The Peter in Context

Originally Posted Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Has this ever happened to you?  You're talking about penises with gay men and suddenly you don't know what you are talking about?  I was at lunch with a group from work the other day.  One of the new bosses is gay and the group were his friends.  One of the women who is going to San Francisco for a conference with him this week said about the hotel where they will be staying, "On Sunday they have a drag brunch."  I wasn't sure if this was a test or pandering or true excitement, and I said simply, "San Francisco.  Who knew?"  Then I began to tell a story. 

When I got married twenty-one years ago, gays lived in an America that was much more openly hostile to. . . what the fuck am I telling you?  I sound like I'm writing a study.  My wife and I flew to San Francisco the day after our wedding to begin a wonderfully long three week honeymoon.  Driving in from the San Francisco airport, we got off the interstate somewhere near the Castro neighborhood and the street was blocked off for a Gay Something Parade.  Liberation/Awareness?  Whatever.  They didn't have parades like this in our own hometown, and when a group of the guys came walking by naked as could be, my new wife looked at me and said, "Wow.  I've never seen so many dicks in my life."  Always the clever boy, I looked her over and said, "Good to hear." 

This was the story I told at lunch with my co-workers.  Thing is, I was struck by the multiple meanings of "dicks" here.  I mean suddenly hetero and homo dicks seemed like different organs.  My wife looking at gay men's dicks. . . well, it didn't seem to have the right impact. 

I won't recount the conversation I had with a gay friend (Jesus that sounds pandering) about anal sex.  He's a topper and took umbrage about me telling him the subtleties of it.  He was pissed. 

"What?  You think you own that, motherfucker?"

Right away, of course, even words like "motherfucker" didn't make the same sense.  I wondered about Freud.  Did my buddy have the same Oedipus complex growing up as I was supposed to?  I don't want to suggest he had an Electra complex for I don't know much about it.  I will ask him next time we are at lunch, though.  I am the type to do it.

The lunch conversation, however, had me thinking about dicks, not something I do very much but what the hell, right?  I was thinking about the punchline of my story, really.  It used to be considered a good thing if your wife hadn't "seen" so many dicks.  At least the joke used to be funnier.  It doesn't seem so funny now, somehow.  We live in an age of veracious sexual appetites.  Everyone is at the table to eat.  I was talking with a twenty-five year old woman I had shot in the studio the other night who was telling me about girls she knew who used to put ruffies in guys drinks so they could rape them. 

"What?  That can't work," I said.  "How can they get it up?"

"I've seen it," she said.  "I've walked in on three girls who were taking turns fucking a guy passed out in bed." 

"Why would they have to drug him?  That just doesn't make any sense to me." 

The thing is, I imagine most of the women who read this blog have been much more sexually active than I have in my life.  I am a sweet, romantic type who once complained that a woman I knew could only sneak away and see me occasionally and that I didn't get to take her out for drinks and to dinner, etc.     When I cried my complaint to a buddy, he said, "Wait a minute.  Let me get this straight.  You are sad because you have a beautiful woman who is willing to come see you and then leave and you don't have to spend money on her? Right?  Let me tell you about the rest of America." 

I thought of the old line, "Man, she always looked so good walking away." 

I told Q about this, and he understood my thinking.  "We are romantics," he said.  "We've read books and want it to be that way."  And it is true.  But I've read books about strong and interesting women, and no matter the era, they had strong sexual appetites.  So why is it, then, that when a lover tells me of her sexual explorations, I feel so. . . . I'll leave it to the women who read this blog to fill in the ellipses.  I am anxious to hear the take on this one. 

You can see by today's picture, though, and it is easier if you click on it to enlarge it, that they make men line up according to size.  See?  I can hear it just before they joined the parade. 

"O.K. everybody, we've got to line up now according to size.  Joe, you get in the front.  No, no, no, man, you, you get back there." 

Well, that's enough thinking about dicks this week.  I will research the semiotics of the word "penis" and the difference between heteropenis and homopenis.  If there isn't anything out there, I will write a paper and submit it to the Modern Language Association. 

You gotta be famous for something.