Disinformation Book of Lists (22 page)

+ Sex

 

1

“Priapeum” by Virgil

Ancient Rome's greatest poet, the author of the epic
Aeneid
, also wrote the poem “Priapeum,” in which he chastises his limp dick: “Goodbye, I am forsaken, wretched cock.” He laments that no “tender boy” or “jolly girl” (it's a British translation) will have anything to do with him, although—for reasons not made clear—he can get it up for an ancient crone with icy skin and cobwebs around her pussy. Pretty racy for the first century BC.

2

Historia de duobus amantibus
(a/k/a
The Goodli History)
by Pope Pius II

I covered this forgotten gem in my previous book,
50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know
, much to the delight of interviewers who loved telling their audiences about a fifteenth-century bodice-ripper written by a man who would soon be Pope. For a book written in 1444 (and published 44 years later), the action is pretty shocking, though not to us jaded members of the twenty-first century. “O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my arms?…O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I am, or more blessed.”

3

Les Bijoux Indiscrets
by Denis Diderot

Philosopher Diderot is known to history as a lynchpin of the Enlightenment. For a dozen years, he edited the monumental
Encyclopedie
, which sought to codify and expand all knowledge at the time. Voltaire and Rousseau were among the contributors. But before helping turbocharge scientific and literary progress in the West, Diderot spent two weeks writing a sexy little book,
Les Bijoux Indiscrets
(1748). Being a French genius, he couldn't resist adding literary criticism and political satire to this tale of a Turkish sultan who magically discovers the sexual histories of the ladies in his court. An alleged version was published in English in 1968 (as
The Talking Pussy
), but it was much different than the original.

4

White Stains
and other works by Aleister Crowley

Maybe it's not too surprising that occultist Aleister Crowley—“the wickedest man in the world”—wrote a book of unapologetically filthy poetry, but his main claim to fame is his numerous writings on magick. In 1898, he published
White Stains
, brimming with his raunchy, sacrilegious verse involving necrophilia, bestiality, golden showers, shit, STDs, Jesus, and menstruation (“How my dry throat, held hard between thy hips, / Shall drain the moon-wrought flow of womanhood!”). The poems even have their moments of strange beauty, as in “Abysmos,” when the narrator laments that he will never again “bite her lips, as once my teeth / Met in her cheek, to cull a rosy wreath.”

The year 1904 saw the publication of Crowley's
Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden
, about which he later wrote: “My object is not merely to disgust but to root out ruthlessly the sense of sin.” It's self-consciously over-the-top, a humorous attempt to massacre every taboo in sight. In describing his adventurous past, the Archbishop says:

At the great Gold Medal competition of the Spunk Society in 1904, I was able to satisfy no less than twenty-seven ladies, besides an exhibition frig in which I extinguished fourteen candles in sixteen attempts, thus taking the eighth prize, and special mention as the sole representative of my cloth who was able to support a child weighing fifty-six pounds on my erect lance-of-love alone, and thus accomplishing the act of sex with my hands tied behind my back. Poor little devil!

In 1910, Crowley—using the pseudonym Major Luity—published
The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz
(a/k/a
Bagh-i-Muattar
). It was presented as a volume of Arabic poetry translated by Luity, when actually Crowley wrote all the verse. It's unabashedly homoerotic, as in “The Love-Potion”:

If Suleiman with all his concubines From dusk to dawn consecutively lay,

Yet at thy buttocks' velvet, O Habib, The man would rise erect from mudded clay.

Elsewhere, Crowley published “Leah Sublime,” 26 verses in which he spits filthy commands at his degraded and degrading lover:

Stab your demonical
Smile to my brain!
Soak me in cognac
Cunt and cocaine;
Sprawl on me! Sit
On my mouth, Leah, shit!

As poetry, it's not the greatest, but it works as erotica mainly because Crowley just didn't give a rat's ass about any kind of propriety or correctness.

5

Various novels by Robert Silverberg

Here we have the first of many science fiction giants who took pen and penis in hand to write one-handed material. The prolific winner of five Nebula awards and five Hugos, while trying to make ends meet, cranked out almost
200
erotic pulp and stroke novels, almost all between 1960 and 1967. He most often used the name Don Elliot when speed-writing such nuggets as
The Bra Peddlers, A Change for the Bedder, Cousin Lover, Dial O-R-G-Y, Dyke Diary, Les Floozies, Kept Man, Love Bums, The Orgy Boys, Sex-teen, Till Love Do Us Part
, and 26 titles beginning with the word
Sin.

During this time, Silverberg also wrote sixteen nonfiction books about sex under various pseudonyms. Titles include
90% of What You Know About Sex Is Wrong, I Am a Nymphomaniac, Sex and the Armed Forces
, and
Virgin Wives.

6
  
7

Image of the Beast
and
Blown
by Philip José Farmer

Farmer is one of the big names of science fiction. His best-known works are two series:
Riverworld
and
World of Tiers.
Besides having won three Hugo awards and one Nebula (the Grand Master Award), Farmer is credited with introducing sex into science fiction in 1960-61 with
Flesh, A Woman a Day
, and
The Lovers
, all of which are extraordinarily tame by today's standards. What's not tame—and probably never will be viewed as such—are the erotic SF/horror books that he wrote in the late 1960s.

Image of the Beast
was the first of these, opening with a scene that will live in infamy: Police are watching a homemade film that was anonymously mailed to them. In it, one of their detectives, tied down, has his cock bitten off by a woman with razor-sharp metal teeth. The penisless man's detective partner, Herald Childe, determines to find the people responsible for gruesomely killing his partner. It turns out that they're a bunch of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other strange beings. Really strange.

In one of the most memorable scenes, Childe is in a secret passageway of the mansion that serves as the headquarters for the weirdos. Looking through a one-way mirror, he spies the incredibly beautiful Vivienne masturbating. But then “a tiny thing, like a slender white tongue, spurted from the slit. It was not a tongue. It was more like a snake or an eel.” This long, thin creature with smooth, white skin lives in the woman's womb and comes out during sexual activity. Its head, the size of a golfball, “was bald except for a fringe of oil-plastered black hair around the tiny ears. It had two thin but wet-black eyebrows and a wet black Mephistophelean moustache and beard.” The vagina-snake with a man's face puts its head in the woman's open mouth, sliding in and out. The woman appears to have a long, violent orgasm, and the strange being withdraws, with a “thick whitish fluid” leaking from its mouth. It then retreats back into the woman's womb.

In the sequel,
Blown
, we find out that the various beings are two groups of aliens stranded on earth. One faction draws its power from sex, the other from blood. Childe, it just so happens, is the only person who can get the space creatures back to their home world by drawing on his sexual energy. He takes part in an orgy with the aliens, and while Vivienne is blowing him, another man yanks the pseudosnake out of her vagina:

Vivienne fell apart.

Childe stood with her head between his hands and his penis in her mouth. The eyes stared up at him with a violet fire, and the lips and tongue kept on sucking and thrusting. The other parts of her body, having gotten onto their legs, began to scuttle around the room. The big black who had been sucked off by Vivienne picked up the many-legged cunt and stuck it on the end of his cock and began sliding it back and forth. The cunt's legs kicked as if it were having an orgasm.

Farmer's two other ventures into weirdcore are
A Feast Unknown
, featuring Tarzan and Doc Savage, and the gothic horror
Love Song.

8

The Gas
by Charles Platt

Platt is a hard guy to pin down. He's written some well-received science fiction, such as
The Silicon Man
, plus a lot of articles on cyber-topics in
Omni, Wired
, and mainstream newspapers. Then there are his numerous interviews with legendary science fiction writers and his
Christina
erotic horror trilogy. Before
Christina
, though, there was
The Gas.
In this outrageous novel from 1970, an experimental biowarfare gas leaks in Southern England, causing people's inhibitions to vaporize and their most primal urges to surge to the forefront. A nonstop carnival of sex, violence, and combinations thereof ensues. Everyone is fair game for the unleashed lust and bloodlust—men, women, children, animals, priests and nuns, corpses, immediate family members, anything….

In one scene, a passing car sputters out, and its driver—a young punk—angrily hops out. Repeatedly screaming “fuck you!” at his ride, he gets an idea. After taking the cap off the gas tank:

He pulled out his prick. “I'll make you fucking go,” he muttered. “Fuck you, fuck this!”

He lunged forward, jamming his prick into the pipe, and started fucking it with crude angry movements. He groaned, spurting jism down into it, whipped his prick out, zipped his jeans up again.

Vincent watched him trudge back to the front of the car, open the door and get in. He started the engine, revved it, drove off down the street and out of sight.

The novel could never be published in its original form today, which is why even bad-boy publisher Loompanics—when reissuing
The Gas
in 1995—cut out a lot of the forbidden sex scenes.

9

The Repentance of Lorraine
by Andrei Codrescu

Those of us used to hearing the highly literate, Romanian-accented thoughts of Andrei Codrescu on National Public Radio might be a little shocked to find out about his porn novel,
The Repentance of Lorraine
(originally published under the pseudonym Ames Claire).

We will, however, be less shocked when we read it and find that the highly accomplished author, poet, and essayist has applied his intellectual power to the task of writing an explicit but psychologically convincing novel about a triad of a male budding writer, a female business student, and a female professor. You don't see much porn peppered with words like “curvilinearly,” “pedagogue,” “petit-bourgeois,” and “Huysmanesque non sequitur.”

Not that it isn't enjoyable. Codrescu is witty and regularly uses memorable turns of phrase: “Colline is virginal, in that sexy French-nun way”; “She exuded sexuality and mystery like an oriental stage set”; while looking at two naked women holding each other: “The view of their two graceful backs, buttocks and legs is my coat of arms.” There's humor throughout, and things get downright hilarious when, while the threesome is in Paris, Lorraine is kidnapped by a left-wing terrorist group, from whom she learns about “the people's orgasm.”

When the writer and the prof have their first encounter: “I unbuttoned the top of her loose garment, and her beautiful breasts bounded into view, her nipples sublimely erect. It is unfortunate, but nature has decreed that one breast must be chosen first over the other. I chose the left. Beginning at the outermost edge, my tongue climbed toward the pink aureole in the middle of which the nipple rose. A flicker of my tongue would set this sheikhdom on fire.”

The narrator comments on the second time all three of them get together: “The frenzy of a bacchanalia seized us. We made love to each other in a timeless furor. This prolonged activity (it was midnight when we finally stopped to order a pizza) brought to the surface the amazing fact of our absolute compatibility. We fit into each other like a three-way lock. Our pleasures fitted together at their jagged edges as described by the Continental Drift Theory.”

Reflecting on the 1973 novel 20 years later, Codrescu said that it was written purely “for money,” yet he didn't want to write a stroke novel. “I felt that sex was transcendental, which is to say, untranslatable. What made the flesh rise was precisely what sank the page.” With its sex scenes far between and too short,
Repentance
is meant more for the cerebrum than the genitalia.