queens or skin sissies. The change from more feminine to more masculine ideals of identification among queers can be explained by the absorption of the object into the subject. While the sissies of the past adored sailors and butcher boys, their cloned descendants have picked up the outer signs of their male ideals and try to emulate their masculinity. That queers are so thrilled by masculine young men can probably be explained if their first love objects in the straight environment of their youth were such men. Most gay men remember infatuations with sports heroes at their school, workmen of the streets, uniformed policemen, or rebellious skins in their suburb. For me they were not skinheads, but soldiers of the French Foreign Legion with their white “képi’s” and in their elegant uniforms that hid their brutality.

Slapping, see spanking

Slavery

Until the mid-nineteenth century, slavery was a normal thing and to this very day in some remote corners of the world it still is. In the fifties of the last century the Catholic church withdrew its moral approval of slavery, even though the Bible gives instructions on how to do it right, thereby condoning it. Pretty quick, merely a hundred years after all Western countries had abolished it. Maybe we can expect the church’s approval of gay marriage by 2100!

Slavery is private ownership of people by people. Slaves had no say in matters concerning their own life or work, but were dependent on their owners to different degrees. In general they were commodities, which were bought and sold. Often the life and death of the slaves were in the hands of their owners, who could do with them as they pleased.

Slaves came in all sorts and sizes. For a long time Russia had serfs, who worked the land for their owners and were sold together with the land. There were prisoners of war, who had to perform forced labor; galley slaves, house slaves, plantation slaves, gladiators who had to kill each other for the entertainment of the Roman people. Fathers sold their children, who, instead of costing, brought in money. Men sold their wives when they had had it with them. Warriors who lost in battle ended up for sale as spoils of war. Villages in Africa and elsewhere were looted and the inhabitants carried off in slave ships. Free people who could not pay their debts had to pay by selling their bodies. Slavery these days comes mostly under the guise of constrictive contracts, offering laughable salaries for some sort of forced labor. People sometimes swallow the bait of managers who promise mountains of gold for work which, behind closed doors, turns out to be grossly underpaid.

In China, Japan, the Ottoman empire, the Arab world and elsewhere, beautiful boys were valuable trade who were trained to work as catamites. The inventive Chinese even had special benches made for that purpose, equipped with vertical dowels of various sizes for the boys to train their bottoms. When they were good at their job, they could continue in adult life, some as eunuchs. If they were lucky they found wealthy protectors who would buy their freedom and give them the opportunity of a career in another field. But for most whoreboys, a life of abuse ended in the gutter or with death. It was a tough and cruel world in which slavery flourished. But precisely that cruelty has a streak of horniness, which fired the imagination in times of slavery, when the ruling class could abuse slaves sexually; when there were no more slaves, masochists dreamed of being possessed and abused by cruel masters. Symbols of slavery -- the whip, shackles, cage, clamps, pins, chains, branding, wooden horses, rods, and pillories -- have been transformed from symbols of horror and abuse to exciting items in kinky sex. And terms like slave sale, block, humiliation, submission, abuse, torture, incarceration, and bondage, these days inspire lust.

The sexual ideal of slavery can bring love to a head as complete submission of soul and body to the beloved, who can do with them as he pleases. Such a surrender to someone else is the ultimate gift of yourself, after which the beloved becomes your master. These are beautiful dreams that bring tears to my eyes. It also happens in more practical ways. In the world of leather, slave sales have been organized, sometimes for the benefit of charities; then slavery doesn’t mean more than that the buyer gets to have a beer and a dance with his purchase. In the US the police sometimes raided places where such sales were being held, so the merchandise changed from free slaves into unfree prisoners. For most of them this was no fun but rather an expensive joke. And then people talk of wanting more police blue in the streets!

In Holland, SM venues like Vagevuur in Eindhoven organized slave markets where the buyers could use the slaves for a period of some two hours, within limits indicated beforehand by the slaves. In the context of private parties and SM weekends, the duration of the slavery is somewhat extended and the freedom of the slaves further limited. There was a slave farm in Austria where you could experience what forced labor means physically for a period of several days or a week. The young novelist Willem Melchior, who specializes in the desire to be killed by a spear planted in his nice tight stomach, devoted another novel to his wish to become a slave with the telling title 24/7 (Amsterdam 2004).

Slaves nowadays can call their own tune, so the SM roles seem to be reversed. It must be a masochist who as a sadist performs all the special and complicated wishes of a slave. It is no longer the slaves who have to work hard, but the masters. In a previous article about “cleaning sex,” forms of modern sex slavery were introduced which are somewhat lucrative for a sadist: doing little work and making money nonetheless by renting out cleaning/sex slaves to others. Work goes mainly into acquisition, training, and the sale of slaves. Contemporary sexual slavery goes back to the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (see masochism), who handed himself over under contract to “belles dames sans merci,” beautiful ladies without mercy. His voluntary sexual surrender to a cruel woman came at a time when the Western world was busy abolishing involuntary slavery. The official abolishment of abuse and slavery at the dawn of modern times obviously created a space for a sexual identity, which was inspired by the old custom of man as merchandise, but distinguished itself by an element of free will, which sadomasochists still emphasize. Maybe postmodern capitalism will finally liberate the people who want to be merchandise and give them the freedom to give up their free will and autonomy and hand themselves over to an animal market of people. So the idea of a free market suddenly gets an unexpected horny twist (Abernathy 1996).

Sling

The sling is a square leather mat suspended by its four corners. You can lie down in it, tied up or not. It comes in handy as aid for fucking, especially handballing or fistfucking. The benefit of a sling above a chair or bed is that a sling moves with the sex motions. In most back or dark rooms, slings are available for the various forms of anal and SM sex. In the much bemoaned sex club Catacombs in San Francisco, they had the Crisco hanging off the slings, so there was never a lack of lubricant for handballing.

Smell

Some people say smell is the foundation of sexual arousal. German sexologist Iwan Bloch wrote a book-length study under the pseudonym Albert Hagen on the importance of scents for erotic desires: Die sexuelle Osphresiologie. Die Beziehung des Geruchsinnes und der Gerüche zur menschlichen Geschlechtstätigkeit (Berlin 1900). It was translated as Odoratus sexualis: a scientific and literary study of sexual scents and erotic perfumes (New York: The Gargoyle Press,1933). We know the importance of smell in the animal kingdom for sexual attraction, but for humans it may be only a sideshow in most cases. The odors of our beloveds that are always personal make us feel mellow but do not direct our acts. Most perverts know the importance of the aroma of sweat, shit, sperm, and piss, of leather and rubber, of hot dark rooms where the stench of sweat mixes with that of poppers, smoke, and alcohol, with the stink of filthy clothes and foul mouths. A most special smell is that of branding, a rare pleasure even in the perverse scene.

Snot

A preference for snot or spit doesn't do a thing for me. Often when I look at a guy thinking I might fancy him, he ruins my fun by spitting on the floor. Not because he is seeing me, but because that is what a real man is supposed to do. Perverts they are! Eating my own snot is stupid, though at times I can't help it. But to eat someone else's? I've never been asked and never sought out the pleasure.

Sodomy

One of the oldest words for sex between men is sodomy. It refers to the biblical town Sodom, that allegedly went up in flames and was then buried under the water of the Dead Sea, and of which not one single trace has been found. For ages theologists told the tale that this mythical city was destroyed because of the homosexual sins of its inhabitants, but nowadays, they presume it was not because of homosexuality, but for neglecting the laws of hospitality.

From about the year 1000, the word sodomy referred to any sex not aimed at procreation or outside the context of marriage. This “sin” had gradations. The worst was sodomy “against nature,” meaning anal sex with men or women, and bestiality. Sodomy or unnatural intercourse was a concept standing for forbidden sexual behavior. It was a precursor of the nineteenth century expression “perversion.” Though most gay men, whether they practice it or not, don't see anal sex as an evil or a perversion, according to Christian doctrine it was the pre-eminent sin. The comparable Arab quranic word is liwat – meaning the people of Lot, the citizens of the town God destroyed.

In Europe, during the period 1000 – 1800, sodomy was strictly forbidden. For the Christian church it was a sin and for the law a major crime. A sodomite who confessed this ‘horrid’ crime of anal sex before a court or was caught in the act, ran the risk of being burned, strangled, hanged, or drowned. Research by Dirk Jaap Noordam (1995), Leo Boon (1997), and Theo van der Meer (1995) revealed that in Holland some two hundred sodomites were executed, especially in the eighteenth century. In those days the expression “safe sex” was unknown, but a confession of homosexual behavior which did not involve anal sex led to much lighter punishment. Unfortunately most sodomites didn't know those kinds of safer sex. They often were not even aware sodomy was considered a major crime. It was also called an “unspeakable” or “silent sin” since it could not be discussed. So boys who fucked each other in the Utrecht orphanage thought sodomy meant cutting off dicks.

The ban on sodomy did not keep those who wanted it from anal sex. In fifteenth century Florence, the police kept an archive on sodomy in which over half the male population was registered. Close to 85 percent of those accused were in the dock for having anal sex (Rocke 1986). In a hamlet like Faan in the Dutch province of Groningen, men engaged in rather casual sex with each other, until a witch-hunt directed by the village judge Rudolf de Mepsche put an end to this. It cost two dozen men their lives at the stake, which this tyrant erected for the sodomites of Faan.

When homosexuals and doctors in the nineteenth century began taking a stand, in guarded terms, for the abolition of sodomy laws, they made a sharp distinction between homosexuality and anal sex. A Dutch homosexual doctor in 1870 wrote: “I am a uranian, not a pederast [...]. I abhor ped(erasty) and with me certainly 199 of the 200 uranians” (Hekma 1987:232). Pederasty here stands for anal sex and uranian for homosexual. According to this doctor, anal sex was as infrequent among homos as among heteros. Uranians tried to gain respectability by making a sharp division between sodomy as perverted anal sex and homosexuality as an identity, which mainly revolved around love, kisses, and maybe mutual masturbation. Such noble uranians turned sharply against Oscar Wilde in 1895, who defended himself against the “insult” that he was a “somdomite,” though he had been fucking newspaper boys.

The homosexual rights movement for a long time maintained a cautious emancipation strategy, in which the importance of anal sex in homosexual relations was negated or put into perspective. Before that, unabashed glorification of anal sex could be found around 1800 in the work of the Marquis de Sade who loved sodomy and abhorred coital sex. It made a return only in 1972 in Le désir homosexuel (The homosexual desire) by Guy Hocquenghem. With the rise of aids after 1981 it became clear how much anal sex was an everyday component of much late-twentieth century homosexual practice. Hardly had sodomy become a widespread sexual variation, when it again received a negative label as the exemplary form of unsafe sex which could lead to aids and thus to death. It made Leo Bersani (1987) pose the rhetorical question “Is the anus a grave?”

In his book Van achteren bezien (1995; Seen from Behind) Marty van Kerkhof discusses “anal sex in the aids era.” According to him, the anus is not a grave since safe sex is possible with a condom, but many of those who engage in it do not like that: they want to feel physical contact without a protective membrane. Van Kerkhof sums up the negotiations between men about anal sex and condoms and discusses all the excuses people try to find which will allow them to engage in unprotected sex. The clear-cut messages of the aids campaigns are twisted so that unsafe sex appears less risky. A monogamous relationship might offer security, but not after three weeks, as young lovers often like to think. A budding gay as partner lessens the risk for the older partner, but not vice versa. Pulling out before shooting is still not safe, but safer than the anal transmission of sperm.

In his book, Van Kerkhof has an open eye for the importance some gay men attach to anal sex. According to them only anal sex is “real sex.” Others want primarily to be fucked since they enjoy that, some because they want to feel feminized and humiliated. Some can only fuck, while a third party prefers doing it both ways, alternately penetrating their partner and being penetrated. Some gay men prefer a big dick up their ass and others a small one since they have a narrow entry. Some like a rude, and others a smooth penetration. There are men who only want to fuck after the anus has been flushed clean (see enema) since they abhor shit and stench while others love just that. In short, men who love anal sex will do so in a thousand different ways.

For most gay men, being fucked stands for humiliation and feminization of the penetrated party. This age old supposition, already present among the ancient Greeks and Romans, is still alive and kicking. For this reason, being fucked was a severe punishment with the Romans, destroying the honor of the victim. Though contemporary people behave as though the concept of male honor has little meaning any longer, such age old images still surface when it comes to anal sex. Many gays in Kerkhof’s study may like the feminine or passive position in anal sex and even use language such as “let me be your slut” or “fuck me in my cunt”; they very much cordon off the sexual from the non-sexual experience so as to protect their masculinity. In the words of Michael Warner (1999: 212), they feel “bottom shame”. Passive anal sex endangers their honor.

Some people fear the chance of the asshole being ripped (this was a common accusation thrown at eunuchs in the past, as they were said to be all “cut in front and torn in back”), or the danger of incontinence, as the sphincter may weaken from repeated penetration. These groups are the visible part of nearly half of all homosexuals, according to recent surveys, who are simply not interested in the anal sex game and are perfectly happy to get their rocks off in all the other ways explored in this encyclopedia, whether out of a desire to protect the one they love, or a wish to look out for their own ass, so to speak.

For the Marquis de Sade, being beaten and fucked was a humiliation, not only wiping out all ideas of Christian virtue and male honor, but also giving rise to the ultimate experience of lust. According to him, a man who was never taken from behind did not know a thing about sexual pleasure. De Sade seems to suggest that the liberation of sexual pleasure is only possible when all men have learned the pleasures of anal sex. In the article on humiliation we have dealt with that.

Solitary sex

In contemporary society, onanism is probably the most frequent sexual act. Onanism was the most common word for self-pleasuring in the eighteenth century and refers to the Biblical person Onan who threw his semen on the ground instead of putting it into the vagina of his wife he had to marry after his brother, her first husband, had died. This “levirate” marriage was common practice in Israel in those past times, to ensure that the dead husband still had offspring. Onan had no desire to have children with his wife that were not seen as his. So his act was something very different and quite perverted in itself, but not masturbation as we see it now.

Individualization has gone hand in hand with onanism since the eighteenth century. The more people are thrown back on themselves and the more space they have for themselves, the higher the chances are they will sexually satisfy themselves. The internet only adds to this development of onanization. The universality of the phenomenon leads to a wealth of expression: next to masturbation, manustrupation, onanism, self-abuse, self-pollution, auto- or monosexual are the more popular like tossing off, jerking off, beating off, getting off, cumming, spanking the monkey, shooting. Decent descriptions are numerous: playing with yourself, satisfying yourself, coming by yourself.

In the eighteenth century, entire dissertations were published about onanism and its presumed dangers. The first treatise to warn against the imaginary dangers of self-pollution appeared in London in 1710. In 1758 the enlightened doctor S.A.D. Tissot devoted a learned disquisition in Latin to the subject, which in 1760 was translated into French and after that appeared in dozens of printings and translations. His theory was clear and simple. Spunk was an important material, certainly in a man’s youthful years. Loss of seed by manual manipulation was life-threatening. One ounce of sperm equaled 40 ounces of blood. Without semen no nerves and no brains.

Boys enjoying themselves too often were tearing down their constitution, would get spinal consumption and eventually die from exhaustion or would commit suicide. Tissot initiated a tradition. After his first step, hundreds of books and articles appeared on onanism. According to Tissot and his consorts, causes for self-gratification were culturally determined. Nature was good, culture bad. Nature meant innocence, culture corruption. Boys learned to masturbate from other boys, from bad educators, and by reading the wrong literature. It could be that the beds they slept in were too warm, that they slept on their belly and not on their back, were riding horses or glided down banisters, ate hot and spicy food or red meat, drank coffee, tea or alcohol, got to know the pleasures of physical touch while urinating, etcetera. Some educators even warned against reading the Bible, because this could arouse feelings of lust. On the rebound, Tissot demanded that parents and educators control every aspect of their children’s lives in order to turn the evil tide of self-stimulation. Historians have claimed that the battle against onanism has had less effect on the habit itself than on the boys’ upbringing into puritanism. At a moment when youngsters are learning and developing their sexual self, so central to the modern individual, a major part of this education will be sex-negative. The basic lesson is: masturbation is sheer evil, you should keep your sperm and sex for marriage, and other pastimes are even worse than auto-eroticism. The abjection self-pleasuring was held in, has remained a main foundation of Western unease with sexuality.

Tissot’s book served as a model for many others. Many quacks warned of the dangers of onanism, but simultaneously offered a remedy, a pill or potion that could be bought only from them and for a staggering sum. Each of us has at one time or another seen a picture of mechanical means to prevent self-stimulation. Some masochists keep such apparatus in their homes since these not only prevent lust, but also stimulate it. Pedagogues fulminated against self-abuse and designed schools in such ways that this evil could be nipped in the bud. One educator devoted an entire book to the theme of trousers and skirts. According to him boys should change their tight pants, with dangerous pockets, for kilts like the Scots wear. Their genitals would hang freely, keep cool and excitement would not be roused. When urinating they would not have to touch their privy parts. A boy’s skirt was the best remedy against the seduction of masturbation and the voluntary emission of seed. The popes seem to be familiar with this piece of writing since they regularly warn against tight jeans and their inherent danger for procreation.

Though Tissot’s theory is sheer nonsense, in pedagogy and medicine his views went largely uncontested until the 1960s. Many generations have been brought up on this baloney. Luckily many boys have not given these matters much thought. But unfortunately many of them did sense some guilt, such as a boy in the nineteenth century who tried to get medical advice for his excessive jerking-off. He wanted to get rid of his balls, but his doctor told him that onanism was not that harmful and that he had better keep his genitals “which in fact made the real male,” obviously with an eye on marriage and reproduction. The boy was in for worse than the doctor suspected and tried to cut off his balls himself with a knife. With one he succeeded, but he had to seek medical assistance before getting to the other one. Nineteenth-century Dutch novelist Lodewijk van Deyssel, the first Dutch to write from his own experiences about special loves among boys in boarding schools, had a handyman who designed an apparatus for him which made self-stimulation impossible. Like many others, he was a victim of the hysteria surrounding onanism. Although the device may have helped him for some time, in his later years he would return to the practice and keep an extensive diary on his sinful behavior.

Over the last two centuries, some raised their voices against the demonic stigma of onanism. While Freud condemned the practice, de Sade adhered to it in his many prisons and did not feel any guilt. Some doctors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries criticized the “anxiety-makers”, as Alex Comfort would name them. A. Morvincit (pseudonym of the gay activist P.J. Smink, meaning love conquers) in Holland and Max Hodann in Germany wrote that masturbation was not the drama doctors made of it. In his Schadelijk of onschadelijk? Nieuwe inzichten omtrent een oud erotisch vraagstuk (1925, “Harmful or not? New insight on an old erotic problem) Smink stood up for the pleasures of palm driving. But both inside and outside the circle of medical men and pedagogues, onanism remained a silent sin, which could barely be mentioned, and certainly not be approved.

Nowadays doctors only warn against excessive self-stimulation, yet many people do not feel comfortable satisfying themselves. Socially it is still more acceptable to gratify someone else or each other. Which does not alter the fact that no sexual act is of such frequent occurrence as masturbation. Coition is regarded with more respect but probably does not score higher than a meager second place. So many prejudices have disappeared that in 1992 Vrijen met jezelf (Making love with yourself) by Jos Lammers could come out, a book for children who want to know more about masturbation.

Doctors objected a long time to the ease of onanism. Other forms of sex demand a partner, not always as nearby as your own hand. They protested against self-love because it was asocial and undermined the idea of the couple. Another objection from their straight standpoint was the resemblance of the deed to a homosexual act. A man familiar with his own body and dick will object less to other men’s physique. The relationship of his hand with his dick can be called mono- as well as homosexual. The same goes for women. A homosexual goes for his “alikeness,” his narcissist strain, and what is more like the self than someone’s own genitals and body? Maybe the autosexual act is pre-eminently a homosexual act.

Another objection is the monotony of monosexuality: always more of the same, but this is the objection of people who lack imagination. In the first place there are many ways of doing it: with the hand, by rubbing; some people are even capable of licking or sucking themselves. You can do it lying down, standing up, sitting down, under the blankets, in the shower, the forest, public transport, elevator, in the heat and the cold. Fantasies are pivotal for starting off the act – maybe a reason that day-dreaming or book-reading was often seen as a major danger that would lead to lustful feelings. A film or magazine can get things started. Some men tie or hang themselves up or put on clothes that excite them. But the most important instrument is fantasy. A nice dream is the beginning and high point of much monosexual activity. Illusions have more variation than cold reality. In the imagination things can happen that you would not necessarily want to experience in reality, like murder, abuse, slavery. Masturbation is far from monotonous unless you see it as a mechanical act and not as a hedonistic pleasure of imagination.

The most important literature about monosexuality is historical and does not deal with the delights of self-stimulation, but about the sad history of the belief that the effects of onanism can be disastrous. These days the theme is mainly that it is not unhealthy or sinful at all. According to some sex educators it is an educational experience, which prepares one for later twosomes. But why would it be better or more fun together than by yourself? The US surgeon-general Joycelyn Elders wanted to have education in all schools on safe sex that would include lessons on masturbation. Immediately after she suggested this, President Clinton dismissed her. Self-gratification has been abused and denounced for more than two centuries, and people are still not at ease with the practice. Did you ever hear one of your parents praise their solitary pleasures? All the attempts to turn evil into good did not help to give lonely diversions the serious and mature status they deserve. With the rise of computer sex, enjoying yourself may be the future (Cornog 2003; Laqueur 2003).

Somnophilia

A preference for sleeping partners is called somnophilia. There has been a long debate over whether a sexual act with a sleeping person must be seen as illegal. These days courts consider it a form of rape. But what if that sleeping person happens to be your regular partner? The repose of a sleeping beauty and his regular breathing can turn him or her into a most exciting person, so I can imagine somnophiliacs going for it. But I also understand sleeping beauties may not like their rest to be disturbed, even for sex.

Soutanes

Under how many soutanes have unutterable and sinful acts taken place? How often have priests fondled themselves, while admiring their pretty dress in the mirror? How often did they invite their confessants into their box and lifted up their cassock a bit, so the sinner could sin once again before receiving absolution? How many men and women will have purposely confessed obscene acts to get those private jewels under the soutane moving? They must have been innumerable.

Sperm love

Seed, sperm, or milk (see there) as the most tangible result of sexual desire is a fetish for some. With seed you can do lots of things: contests to see who can shoot furthest, licking it, smearing it on the body, using it as a lubricant for anal sex. Dutch gay writer Gerard Reve sent small film roll containers filled with his spunk to young beloveds as evidence of his love. I can imagine there are people who use it as a herb in cooking or as the base of a drink. Someone produced perfumes with Arab sperm. Sometimes one sees men with dried sperm on their pants. Depending on your mood, this can look rather dirty or very hot. Beautiful are shiny fresh strings of seed on naked skin. There are people who get a kick out of a sperm wave over their face.

With some regularity, doctors worry about the quality of male seed, for it is more watery and less fertile than in the past. The number of sperm cells has declined over time. There is a simple explanation for this: men these days have more sex than in the old days, so the amount of sperm gets divided over more shoots, maybe reducing the quantity each time, but the entire sperm production is not very different, nor is the quality.

Spermatophages are seedeaters or spunk madmen.

Sports sex

According to most sports clubs and federations, sex and sports have nothing to do with each other. The scandals where coaches are convicted for molesting their pupils are exceptions in an otherwise sex-free sports world. The Gay Games join this image of a sexless manifestation by saying that their global success is based on friendship, not erotics, thus throwing away their chance to be innovative and become a bridge between sports and sex.

Sports and homosexuality are both innovations of the nineteenth century. The British developed sports to create a manly character in boys, and to distract them from their mono- and homosexual games in boarding schools. Sports were a weapon against homosexuality and sissiness. At the same time, doctors and uranians (the first word homosexuals used for themselves in 1864, before the term homosexual arrived in 1869) invented the homosexual as a male who was effeminate and liked men sexually. He had “a female soul in a male body” as lawyer, uranian, and homosexual rights activist Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs defined it. The late nineteenth century created the opposed images of the chaste, heterosexual, and masculine sportsman and the promiscuous, homosexual, and feminine queer.

This tradition has not disappeared. Gay men continue to have difficult relations to sports as a macho domain. Many of them remember sports activities in and outside school as occasions where they were harassed as sissies, or were routinely last to be chosen for a team. Entering the gay world in the past marked the moment to stop engaging in organized sports. A few gay men will have enjoyed their time in sports, cherishing their memories of playing among sexy men. Sports, however, are gendered, with games as volleyball and badminton that are seen as feminine and so more popular among gays. Lesbians, on the contrary, often had a much more positive relationship to sports. They enjoyed the male-defined athletic activities and their female homosociality. Before the times of gay and lesbian sports clubs, in relative terms there were many more teams that were largely lesbian (in rugby, soccer) than those that were gay-defined. The development of gay and lesbian sports and the Gay Games made it possible, especially for gay men, to return to the sports fields.

The participation of gay men in particular in male sports was problematic because they homosexualized sports that were imagined as asexual. Of course, gay men did everything to prevent being recognized as homosexual. The homosexualization of sports should not be attributed to the presence of gay men who did their best to hide, but to the homosexualizing gaze of their straight fellow athletes. Gay men were forced to hide their sexuality in sports and this tradition continues. Even in their own sports clubs, gay men stress once again that sex and sports are separate domains, so now they intentionally support the continuing sexophobia of sports.

Though many insiders dislike the sexualization of sports, for spectators it is a main attraction. A few years ago, Dutch television stations asked how they could make soccer games more attractive for the women, girlfriends, and wives of the men who watched sports. One of the suggestions was to show the locker room during the breaks and after the game. They tried to show the sportsmen, who didn’t want to be exposed on television half-clad, or naked under the shower. They had no desire to be seen as soft porn models. Women are allowed to enjoy the athletes, but only sweaty in their sports kit on the field and not in a bad temper in underwear after a lost match. Straight women and gay men who watch sports often enjoy the players more than the game. For them, sports offer a chance to see cute men and boys in their finest form, with muscular and well-trained bodies, straining every nerve. It is no wonder that athletes have become sex symbols, more so because they are the first ones to strip down and embrace each other in front of excited audiences after they have scored. Pop idols do not display half of what athletes expose at such moments.

Gay men usually have one of two reactions to sports. Either they run away screaming that sport is too macho, or they join in because it is a butch thing to do. It just depends on what type of gay man you are and which sport you are talking about. Out and open gays have little chance, especially in macho-sports like fight-sports, football in the US, and soccer in Europe. At the same time it is an alluring idea to play with all those butch, sweaty boys, who just reek of sex. It is quite erotic to think of being one of the team, to be a man among men, in the mud and in the locker-room. There is, moreover, a certain attraction to the anonymous feeling of team sports, similar to military and uniform fetishisms. Sport offers the chance of being naked in the lockers and under the shower together with all those cuties. Unfortunately most athletes never realize all the possibilities of their sexy plays, and most gay men only discover them after they have given up sports.

The classic Greek Olympic games were a naked game of eroticism and endurance for men and boys. The organizers had to take precautions so that the sexual element would not prevail on the sports fields. When the Olympics were introduced in Europe there was no question of sexuality, it should simply not exist. At the end of the nineteenth century, athletes should not have sex with each other; the idea that a sportsman could have homosexual inclinations was unheard of. The ideology stuck around that sex and sports are two separate domains, but gays know better. Time after time the press has shone their erotic spotlights on athletes, male and female, for homo- and heterosexuals. Unfortunately few sports photographers capture the true erotic moments in athletics. There were even court decisions that confirmed the asexuality, or heterosexuality, of sports. The craziest of them declared that soccer players could not be called homosexual. The argument of the Italian judge was that soccer players were men, not faggots.

But there are homosexual soccer players. Let us take a famous quote from Marco van Basten, one of the world stars of the 1980s, about what may happen after a goal: “You are not only kissed, and patted on the back, but touched and pulled on everywhere. That is simply the way soccer players show their affection. Italians are good at showing their feelings, but the best comes from Van ‘t Schip. He grabbed me [..] after a goal by my balls, proceeded to kiss me everywhere and said that he loved me.” This obvious piece of homosexual love took place in the arena of Zaragoza that pouring rains had turned into a mud bath. Marco’s object was his Ajax buddy Johnny, the guy with the cute ass. Following the rule of the Italian judge, neither of them ever came out as homosexual. Perhaps they could have come out as mud lovers. And 20 years later, they were still together as Amsterdam’s Ajax soccer club’s trainers.

Soccer offers interesting erotic possibilities, but they are more obvious in boxing and wrestling. There have been many locker-room scenes in the porn industry. In the imagination of the pornophile, those sports guys have good reason to turn all the pent up pressures of the game into good sex. Tons of stories have been dedicated to the orgies that take place on sports fields or in locker rooms. A time ago it was popular for coaches to forbid their players to have sex before games to keep their energy and not lose their testosterone. Of course many athletes believed and still believe in this nonsense, which gives them an excuse to let out their inhibitions after the game. It does not matter if they won or lost the game, since losing can awaken just as much lust as winning. Personally I prefer losers.

Some sports fans would rather see their favorite star in sports stuff than naked. While others get off on military and police uniforms, sports sex lovers fantasize about sports clothing: lycra bicycle pants, judo suits, Adidas shirts and shorts, and of course jock straps. In England both homo- and heterosexuals get off in the soccer kits of their favorite club. A member of parliament was found dead after he had sex in full kit. I like soccer shirts and shorts if they have something obscene with bright colors and shiny fabric. It brings back dreams of my youth. Nowadays mainly in Europe, sports sex parties are organized where the visitors show up in their fanciest or sexiest sporting costumes and have sex together. Websites are devoted to themes such as soccer bondage.

All sports can be turned into sex games. With bestiality I mentioned the possibility of putting human jockeys to the chariots and of forcing them to run the track. Another SM variation would be to set the stakes somewhat higher in sports competitions and give winners the right to abuse the bodies of the losers. The game would take on new proportions when the losers’ bodies were at stake. That way the winners would really have something to celebrate and the losers would feel their loss physically. The Aztecs took this idea one step further in their ulama game where not the losers, but the winners were offered to the gods. For them it was an honor to be sacrificed. Another game that is easy to sexualize is paint-ball. Here not only the hunt for the other players but also the bodies of the other players could be the reward. The sexual abuse of the losers might take place in public so that a voyeuristic audience could live out their fantasies while the winners might also sell their prizes. I would not mind seeing these variations take place as demonstration games at the next Gay Games. My advice is while you are watching sports to think about all the sexual possibilities of the game. Then maybe the sports might get the sex they deserve and perverts the sports they enjoy.

Spreading bar

Bars will excite the imagination of most bondage freaks. They come in all kinds of fascinating shapes. The most well known one is the spreading bar, in which the feet can be locked a meter apart. Tie his hands on his back, hoist his hands up in the air so the upper body bends forward, and the masochist’s body can be worked on from every angle. The spreading bar opens up the anus nicely and also the mouth is on workable genital level. Some spreading bars come with extra locks for the wrists. A neck bar is worn horizontally along the neck and over the shoulders and has metal or leather wrist cuffs. Use the bar and the restrained posture of your victim to put him into all kinds of uncomfortable positions. Other bars are available, linking the necks of a number of slaves. Or go behind the back or in front of the stomach and come with locks for the neck and ankles, maybe also for the wrists. The nice thing about a spreading bar is that it can fix certain postures. Look out for stiff muscles, though.

Stalking

Of stalking I've never heard in gay circles, but I am sure it happens. I can remember how in the old days I stole around the houses of beloveds, stalking the places where they used to come to catch a glimpse of them. But I did so most discreetly, so my victims did not notice. I did not plant myself in a camper in front of their door, did not spy on their every move with binoculars, and did not bother them with chats or groping when they left their houses. I was a decent young queen and can hardly imagine that other queens, discreet as they are, stoop to stalk.

Statues

Galatheism, pygmalionism, or statuophilia are all used to describe a sexual interest in statues. Back in the 1800s this preference was listed among vices such as bestiality and sodomy. Around the end of the eighteenth century, there was a renewed interest in classical sculptures of the naked human form. The classicist Johann Winckelmann very much promoted this interest and, as a homoeroticist, largely focused on the male form. The rage for classical art assumed its sexual form as men, who had much less access to nude imagery in those times before photography, fell in love with statues, embraced them, and masturbated in front of them. They could then only be prosecuted for public indecency. Notwithstanding the abundance of pornography in our days, some men continue to cling to statues. The gay Dutch writer Gerard Reve tells in one of his novels of masturbating in front of a statue of Maria in a Catholic church. Queerly enough, the gay writer became a straight statue-lover. The David of Michelangelo is of course the most famous statue that continues to attract the erotic interest of many people. Other people fall in love not with statues but with paintings, or other products of art. Rascha Peper wrote Verfhuid (2005; Paintskin) about a gay art dealer who is disappointed by his lover, a fashion queen, and starts instead to love the painting of a boy. At first he does not understand the collecting obsessions of a straight client, but slowly gets the idea and in the end succumbs to the same desires, preferring the eternal beauties of painted bodies to the real ones in his bed. Is not all art about erotics? It makes one think of Dorian Gray who falls in love with his own portrait, and becomes it. But what did Oscar Wilde mean with Dorian’s downfall: did he prefer the eternal youth and beauty of the portrait to the real person whose youth and beauty dissipated? Perhaps he liked best his own fiction that made fun of Platonic ideals. He surely preferred the real thing to the image, as we know from his life, for he appreciated how reality was transformed into art and how this made one think of and return to real bodies. I would like it better if the obsession with porn on the internet helped people have hornier sex and more interesting ideas about life. Perhaps that was easier in a time when artsy statues and paintings left more to the erotic imagination than does the concrete imagery of today.

Stealing

The excitement created by stealing is the sister of kleptomania and cousin of money sex. The Greek word is harpaxophilia. Most shoplifters get a kick out of their business, but not always a sexual one. For the specialist, it is one of the few perversions that requires special care due to all the security out there, which can be very problematic if you cannot think straight because stealing makes you blind with lust. If I get a hard-on while trying on new clothes, I know for sure I have to get those pieces, but I do not steal them. In my excitement, I might get caught; others might like that idea, but I am afraid to end in prison without my beloved pieces of clothing. Some people only get a hard-on if they leave the shop with their favorite item but without paying. Others get aroused after having paid. For me the financial transaction is a bothersome intermediate stage in the purchasing process. Internet shopping brings a new stage: buying or winning the object is exciting, waiting for it may produce lustful feelings and receiving brings new orgasms. For the kleptophile, however, getting away without paying is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

For some, the risk of getting caught makes stealing for lust even more stimulating: they are klepto-masochists. It could be great fun if you are caught, to discover that the security officer enjoys catching petty criminals and will only deliver you to the police after a good body search, some sucking and fucking and other humiliations. Food for fantasy, as it never happens in real life.

Stercoraires

Stercoraires are the men “who experience an erection when a woman enters a toilet-room in their presence.” This is how the American doctor Kiernan summarized this forgotten neologism of France’s leading forensic doctor Brouardel, dating from 1887. Other doctors mixed up piss and shit and said it referred to the latter fetish. There must be women, homosexuals and lesbians who may feel the same excitement when their beloved types enter a toilet. No idea what is the origin of the word that now refers to scat or shit lover. Maybe the idea of nudity that was less common in those days than nowadays with nude beaches and sex shows, was replaced by something stronger and shittier. The meanderings of sexual terminology and erotic life are mysterious. See coprophilia.

Stick

What is a cop without his stick? But about which stick are we speaking, his baton or his rod? Cops have been so sexualized that the separate parts of their apparel -- uniform, cap, belt, boots, pistols, and sticks -- have become fetishes themselves. Cops are not ignorant of this ambiguity, as more than one has used his stick to sodomize some unfortunate prisoner. In earlier days Dutch police officers wore funny looking riding breeches with ample room around the hips and crotch. As a child I figured they hid their baton in there. Little did I know how right I was. See Police sex, Rod

Stigma sex

People with a stigmatophile preference have stigmata like tattoos and piercings put on and into their skin. Only saints receive the original stigmata, the nail wounds of Christ on the cross, by meditating. Most stigmatophiles will have to apply them by physical means. In the Philippines they are experts at it. It is not advisable because of the dangers of poor hygiene.

Stinging nettle sex indicates a masochistic dream where you roll around in a garden full of stinging nettles or are whipped with them by a beloved master.

Strangulation sex

“Do not attempt any of the autoerotic activities described or depicted in this monograph. These activities are inherently dangerous and carry a risk of death. There is no reason to believe that these activities are pleasurable to the average person, and there is every reason to believe that they may prove fatal.” So starts Autoerotic Fatalities (Lexington Books 1983), a handbook for forensic physicians by Hazelwood, Dietz, and Burgess. A book starting off like this tickles the curious nerve. This one describes the so-called dangerous acts in detail. These are not dances on the edge of the volcano, but tip toe work. Most of the cases deal with sexual self-stimulation through hanging. Choking cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain, leading to sexual stimulation and possibly to death by strangulation.

The suspension is mostly done by hanging, while the person in question takes special care that he can undo the knot(s) in time. Due to complications, like an unstable base, contraction of the body at the moment of ejaculation, hair caught in the knot, or because of unconsciousness as the first phase of strangulation setting in, these autoerotic acts sometimes end in deaths, some 200 a year in the USA alone.

Strangulation does not only happen by hanging. Other ways are manual strangulation; or a rope around the neck attached to the ankles or a pulling mechanism will have a similar result. Cutting off the oxygen supply can also be accomplished by breathing in and out in a plastic bag or by replacing oxygen with other gasses, as with poppers. The authors of the book make it clear that simple devices can have dramatic results. How quickly something can be transformed into a sexual aid became clear when the plastic bag was introduced and was shortly after used for sexual stimulation.

The authors’ explanation for the sexual arousal, also seen at executions, does not dig deep into human physiology. These are doctors and you might expect them to do their best to give a sound clinical explanation for the sexual effect. But they do not seem to think twice when they say unashamedly that the explanation should not be sought in biology, but in other circumstances. The ways in which stimulation is reached are too multi-faceted for one physiological reading only. The mechanical and fetishist means used to reach the desired results differ widely and do not always aim at immediate physiological results. Some want to come during the hanging, others jerk off after the scene has been finished. Most victims also apply all kinds of bondage toys or are found in drag or with sexual appliances like leather masks, gags, whips, and dildos. The progressive perfecting of the sexual situation often implies added risk, like the man who lost the keys to his cuffs, thus losing the grip on his situation.

How people discover such bizarre practices is rarely written about in papers nor discussed by neighbors. The authors cannot say much about it since they only arrive on the scene after the victims have died. From literature and reconstructions they deduce that most practitioners of strangulation sex hit accidentally upon this sexual possibility and a minority learn it from others. In one case a suicide attempt turned into a sex game. In some places hanging is a game of boys among themselves. They go into the forest and play with bondage and strangulation, and have gay sex. If you can trust each other, the game becomes much safer because the others can prevent many of the risks of doing it on your own.

To the doctors it remains an enigma why sexual arousal by strangulation occurs. Physiological explanations are not available, but neither are psychological or sociological. The doctors’ clinical view leaves little room for other interpretations, because their reports are rather one-sidedly directed at medical-forensic problems. Their task is to distinguish between murder, manslaughter, suicide, and autoerotic accidents. Moreover they are only dealing with dead, not live people. The simple question of why such habits almost always seem to be autoerotic is not easy to answer. Since other kinds of monosexual sadomasochism lead to death less often, such cases rarely end up in forensic literature. We only see the tiny tip of the iceberg of autoerotic pleasures with the help of accessories, but about the nature and proportions of these practices we know next to nothing. Large-scale sex research passes by such practices in unfit silence, but nevertheless they occur regularly, even with their considerable risks.

In such a forensic study, doctors would prove to be bad sex experts if they could not come up with yet another classification or fail to discern the latest paraphilias (as they call perversions nowadays). For the first, they classify suffocation sex as hypoxyphilia (Greek for lack of oxygen) or Kotzwaraism. They refer to Francis Kotzwara, a Prague composer who died in a London brothel in 1791 upon being hanged, at his request, by a prostitute. Prior to this the woman had refused to cut off his genitals. The second paraphilia to be classified is sexual bondage or ligotism or cordophilia (love of tying up and of rope). According to the doctors, this paraphilia should be sharply distinguished from masochism.

It looks like this medical classification delusion lends a scientific air to it all. The criminal investigation of doctors is incorporated in university’s Valhalla, while scientific explanation does not come one step closer to how such life-endangering practices might yield less risk. Most victims do not want to die, certainly not the young men involved: it is their hypoxyfatum: the fate of those who like lack of oxygen. See Asphyxiation, Autoerotic fatalities

Stretching

Stretching the body or body parts was a nasty form of torment, often used to extract confessions in the Middle Ages and beyond. You will not come across such instruments in your regular leather store or bar so it must be a rare perversion, but on the internet I once saw an SM table that had appliances for hanging and stretching, and a cage for solitary imprisonment underneath. A great device! Stretching balls or tits by weighing them down with heavy equipment is practiced, though. Attached more often at the base than at the bottom of the balls, since the aim is not the stretch, but the pain, as in nipple torture.

Strip sex

You can strip in many ways. Some people become strippers in a disco, others perform at a party in their living room. A well-known way is strip poker. Whoever loses the game (and better make sure it is a short game, otherwise it might take hours), has to take off a piece of clothing. Watch that everybody wears an equal amount of clothing, or that you are wearing most (or the least if you want to be out of them fast). Do think up a nice new game to do at the end, when the clothes have been taken off, because otherwise you just end up sitting there in the shoddy company of undressed or half-naked people and all you can do is share each other's boredom by getting drunk.

Submission

Surrendering oneself to another is submission. The term comes from warfare. In the past armies or cities that surrendered were looted, the soldiers and citizens were sold into slavery, or in the worst scenario, massacred. A recent and painful example was Srebrenica, a Muslim town in former Yugoslavia that was conquered by the Serbs when Dutch UN-soldiers who were there to defend the inhabitants failed to do so. The victorious army separated the male and female inhabitants of the city and let women, children, and the older men leave, then slaughtered several thousand men and boys between the ages of 16 and 45. The men responsible have yet to see justice.

Submission is the title of a film by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh that criticizes Muslim patriarchy and abuse of women. The movie shows a nude female in a transparent dress. On her body are written qur’anic texts. She recites the atrocities committed against women in name of Islam. The film created an uproar in the Netherlands and both directors received death threats from Muslim fundamentalists. Some months later, the radical Mohammed B. murdered van Gogh in name of Islam, although he would rather have murdered Hirsi Ali, who was then MP for the Dutch conservative liberal party and now works for a conservative think tank in Washington DC. This politician of Somali origin opposed both female and male circumcision and intended to make a sequence on the submission and abuse of gay men in Muslim countries, but never did so.

Submission and surrender have a much sweeter meaning in love. You give yourself to your beloved, body and soul. When it comes to kinky sex, both terms get the harder SM meaning that you surrender to your master, as if you belonged to the loot of a surrendered city. Look around in this encyclopedia to see what the master can do with the prisoner who gives up his body and soul in submission to his captor.

Sucking

A favorite pastime for many people but not a perversion. Among straight people in the USA, oral sex comes second in sexual preferences after coital sex, with 20 percent enjoying it. According to French sex researchers, it is on the rise, not only as foreplay but also as the sexual aim. This may reassure gay men, who nearly without exception enjoy sucking and licking. It is a good topic for poetry and academic essays, but less so for an encyclopedia of perversions.

Sweat craze

The love for sweat has been mentioned under salirophilia and rubber. The seeing, smelling, and licking of sweaty bodies, garments, or shoes are the sweat-crazed man’s ideals. It may include a preference for all kinds of secret and less secret sweaty spots like forehead, behind the ears or balls, the anal cleft, armpits and feet. The smell of sweat can also be sniffed from underwear, socks, sports apparel, and shoes. Some queers steal clothes from sports schools and elsewhere to enjoy the smell of perspiration. I have a friend who roams dark rooms and saunas in search of sexy leftovers such as dirty and sweaty shirts, shorts, sports suits and sneakers.

Swimming

The lust for swimming is nearly the opposite of the sweat craze but a sister to wet sex. The fools for swimming prefer swimmers’ bodies and swimming trunks that leave little to the imagination. They prefer the smell of chlorine and salt water to sweat, though both the lovers of swimming and sweating can go wild over moist shiny bodies or speedos wet with water and sweat. The same sight turns both of them on, but the difference is in the odor. If you are an undinist, do consider which direction you opt for (Sprawson 1992).

Tackle

A friend of mine has a tackle in his room. He can spot tacklephiles right away, because they leer at his sturdy machine immediately. They are ideal for hanging and hoisting. This can be done in many ways: by the hands, head up or down by the feet, using a spreading bar, by hands and feet simultaneously or lashed up like a package. Hanging is one of the ways that can make one feel totally dependent and humiliated, as a beast in a slaughter house. It calls for care because most people are so heavy they can't be hoisted up by their ankles or wrists without damage. Even with leather cuffs and soft material to relieve pressure on the shackled body parts, it’s a tricky business. There are special shoes that are used for this sexual play. Take care not to hang too long up and certainly not down because of possible harm, and use the best material for tackling. Much safer to hoist the sling-freak halfway up with his toes, buttocks, or shoulders still touching the floor. The tackled up bodies of masochists are dream pictures for kinky queers.

Talking sex

Talking about sex comes in many variations. The preference for telling dirty stories is called narratophilia. More decent, erotic preaching is homilophilia; when the tales are very perverse, narratophiles speak of coprolaly or drivel about shit. Lots of literature – such as the works of the Marquis de Sade, the Dutch gay writer Gerard Reve, or Californian Dennis Cooper – is a form of dirty talk. Unfortunately the telling of salacious stories almost always happens in a small gathering, most of the time between two people in bed. When will bars, as part of or adjacent to their dark rooms, install an area for sharing dirty stories and putting forward sexual polemics that will stimulate sexual fantasy and performance?

Tattoos

In earlier days mainly sailors and jailbirds sported tattoos. For a queen it was super-horny to have sex with a sailor who had a hetero text tattooed on his arm like “Jane, my one and only love.” Gay men, going for such real men, at times identified so strongly with the object of their desire, that they had themselves tattooed as well. Samuel Steward, English teacher and pornographer (Phil Andros), went one step further and became a famous tattoo artist himself. It was a way for him to create intimate, sometimes sexual, contacts with his masculine clients like soldiers and sailors (Spring 2010). Tattoo, once a privilege of a marginal minority, has turned into fashion for the masses. Since the link between tattoos and macho men has been broken and every softy now sports them, glued on or real, much of their horniness has gone. What still makes tattoos exciting are obscene texts or symbols indicating sexual preferences. A slave can have an expression of his slavery with the name of his master inscribed in his skin.

Teeth

The difficult word for teeth sex is odontophilia. Some people like to have the imprint of their lover’s teeth in their skin or to be bitten by him on their dick. A variation of the licking of shoes is the licking away of dirt between molars and teeth. Other people get horny from somebody pulling their teeth or from pulling their own. A mouth does not hold many teeth, so a tooth-pulling aficionado will have to change lovers often and may leave behind a trail of mumbling mouths. But for these there are other fetishists, who like nothing better than sticking their dick into a toothless mouth. The rudiments of one form of lovemaking lead to other kinds of sex, a perfect proof of the inexhaustibility of fetishism.

Telephone

Before the internet there was telephone sex. It started with men who dialed a number on the off chance, and hooked up with someone of their liking who did not break the connection, engaged in dirty talk. I remember friends being on the telephone for hours. With a good teller of horny stories, things did not have to take long and the manual labor was soon done. Later there were sex lines, still drawing a crowd who obviously needed aural stimulation. But these days we have internet sex, where it is all about the written word and stimulating pictures. How long will phone sex remain a specialty in the sex-at-a-distance genre?

Telephones were a regular appearance from 1930 on in some trendy homosexual bars. In German dance halls, tables had a phone and a number and when you liked a guy sitting at table 8, you simply rang the number and you were connected. Bangkok has a Telephone Bar where they still work with such a device – really a funny machine to use, more direct than internet and moreover you see live what you like.

Thing-sex

A new word for a new variation: thing-sex. The principle is simple: for sexual pleasure we change a human being into a thing. Some examples can elucidate the precept. In Petronius’ Satyricon the rich snob Trimalchio has a slave with long hair on which his guests could dry their hands. The young man is used as a towel. The fantasy can include an endless number of examples: coat rack, Christmas tree, table-leg, chair, door-bell, doormat, public urinal, milking machine, statue, artwork, collecting-box, note-paper, and postal parcel.

Imagine you would give a fun, sexy little party. You invite a couple of masochistic boys or men who are willing to play an object. Everybody has their own taste, but queeny boys from fashion stores seem to fit for me. They have by nature something subservient, do their utmost to look good, and are impersonal, which makes them pre-eminently suitable as sexual things. They will be permanently afraid of punishment if they do not execute their task well. Perhaps there is a destitute little club that could furnish some members in exchange for a nice subsidy.

The next question is how you should dress them. It can be in leather baby bags, soccer tunics, suits of armor, soldiers uniforms, in shiny clothing or just naked with some tit-clamps and piercings. It is nice when their appearance has something obscene. The things are around to make sure of some excitement. Uniform attire is also fun: things should be exchangeable. It is also nicer for them when they can imagine being among brothers, comrades, slaves, captive soldiers or something like that. Leather gags with red rubber balls humiliate the objects further, make them sexier to look at and prevent them from talking or screaming. They have to be quiet, silent objects that do what they are needed for. A gag is unwanted when you use their mouths and tongues for activities like pissing, sucking, or giving blowjobs, but there exist gags with a hole for those activities and keep penetration safe because the things can’t put their teeth in your thing.

Their hair should be kept short except for those who provide towel service. The others get a color rinse through their short prickly hair per preference: yellow for piss sex, brown for shit sex and so forth. If they are naked, you can paint them or write squalid texts on them. That is the thing as artwork. Or you write a little note on it for a friend. Stamp on their nose, address on their forehead, and there they go. Even before I myself ventured in the gay scene, I dreamed of boys who were nicely tied up as postal parcels to be sent around the world.

The next step is to decide which jobs the male objects will get and this depends on the kind of party. Is it more about sex, sociability, or a delicious dinner? In the last case they can serve as plates or tables. Table-leg is also a funny idea, but then you probably need more things. The degree of sadism determines how tightly they will be tied up. One suggestion is that they kneel with noses on the floor and the tabletop placed on their upraised bums. To give the entire object some stability you tie them hand and foot under their belly. Their tongues should remain available to lick your shoes; or the other way around, their asses for anal sex or for some little punishment when they make too many jittery or wild movements and spoil your dinner.

A nice function is coat-rack. You hoist the objects up in a cross form in the wardrobe, tie their wrists to the sides so their arms are available to hang coat hangers on. It is a good idea to use a strong object with thick arms for some stability. Unfortunately clothes pins will not work very well except with light summer clothing. The owner hangs his coat in the mouth of the coat rack or is that a better place for an umbrella? Of course, you can just throw the jackets over the object, but be careful that the object does not faint; it makes such a mess in the wardrobe. If you want to be nice to your coat rack, tie his arms to a stick that is placed horizontally.

The variations are unlimited. How about a four-poster bed with boy-objects bound to the four pillars? Luc Milne describes in The Milk Farm the use of men as cows: Is that bestiality or thing-sex? Also with the use of boy-objects as bells there is an animal variation, like a dog or a goose in the garden. You tie their hands and feet together behind their backs to so the object can waddle like a genuine goose, and quack when visitors come. The use of an object as a bell can be combined with electric sex. The objects get a shock from the caller and must thereupon give the requested sign, a shriek I imagine. Guess which part of the body is the doorbell.

An essential part of thing-sex is obviously the punishment. When the objects do not surrender to their function, there must be discipline. Within the hierarchy of things, they are demoted to the lower places in the lust-list, like coat rack, towel, or toilet bowl. It depends upon the master what the penalty shall be and which forms of sex the thing shall go through.

Thing-sex is the apogee in the making of people into marketable objects. In social life this is considered wrong, but many things that are inappropriate in daily life are exciting in sex. And there remains the question of whether most sexual acts are objectifying. Many people call their dick a thing, both their own and those of others. Whippings, slavery, objectification of humans are considered inhumane and bad behavior, but in bed and elsewhere thing-sex and slavery with willing culprits and victims can be very horny. Will society become more virtuous when such naughty, transgressive behavior is transposed into sexual pleasure? Whoever knows, please speak up.

Throat

The straight movie Deep Throat was the most successful porn movie ever and its focus was the throat, location of the female star’s clit. The leading lady with the remarkable name of Linda Lovelace, who earned very little from this hit, later became an anti-porn activist. In gay circles sucking was and remains a popular custom. Knights and horsemen dream of getting it deep down their throat and masochists get aroused by the idea of being forced to suck off such a tool to the point of vomiting it out or of being suffocated by the closure of their throat.

Tickling

Tickling is a favorite pastime with many children, maybe because of its erotic charge. For many people it is an aside in their sex play. I understand there is now porn that shows the tickling of balls as highest pleasure.

Tits

Most people have something with nipples, but there’s a group for whom nipples are as sensitive as foreskin or sphincter, and who like nothing better than tit sex. There are gentle lads who get all excited by having their tits lovingly fondled and there are tough guys who cannot picture tit sex without clothes pegs, piercings, rings, and weights dangling from pegs or rings. Like those who make bondage their sexual specialty, there are men who devote themselves to titwork, who know all about kneading and stretching tits, about rings, pegs, and pins, and how to turn titclamps and connecting chains into a harness for training their loved one.

Toilet training

When you get a dog or cat, you have to toilet train them. Some kinky people like nothing better than being a dog who gets trained just like that: to have to negate nature's call till their master allows them to let it out under conditions he imposes. Did you ever wonder why some friends of yours have a cat box but no cat? They secretly hope for a catgirl or -boy who has to be trained to take a crap in that box.

Tongue

Delicious part of the body, and although a fetish, nothing perverted about it. The kinkiest thing you can imagine about a tongue is that medieval tormentors sometimes tore it from their victim’s mouth, which goes quite beyond the fantasies of most perverts.

Torture garden

In London the Torture Garden has been running for many years as a monthly fetish club and now organizes parties in more cities. The name of the club is borrowed from a book by the French writer Octave Mirbeau. It offers a combination of fetish, SM, and body art. The dress code is “cyber sex, fetish, body art, fantasy, glamour, but no street clothes (jeans etc).” That sounds like a relief for someone who feels that blue jeans and chewing gum (and not drugs and alcohol) should be prohibited. Straights, gays, and everyone in between and beyond come to the club.

Creation Books in London published a beautiful coffee table album with photos from this club (Chaplin & Sivroni 1996). You can spend hours looking at it in excitement and amazement. There is a photo of the organizer Alan Sivroni with six sturdy iron pins through his cheeks. The zipper of eight rings in both ears is nothing compared to what he has got in his cheeks. His nose and underlip are also pierced. Fake eyelashes, a leash, and a simple coiffure with a single steely adornment complete the handsome image of his head. You can see his equally festive underbody in another picture further on.

In Amsterdam I have still not seen corsets in the kinky scene, but in San Francisco they are a trend. You can buy them in all sizes and shapes; it is even possible to get them in leather at a special corset shop. In the Torture Garden book there is a man who is bound into a corset twice as tight as normal, which makes him look like a wasp, a transgender person with a corset in place of an operation. The fetish corset industry has moved into high fashion industry as corset makers starting off for the visitors of the Torture Garden nowadays work for great designers like Gautier. The volume has no picture of a man bound in the small iron shoes that Chinese women wore in the past, so there still is room for the imagination.

The album sparks the fantasy and curiosity for those who are into this sort of thing. The club receives guests who are into blood and playing doctor. There are men who drag women around with ropes, and the reverse, dykes who whip gays, and cages that are usually too small, where girls and boys pay for their mischievous behavior. There are girls who look like boys and boys who look just like boys should look. There is someone for everyone that you would be willing to fall eternally in love with or would like to torture forever.

The only bad part of the book is a picture of a man dressed as an SS-officer. It seems to me unnecessary to choose a uniform that is so laden with the most monstrous of crimes. Why pick, from the hundreds of possible uniforms, the one that makes most people sick? Or am I suddenly a dull old bat, that I cannot see the fun of absolute transgression? Why don’t I like the SS-uniform and do not care about the relivings of slavery which are also in the book? Is it the distance in time?

The album is fantastic on account of its personal character. It is so strongly pornographic that it excites the senses while at the same time it shows people as they prefer to be seen. With their deepest desires and horniest clothes they show themselves to the other guests of the Torture Garden and to the photographer. Others have recreated their bodies with tattoos and other additions, omissions and modifications. The body is no longer the authentic and unchanging starting point where you drape clothing on; even the shape of the body has become fashion and culture.

Self-evidently you can admire many different types of leather in this fetish scene, but like the dress code implicates, glamour and fantasy are just as important. There should be clubs in many more places around the world with the same artsy qualities and without the old-fashioned dress codes that call for costly leather, uniforms, or rubber clothes. It has often been proposed to focus sex less on the anal stuff and displace it to other, often more exciting and usually safer positions. This goes for leather, rubber, and uniforms as well. Doing the same thing gets boring after a while. Why are there no clubs where the space and content are constantly renewed and widening instead of the perpetual repetitions of the leather scene? You will find pictures in the album in monk’s habits, hauberk, and fish net clothing. Some of it actually fits more with the SM scene than leather. Why does leather always have to be black in the gay leather scene and are the red color of blood, the green of grass or the white of innocence only to be found in the straight scene? The mad part is that fur, genuine or imitation, is totally absent from the Torture Garden. A hundred years ago, SM was unthinkable without fur, thanks to the novel Venus im Pfelz (Venus in Fur) by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the man who gave masochism its name. These days fur has completely disappeared.

The Torture garden shows a way to renew the kinky scene in genuinely queer directions. Sexual preference or gender is no longer a criterion for visiting the club, which leaves room for gender- and sexual passion beyond the normal stances. In the album it does not say whether the strange world of the Torture Garden works sexually, or whether sexual desires are gratified. We are still in London, honey! In England sex with more than two people at one time is prohibited even in the private world. One more reason for other places to give it a try. See www.torturegarden.com

Touching

Toucheurism is the excitement of being touched. The best-known form is to rub up against others in an overcrowded train. Subtler is touching sensitive or erogenous areas such as genitals, anus, lips, tongue, earlobes, nose, neck, soles of the feet. Most people have their own special, highly sensitive and stimulating spots. Some people get their greatest satisfaction when their most sensitive parts, which are not necessarily their private parts, are fondled. Touching can be done with fingers, toes, a prickly beard, hair, tongue, or nose; also with a whip or feather duster. It can go soft and hard by tickling and beating.

Toys

Nature offers cheap SM queens a number of fun toys that cost next to nothing. You can tie your slave to a tree with hemp and flog him with twigs or nettles. In places where the upkeep of pollard willows has been neglected, you have a chance to make a whip of their twigs for free. These are so strong and yet flexible that street sweepers and every trueborn sadomasochist like them best. Cheap toys such as rope, clothespins or brushes are available in supermarkets and hardware shops. Animal shops offer dog cages at acceptable prices. An old t-shirt can serve as a blindfold, a leather belt for a whip. The most specialized and expensive toys for sex games are for sale in leather shops where everything from needles and kinky porn, bondage material and whips, to the various kinds of fetish clothing and cages and torture tables is on offer.

Train sex

An extremely complicated word for train sex is siderodromophilia. Especially in the old days, when each compartment had its own door to the outside and the conductor could only get from one coupé to the other by way of the footboard, a half-full train was an ideal spot for having sex. The roar of the wheels on the track offered a pleasant background rhythm, the feeling of movement added to the erotic pleasure, and the thought of being seen by people outside heightened exhibitionistic fun. In contemporary trains toilets are a fun place for sex, especially the super-large ones in the German IC trains, where you can organize an orgy for ten. An exhibitionist once said he wanted to flash his dick at every station in Holland, like those queens who want to have sex everywhere, not just in trains, but also in planes, buses, trams, the opera, town halls, elevators, parks, barracks, prisons, convents, churches and their towers, schools, factories and so on and on. These can hardly be called siderodromophiles, rather they are pluri-loci-libido-philes.

Transgender

All men and women have their masculine and feminine sides, so we are all in a way transgender: mixtures of masculine and feminine. But the real transgenders oppose this way of thinking because they consider their transgender identities, however flexible they may be, as different from the male and female identities that most cisgender people hang onto. Another problem is the question of exactly what male and female, masculine and feminine, mean. Transgender comes in many forms: transsexuals, transvestites, tomboys, sissies, and whatever. It sometimes leads to border battles about who really belongs.

Nowadays there are many interesting studies on gender and transgender themes. Thomas Laqueur states in Making Sex (1990) that in Western Europe since the late eighteenth century, medical men made a clear distinction between male and female. Before, they only recognized one sex, the male, of which the female was a minor variation, the female sex parts being turned inwards instead of outwards. Then, women were as sexual as men, perhaps even more. But at the time of the French Revolution, genders changed and men became seen as sexual and women asexual or chaste beings. Hermaphrodites, once a recognized intermediate sex, were allowed to choose one gender or the other at adulthood, but in the nineteenth century having both sexes made them into biological monsters that had to be changed. Doctors made them male or female, so instead of being hermaphrodites they became pseudo-hermaphrodites or, in modern parlance, intersexuals. Notwithstanding this medical tyranny, physicians still cannot answer the question of what makes a man or a woman. As Laqueur notes, because what we see in gender is more a question of culture than nature.

In spite of lacking an answer to this crucial question, society continues to believe in the sex dichotomy and official records only acknowledge men and women, and no third sexers. Toilets, registration papers, clothes, passports, the sex world, in fact most of society, produce and reproduce the sex dichotomy. Boys and girls are strictly educated to become men and women because of fear that boys and girls might turn out differently later in life. Transsexuals are a good example of what can happen to those who blur the lines. The social construction of only two sexes is, of course, fundamental to the straight structure of society.

One of the greatest wonders of sex medicine was achieved when transsexual operations became possible. Since the 1920s surgeons have experimented with sex changes, and the Netherlands had its first operation in 1960. Now the Gender Team of Amsterdam’s Free University handles these sex changes. This operation was a first blow against the strict sex dichotomy, although some people rather thought this was its ultimate confirmation. The Dutch consensus democracy in 1978 made it legal to change sex and the costs were paid by health insurance. The first step allowed people with male bodies who felt they were in fact women, to become real women; transsexual women experienced the reverse. Now other persons who are not comfortable in either sex have come forward: drag queens and kings, sissies and tomboys, and many other transgenders. There is now a broad spectrum of sexes beyond male and female; society is not very welcoming to them, but they exist and have created their own organizations and movements.

It is an open question, whether men who are masculine and women who are feminine and follow the social gender norms, feel entirely happy with their learned gender. I am afraid not all of them do because there is a lot of competition in and between both genders. Men and women both have to prove their gender repeatedly, and a lot of rivalry goes with this. The struggle to prove one is a real man or woman occurs in all kinds of everyday situations. Many men and women give up very quickly in this race, men because they are not strong or straight enough; women because they are not shapely or compliant enough to fit the gender stereotypes set by society. They can always emphasize a smaller part of their gender by growing beards, wearing more make-up, driving faster cars, raising nice children.

Neither the winners nor the losers in this gender competition can deal easily with jokes about gender identities because it is such a sensitive topic. We all know the excuses made by sportsmen who have performed badly: it is never due to their lack of manliness, but to an off day, the wrong shoes, their mates, a hangover. Men and women never find their gender position in life right away, which is similar to what so many authors say about transsexuals. Above all, men will do their utmost to hide their feminine side. They are constantly walking on eggshells because of the subtle differences between masculine and feminine, fearful that if they do show their sensitive side, they will be put through the wringer by their macho friends.

Many times I have observed that satin clothes make men unsure of themselves. Most men still think of satin as a sensual feminine fabric. The purchase and wearing of such clothing is not very different from the feeling men get when they are buying female clothing: they would rather abstain. Out of fear of being labeled as faggots, they avoid sensual satin and choose rough jeans instead. It is one more example of the restrictions created by our rigid gender system.

Transsexual operations have reached a milestone in opening up the absolute sex divide. Since 1978, it has been possible in the Netherlands to change one’s birth certificate after a successful operation, so transsexuals who met all the physical and psychological requirements could change their sex quite easily, but the female reproductive organs must be removed to avoid the possibility that a man might bear a child. In the past, transsexuals had to divorce to avoid same-sex marriage, but that restriction has been lifted. In 2014, the obligation to have an operation has been abolished to respect the physical integrity of trans people. Now an interview with a physician or psychologist will do for a change of sex. But probably better to completely do away with the gender dichotomy!

The Gender Team is to be congratulated for all its work and struggle. They have taken the first steps toward a plurigendered society. How can we proceed to an even more polygendered situation? Given the growing criticism of the coercive and normative gender-dichotomy, it seems sensible to get rid of it, as suggested by Inez Orobio de Castro in her Making Gender: Sex/gender in transsexual perspective (Amsterdam 1993). How many problems would disappear? Intersexes and gender dysphoria would change from pathological to normal. Same-sex marriage would no longer be a political theme. Transsexuals would not have to follow the strict rules of an operation and transgenders could have partial operations to get rid of their balls but keep their dicks. One day it could be that a man can bear a child and a woman can pee standing up. For the Gender Team and its colleagues there is much more work. It is a nice idea but there remain some important problems, for when there is no register of men and women, we have more difficulty in determining and also opposing social discrimination against women. It could well be that men will do their utmost to prove their masculinity now that the bureaucratic evidence is missing.

In Holland there is always the problem of cost and who should be responsible for the bill. Taking away the sex system saves a lot of money in the long run. Rooms for changing clothing and toilets would not have to be separate. Perhaps the costs of transsexual operations should not be paid by the national health insurance, but by the transsexuals themselves. Fetishists and transgenders also have to pay for their own objects of desire, just like people who desire piercings, body manipulations or plastic surgery.

My conclusion is simple but I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime: let thousands of sexes and genders bloom from pure man to pure woman and every step between and beyond. The many sexes and genders will be a “Fundgrube” for perverts who will love all the gender masks, from the supervirile to the unmasculine. More variation means more desires, not only for men who are men, but also for men who look like women, who do their best to be women, who want to be as unmasculine as possible, for women who look like men, who have become men, even those who like to humiliate men by making them women. A US magazine, Forced Womanhood, specializes in men who like to be forced by women to become she-males. They are trained to be women and have to look like women, wearing high heels, corsets, sexy underwear, using whips, cages and bondage, and taking hormones to grow breasts. They may keep their genitals but they are bound up so that no sex is possible. Chastity is their destiny. These men are moreover coerced to suck dicks and lick cunts. Favorite headlines go along lines of “Lesbians turn man into their she-male slave,” or “Are you man enough to be a woman?” I leave it to the reader to consider all the other possibilities and variations (Laqueur 1990). See She-males, Unmasculinity

Travel sex

For many people nothing is so sexy as sex far away. This is called travel sex or hodophilia. In past centuries gay men willingly traveled, because abroad they did not have the burden of kin, friends, and neighbors who must not know about their pederastic or sodomitical interests. France and Italy offered them shelter, but they always went further south, to Taormina, Tunis, Tangier, and Thailand. They came in droves to get their rocks off while they sent letters home about beautiful landscapes.

Many of the men who “discovered” the world for the Western imagination were homo-erotically inclined. Good-looking young men who acted as their guides, servants, and secretaries often surrounded the soldiers and explorers who set out for Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Alexander von Humboldt, Henri Stanley, Richard Burton, Pierre Loti, Hector MacDonald, Nicholas Przewalski, Roger Casement, Cecil Rhodes, André Gide, T.E. Lawrence, Hubert Lyautey, and Wilfried Thesiger were such men. For some, their most important discoveries outside Europe were homosexual pleasures forbidden at home. In fact, the discovery of their indulgences cost two of these men their lives: General MacDonald “saved” his honor by committing suicide, and the British government refrained from reprieving Casement’s death penalty for treason after they discovered his extensive homoerotic “black diaries” of encounters in Brazil and elsewhere.

At present gay men travel above all due to lust for the exotic. They want variation and find it most easily far away from their own beds. A friend of mine says he only feels he has really been in a foreign country if he has seen the sperm of a local guy. Poor beggars can take care of their travel madness at home when they live in destinations like London, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, or Bangkok, where they can enjoy all the tourists who visit the local bars. Amsterdam has an extra attraction with gay marriage. The Amsterdam queer interested in exotics whispers to his beloved, “Let me make you merry and marry you.” There are more gay boys in the world who dream of marriage with a Dutch queen than there are single gays in the Netherlands.

The list of gay travel destinations is growing every year. In the USA, resorts like Key West, Palm Springs, Russian River, Provincetown, and Long Island have gained a gay reputation while Sitges, Mykonos, and Gran Canaria in Europe have also seen this development. Istanbul and Bali have longstanding prestige as gay places. Tunis, Tangier, and Baghdad have lost some of their homosexual fame, but Capetown, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Philippines have got more. The adventurous queer now continues to Saigon, Madras, Mumbai, Shanghai, Bahia or some places further off. Robert Aldrich (2003) wrote about the gay grand tour of the past and colonial homosexualities; other people about the pleasures of Paris, Capri, Tangier, Bangkok, and Provincetown. When it comes to lesbian women, the main sexual tourist destination they can claim is Lesbos. Most gay capitals offer a small corner for them. Perhaps it is better to look for lesbians in the main places for walking tourism – a main pastime for this group. Gay men, on the contrary, don’t want to walk to find sex partners, they want to find them on the spot,

Heterosexual sex tourist destinations are as abundant as for gay men. Straight men go to Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, Bali, Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, the Caribbean for sexy or submissive sex workers and lovers whereas women visit Tunisia, West- and East Africa (Senegal, Gambia, Kenya and so on) and also the Caribbean for sex and romance. Some Western places have quite a reputation for their Red Light districts or other forms of sex work (Las Vegas, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, Odessa, Istanbul). In the male straight version there are a substantial number of transsexual sex workers and she/males, that always raises the question about the sexual orientation of the clients who most often claim to be heterosexual.

Triangulation

Not a very queer perversion is triangulation. It is mainly for hetero-men who don't dare to sleep together, but do so with each other's girlfriends. They fuck their friend, as it were, by way of the vagina of his girlfriend or wife. Cuntbrothers they call them, like the German playwright Bertolt Brecht who slept with the girlfriends of his best friend. In her book Between Men (1985), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the triangulation of men experiencing the taboo of not being able to have sex with each other, who find release by sharing their sheets with the best (girl)friend or wife of their beloved boyfriend, meanwhile interviewing the intermediary woman about their friend's size, performance, and other intimate qualities.

Trio-sex

Troilism or trio-sex is an erotic variation with a threesome; quartets of course come in fours. These are sexual variations rather than perversions. See Duo-sex

Trisexuality

The same goes for trisexuality, under which heading come almost all bisexuals. This word stands for the combination of homo-, hetero- and monosexuality. Trisexuals are people who like their own gender as well as the other and moreover enjoy playing with themselves. But what do we call the gay or straight who is addicted to monosexuality as well? Are they the real bisexuals?

Twin sex

Some people get off on twins. A leading Dutch psychiatrist was married to one of a pair of identical twins while the other half lived in the couple’s household. The husband and the twins liked to confuse their guests about who was the wife and who was the sister-in-law. The man was later prosecuted for sex with male minors, so he really loved variation. Once I interviewed a couple of gay men who both had my first name, which awakened my desires (or theirs?). Twin sex? In the gay scene the idea of having sex with a preferably identical twin is a sweet dream. Imagine them bound together in front of a mirror to double your happiness and luck.

Underwear

Among men of all sexual inclinations, underwear, in particular used and filthy examples, is sometimes popular to such an extent that they will steal it, break into locker rooms, or simply buy it at their local sex shop. The last, to my knowledge, is only possible in Japan for straight customers who buy the used underwear of high school girls, who make some profit without much effort by this means. Among gay men, underwear is so popular that many disco boys like to show it, especially their fashionable Calvin Kleins, D&Gs, Paul Smiths, or Versacis, while other guys prefer to visit special underwear parties. They would rather see the covering of the family jewels than to have immediate visual access to them. Or they like to be surprised by the contents of underwear. The love for underwear has many variations. Some men like boxer shorts, others briefs or jocks, while soccer and runner shorts by Adidas, Nike, or Umbro are part and parcel of sport sex. Swimming trunks again are another chapter, mixed up with undinism. Many youngsters have taken to showing the string with the brand name of their underwear sticking out above their jeans. It is more a fashion than a kinky statement, something I never understood.

Undinism

Water sex is undinism. This can be in a bathtub, a swimming pool, or in the sea. In the past, the website of Score FC showed a picture of a guy tied up and obviously immersed in water, a form of undinistic masochism with a hint of hypoxyphilia (lust for lack of oxygen). Some men cum while swimming and most men have tried at one time or another to jerk off under water. I think it merely takes more time, but then I am not undinistically inclined. At Gay Swim (an Amsterdam swimming club), I believe, they have sex less in than out of the water, so this is not the ideal club for homosexual undinists.

Unisexual

Another word for uranian or homosexual is unisexual. The poet Marc-André Raffalovich went public with this word in his 1895 study, Uranisme et unisexualité (Uranism and unisexuality).

Unmasculine

Most gay men have faced the accusation of being effeminate. Unmasculinity again is something entirely different from effeminacy. An unmasculine queen is a faggot refusing to be a man, without opting right away for a female position. Feminine men or men who want to be women, in a certain sense confirm the difference between the sexes, while non-masculine men could hardly care less for the he-man display of leather faggots and the feminine gestures of pansies and travestites. They occupy a territory between masculine and feminine, or put differently, transgress that area by overruling common sexual norms. Such unmanly boys are my dream princes. Some people suffer from men-madness, so shall we call the love of unmasculine boys and men the unmanly-men-madness? See Transgender

Uranian

The words uranian and uranism (English translation of the original “urning”) go back to 1864 and come from Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, recently called “the first faggot in history.” His formula for homosexuals was “female souls in male bodies”. This jurist and Latinist thought up uranian for “third sexers” and other terms such as uranodionism for bisexuality and urinast for a temporary homosexual. Ulrichs got the idea and its derivatives from the Goddess Urania, the “heavenly” protectress of boy love. Dionian and dionism come from the “earthly” Venus, her other side, Goddess of “normal” eroticism, and refer to heterosexuality. A urinast is a hetero doing it with men for want of “better” (women).

A concurrent but separate tradition, that of the Uranian poets, evolved in late Victorian England and the United States. It had little in common with the German school, as the members celebrated love across age divides, and rejected anything faggy or effeminate.

Urinal

Movie man John Greyson wrote the funny play Urinal (1992). Known as tearoom, pissoir, public toilet, cottage, vespasienne in French, pisbak in Dutch, Klappe in German, it is a dream palace for gay cruisers. It offers all kinds of sexual possibilities but regrettably because of the risk of interruption by the police or unfriendly people, many things cannot so easily be acted out. It is the best place for exhibitionists and voyeurs, for people who like the smell of piss or love golden showers, and for men who are into jerking off alone or with someone else. Also for those who get a thrill from the hidden dangers of the urinal. The pissoir has been a place much discussed in gay literature. The Dutch poet Karel van Reym (pseudonym of E.B. de Bruyn) devoted a poem to this Templum amoris (1980; Temple of love) and the German Felix Rexhausen collected his gay novellas under the title Die Märchenklappe (Berlin 1982; The fairy cottage). Laud Humpreys started his sociological career with an epoch-making book, Tearoom Trade (Chicago, 1970) which is a detailed study of gay sex at one public toilet and the men who visit it – mainly conservative married men at that time. For most visitors to public urinals this was a quick way for getting relief, a bit like men visiting dark rooms nowadays. The same goes for many sexual variations: what to some is a side dish, for others is the main course. Unfortunately for men who are turned on by public urinals, most of them have been taken away, and in the few that remain, homosexual practices have also vanished.

Claude Maillard offers with his Les precieux edicules (Paris 1967; “The Precious Little Buildings;” or alternatively, “Temples”) a nice architectural and social history of Les vespasiennes de Paris, the city that had the richest collection of pissoirs and urophiles.

Urophilia

One of many words for piss sex is urophilia. We dealt with this theme under golden rain or golden shower. Other expressions are urolagnia and rénifler, which is French for sniffing, in this case piss. For some men urinal sex is a form of piss sex, because the stench of urinals turns them on.

Urtication is a complicated word for nettle sex. Beating with nettles causes pain and so belongs under sadism. See stinging nettle.

Vaginal-masturbation

A weird expression for a man who fucks women, but does not get turned on by them or by this type of sex, is vaginal-masturbator. He gets excited instead by sexual fantasies that have nothing to do with the woman with whom he is having intercourse. This can be the same for a gay man who marries a woman, but most of the time these blokes are straight guys who feel obliged to fuck, but would prefer another woman or would like other action. I would not be surprised to learn that most heterosexual actions are actually vaginal-masturbation. Anal masturbation never made it to similar renown.

Vampirism

Sucking blood from someone else is vampirism. It often stands as a symbol for sex. Some people surrender to somebody else, others steal love and sex. The bloodsucking of vampires is a symbol of forced sex. Most vampires in literary history, like Count Dracula, have homosexual inclinations. Two birds with one stone for gay bashers: vampirism stood for gay behavior and at the same time lent it a negative connotation. To make matters worse, male vampires were often after boys. The addition of cruelty to lust, which characterized vampires in earlier days, now describes pedophiles. The girl-filled cellars of Mr. Dutroux are a contemporary variation on the castles of Count Dracula, Bluebeard, and Gilles de Rais.

Virginity

To be deflowered sounds rather unmanly, but in the world of unmanly men and unmanly-man-madness this is seen as nonsense. Defloration means taking away the virginity of girls who are not supposed to have sex yet. Some guys in gay circles like nothing better than deflowering boys’ asses. In this way they are stuck in the sexual baloney that only men who “rob girls or boys of their sexual innocence” are “real men.” And the deflowered girls and boys become “sluts,” having “lost their honor” through stupidity or cupidity. The first sexual experience is the beginning of a life of pleasure, it is not something bad or horrible for girls or boys; neither is deflowering such youngsters something to be proud of, unless you are a good teacher and show them how to have fun. For a long time men believed they could get rid of venereal diseases by deflowering innocent girls and boys. Nonsense. Even in recent times since the arrival of aids, virginal boys and girls have been raped by men who believed their hiv status could be cured that way. That their therapy endangered these poor children was none of their concern. The best would be to forget as soon as possible about chastity, virginity, and deflowering as special events. The first time people have sex is in most cases not very pleasurable because they know nothing. They have to learn it all and that is not always easy. So better move on beyond the virginal status!

Voyeurism

The reverse of exhibitionism is voyeurism. Hidden in every faggot you will find a voyeur. Who does not enjoy watching cute boys or a male sex jumble in a dark room? The voyeur of old was a dirty man, peeping in the dark, but nowadays city life offers so many erotic images that you must be blind not to become a voyeur. With terrace peeking and disco watching, voyeurism has gained some exciting modern variations, like the old-fashioned flashing that developed into the modern exhibitionism of leather queens and fools for fashion, enlivening our urban landscape. Politicians, harping on the themes of corruption and pornification, unfortunately are not only talking about gum, piss, or dirt in the streets, but also mean transvestites, leather guys with naked buns, or cruising queens. Some only see evil rather than fun in the game of watching and being watched.

Webcam sex

The web is an aid to sexual encounters and not a paraphilia in itself, unless one becomes addicted to the slow imagery and dragging internet conversations. Or to the clumsy moves to focus the webcam on the right spot, to the request of lurkers to point the camera a little lower or on the ass. We cannot speak of web sex until the mere sight of your computer screen induces excitement. See also Cyber- and Internet sex.

Weight sex

Weight is not only about too many pounds on your body, but also refers to a subdivision of bondage. You can hang up your beloved so that the sheer weight of his own body will cause him pain. A much more common practice is to hang heavy items from dicks, scrotums, or tits. Commonly used are weights, boots, or steel objects. Stupid things like teapots, pans, or keyboards can be even more exciting because they also humiliate the hangee.

Wet sex

For the love of wet clothes there are nowadays special disco nights. Soaking clothes that cling to the body reveal its shapes wonderfully. People who prefer shiny clothes enjoy them even more when wetness adds extra luster to the attire. Jeans, by the way, have been seen lately in a “wet” look. In the Netherlands, someone founded a club, “WackyWet,” for gay men interested in wet clothes. To my regret, in an interview for the Gay Krant (July 2000) he stressed that this is “completely normal” and that his preference has nothing to do with sex or fetishism. Let’s hope that other wacky wet gays are less restrained in their fetish love and join his club. The article was illustrated with a titillating photo of a wetboy who describes himself as fun, slim, athletic, and good looking. You can dream up for yourself how you would like your wet sex with him.

Windlust

Respectable words for windlust are flatulence or eproctophilia. In earlier days there were showmen who turned passing wind into an art and made music with it, the “petomanes.” There is a shelf of books on their specialty. I get the impression that the largely asexual windlust in the contemporary world has lost out to golden shower and scat. The true aficionado sticks his nose into his lover’s asshole and feeds the beloved with lots of beans so he is able to produce a series of stinking blasts. Do not light a match though, for farts are just as flammable as the gas of your stove.

Wrestling

Wrestling, in general, is a gay unfriendly sport, for the men who are fighting so intimately with each other in no way want to be seen as gay. Because wrestling is so homoerotic, gays do like it. The Dutch gay sports organization Tijgertje (little tiger) offers wrestling instruction and the Turkish wrestling championships draw a large gay crowd who enjoy watching well-oiled men scuffling in the mud. For other men, wrestling is a symbol for sex or a form of sexual pleasure. For them, the wrestling twists are essential foreplay for a sweaty fuck, or an SM relationship in which the loser surrenders sexually to the victor.

Xenophilia

The words xenophilia and allophilia stand for sex with strangers. In allophilia it is mainly about ethnic difference like black and white, in xenophilia it is about a preference for meeting with strangers. The gay world has lot of xenophiles who prefer having sex with a stranger they will never meet again rather than with their beloved. Right they are, since sex with strangers offers possibilities undreamed of with a lover. For most people the best sex is xenosex. It could be a remedy for xenophobia and racism.

Yankee love

The love of foreigners for the USA is called Yankee love. Most of the people who live outside the USA and who suffer from such love, will probably also indulge in Yankee hatred because they are not allowed into fortress America. The kinky people who love Yankees should know how puritanical most of the US and its citizens are. Regrettably, many places in this world do not lag far behind “the evil empire” when it comes to puritanism. The advantage of the USA is that at least it has a visible queer and kinky world.

Zelophilia

The weird expression zelophilia stands for the excitement inspired by jealousy. If you have a friend who gets a haze over his eyes when you are making a jealous scene, be sure he is not a zelophile. Otherwise, you can rest assured such outbursts will happen time and again because your lover needs these for his turn on. Zelophilia creates impossible situations. As long as you do not know that your beloved enjoys jealous scenes, they will keep spoiling your fun. As soon as you understand it, quarrels end and you have lost your lover who cannot love without such conflicts. So people who are turned on by jealousy and can have their way with it are probably far and few between because they keep changing partners and making them unhappy so they can maintain their zelophile habit. People who allow their zelophile beloveds to prod them into jealous scenes are dummies who think love and possession are interchangeable.

Zoömimetophilia

The difficult word for the desire to be treated like an animal such as a dog, horse, or cow, is zoömimetophilia. Stables, cages, dog and cat boxes, pig and dog masks and the like are part of it. Dog training is a variation of slave training. See also Bestiality.

Zoophilia is love for animals. See Bestiality.

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