Larry Scott (Paris, Janvier 2013)

“From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs…”

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’

It wasn’t quite an Oscar Wilde opening. He’d kept me waiting in a café on the Boulevard St Germain, which meant icicles and blue extremities and quickly dwindling cigarettes. I’d ordered mulled wine, mostly because I liked the aesthetic. Pre-midday, I sat there plugged into iTunes Verdi, eyes half-closed over some boozy requiem – a pseudointellectual and a pseudoalcoholic.

He arrived with a proposition. An afternoon in his apartment to see the photographs he’d taken – a career evolution to behind the lens. It was motive-laden, but I accepted the offer without pause. I was shallow. I was cigaretted. I thought myself some kind of muse to the celebrated model Larry Scott.

The studio was one he’d borrowed for the week. Housesitting, but there wasn’t a cat to feed. Just weed. And the heady fragrance of vanilla incense hovering in the pages of books that filled the walls, and closed windows, and a neon sign above the computer that said “OPIUM”.  There was a large bed – not the typical futon I’d grown accustomed to in Parisian apartments. And the light in the room constantly flickered, provided by the glow of the computer screen and the languid movement of the word “OPIUM” as it moved from left to right, and the fire-pricked end of my cigarette. He sat in the middle, a picture of Dorian Gray.

He came with a narrative; spoke in long, unbroken sentences, fueled by sadness, as I flipped through old copies of Russian Vogue. He’d grown up in Washington, part of the only white family in a black ghetto. His father was a coke dealer with that sensibility for fashion that comes from pimp nurture. Furs. Colour. Tailoring. Money. And then there was his stepmother who’d molested him. He told me about her trailer trash hands on his twelve-year-old body. Six years later, he’d been model-spotted selling jewellery in a store in California. He had been used by his management and propositioned by gay designers, received innumerable gifts, scored windfalls of cash and done ten-hour shoots without pay. He’d met everybody from Gaultier to Jimi Hendrix and Patrick Demarchelier. He’d become the face of Armani Aqua di Gio. Now he was an icon, and still booking shows.

But everything was a little self-aware. It was as if his stories had been told too many times. Pity stories in want of a pity fuck. Stories laced with names to impress. Don’t know why. He was beautiful enough to have rested on aesthetic laurels.

We did look at his photographs. Many of them were nudes – prostitutes and women he’d seduced, and self-portraits. He’d spliced them against landscapes and images of nature and hoped to print them large enough to cover whole walls. Palm trees and bees, cities and flying machines that carried lines towards and away from his human subjects. They were brilliant; he had an understanding of beauty and grit that was breathtaking. At some point he took me out into the snowy street. I took off my clothes. I kept my hat on, gold, like fucking Nefertiti. He took photographs. I got gangrene. Emotional gangrene. Manufactured in facile rebellion against an American consumer culture that had been eating him for decades, his talk had turned to unceasing sermons about the fashion industry (which he hated) and ‘70s flower power ideals (which he was old enough to have experienced first hand).

Back in the apartment, he massaged my limbs out of entropy and my mind further into it. Hot oil and high-pressure over fourteen cigarettes. And he asked if I would mind if he took his clothes off. I didn’t mind.

Then, it was time for me to leave. He’d begun to wank in the corner. Red lipstick and hats are reason enough for avoiding such situations. He was a visual fantasy that had transgressed the line into the momentarily tactile. And he was grating. He had his own gluten free baking website. Two gluten free narcissists trapped in a European artist’s cliché. I had to get out.

I got a telephone call from Larry Scott two days later. He called me a clown and whined about me leaving lipstick on his Levi’s.

From the corner of the Parisian futon on which I was lying, smoking, as usual, fucking countless cigarettes, I could just catch the gleam of beautiful icicles dripping from my window. 

Larry Scott had a brilliant career and a hard on.

He’ll remember the hard on.
I’ll name drop the career.

My Months as a Marilyn: Instalment III: Richard Westin (June 2012)

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” - Socrates

There is nothing more immoral than putting a bunny in a dryer.

Contrary to the opinion of our favourite Athenian gadfly, seeing pink eyeball ripped from white fur and spun around with the socks, shatters clinical values under the weight of emotion, and visually overwhelms the fading yardstick of principal. And yes, that bunny always appears to be of the motherfucking albino Easter variety, with a generous heart and a couple of lollipop stains on its cotton-tail from the times you hugged it extra hard as a kid.

Richard Westin was the second bunny that made it into the laundry room of my life. This was a space reserved for the special ones – the ones that were a little more fragile, that I liked a little too well. I attempted to keep them clean, and succeeded for a time. Doom smells nicer soaked in OMO.

We met (or should I say, he and Clark met) and casually flirted on Grindr, one cold Monday night in June. Richard was interesting, clever, multilingual. His sweetness was something that one encounters rarely. And so, after a week of conversation, I came clean about my gender. His reaction was slow, but positive, and we decided to meet. A phase of platonic bliss ensued – we walked to work together, sipped local coffee and drew on memories of respective Stonewall nights.

But, as my gay relationships are wont to do, our friendship quickly re-evolved into something more.

By Tuesday, I had kissed him in the alley behind the Wesley Mission lodge. So the mis en scene of our lust, first coloured by a virtual gay networking site, shifted to a drug rehab hub in Surry Hills. It was raining in the city and I was entering an oriental wardrobe phase. The whole of Sydney sought warm beds and closed windows. Everybody was fucking. Very film noir. And I, the femme fatale, hung by my mental washing machine, ever sinister in my domesticity, ever attempting to make this one clean.

Five dates, fourteen bottles of red and too much gay sex later, Richard Westin was beginning to crumble.

I have long reconciled with my particular style of sexuality, but he could not. Fifteen years of gay identity, a particularly difficult ‘coming out’, and an active pre-Clark Grindr lifestyle did not lay strong groundwork for a suddenly-30 bisexual revelation. And then he told me he was in love.

Spun with the sensibilities that only come with upchuck and regret, on the nineteenth day, I unpegged Mr. Westin and spin-cycled him back into a world of men.

There is not only truth to be found in vulgar emotion, but a sound measure of principal. Perhaps our dear Socrates failed in this learning because high-heat spin dryers hadn’t been invented yet. The physical manifestation of an emotional metaphor wrenches us from our clinical logic as we lament those lost, fluffy Easters.

That fortnight with Richard Westin, when it seemed all the world were fucking like pomosexual rabbits and it was not against the moral grain to join in, has thus been challenged.

By a bunny. By a dryer. By an illusion. By an emotion.

My Months as a Marilyn: Instalment II: ‘Adult Themes’ (Sydney, June 2012)

‘Adult Themes’ lived down the street. His pseudonymn fails to do him justice. Half balding, with a forest green pea-cap and a white pair of speedos, he had a proud smile and an enthusiastic personality.

I began the conversation: ”Tony Abbott?”
He replied “You’ve found him here.”
And our romance was seeded atop stained budgie smugglers and bicycle double entendres.

We chatted in earnest for a time. He had been closeted for 54 years, yet his Grindr photograph held no ambiguity, his nom de plume held no desire for anonymity. Typical of an older generation of Grindr-dwellers, he was comfortable in a space that had been designed rather than claimed for him. It remains a platform protected from interlopers, so much unlike global gay-streets, where seedy straights catch girls unawares and ‘real men’ seek fairy blood lust in the acrid, post-2am lull.

Also Grindr-typical, the conversation broke in half cleanly. It was 16.22:

“I want to eat slices of kiwi fruit off your body”

And so I wandered under the shade of a new umbrella – the world of ‘Wet and Messy’ (WAM) – sitophilia, foodplay and pie-fetishism. Conventional sex-texting merged with detailed produce imagery and continued Abbott allusions. It was a sweet salad of a conversation.

45 minutes passed before he suggested a rendezvous. Yes, the foreplay was protracted – an unspoken decision to get the pipes warmed up and the fruit pre-juiced before abandoning our own right hand/fruit/apendage trifecta, for a menage-a-six: two dicks, two tongues, a pineapple and a banana.

It was imperative at this stage to send a photo and an address. I was underprepared. Cropping a fully-clothed photograph of my old London hostel flame, I clicked ‘send’. It was not the expected cock-shot and my modesty piqued his interest. An elderly man in a speedo and a young, suited gent in a white pressed shirt. Ready to WAM.

I baited: ”Whenever you can CUM”. It was crude, but it secured a time. 17.30, he would be at my place. To fuck. With food.

The address was my neighbour’s. She’s an artist in her mid-eighties. I had a perfect view of the gentleman from my window, and I slunk into the kitchen in a corset and lacy underwear. If Clark was having imaginary sex, damn well was I going to dress the part.

He arrived early – 17.37, and messaged me via Grindr first. Grindr Protocol #1: ask permission to ring doorbell.

Again, I had no plan. I asked if he had brought the food as I craned my neck out the window. There he was – a bald man in a pressed suit, holding three grocery bags bulging at the seams with brown, prickly-skinned fruit.

My amateur and immature mind swung into action. I could not quite summon the spirit of the great lying sex-fiends of history, nor even my fraudulent namesake. Instead, the excuse, “My grandmother is home”, had to suffice. After much discussion about my grandmother’s strict Catholic upbringing (prohibiting loud, gay, kiwi sex in the upstairs bedroom), we concluded I’d meet him at his white Toyota Celica, halfway down the block. Ten minutes later, I was “cooking dinner with grandmother” and indefinitely unavailable.

We resumed the text fucking. Phrases like “Daddy Kiwi” and “cum in envelopes” were thrown about with increasing frequency. The conversation ceased when I fell asleep, exhausted and rather hungry… smacking my lips for whipped cream and dreaming of political scandal.

I favourited ‘Adult Themes’ in my Grinder list. I will likely never know his real name. All that remains is the conversation history of an imagined evening of wholefood WAMplay between one youthful Clark Rockerfeller (circa 1980) and a sweet Australian politician (current, closeted and not quite conservative).

My Months as a Marilyn: Instalment 1: Clark (Sydney, May 2012).

The aim of beauty is to keep the populace hypnotised, (hence desperate to be led to safety), by the menacing wit of Wintours and other robots, manufactured upon polished skin and cigarettes. This world, all of it imaginary, is what we like best, for it is a reincarnation of the picture books we suckled at in our youth. In a world where the wild things are real, it’s all the better to see them cloaked in glitter.

It all began with Clark Rockerfeller. We had met years before in the pages of Vanity Fair. Fresh-faced, eighteen and enjoying my first foray into freedom from matriarchy, I bought the rag, convinced it represented ‘going native’ in New York. I also bought a hot dog in Central park. It wiggled limply in the NYC winter. I savoured my ‘Sex and the City’ moment… minus the fashion, the cocktails and the cashed up 30-somethings. So, all I had was a fake limp dick and a magazine. That coming of age wonder seems so innocent when you look back at it, cynical and hardened, at twenty-one.

Clark was intriguing and delicious (yes, he and I are now friends, and I refer to him in the first). Pretty in his youth, in sunglasses and with a full head of quaffed Nordic hair, he looked like he’d jumped out of an ad for Colgate toothpaste or Nova Scotia, or something else hyperbolically wholesome. But far from white, Clark was touched by that supremely attractive trait of criminality. He was a fraud, even a murderer. And he was a modern Marxian triumph. Clark had used the constraints of Feudal, class warfare against its capitalist arbiters, without the need to resort to hippy love melodies or muted, hessian colour schemes. He had achieved the Marxian dream – essentially fucking over the capitalists without having to carry out any legitimate work within the Capitalist system at all. And that’s what my cock-eyed version of Political Economy 101 will have you believe. So our dear Clark was my dark hero from the start.

Some four years on, the chrysalis had totally fallen away, and I was discovering another city – one that had always been there, but that I had never claimed. Sydney. It takes a revelation to fall in love with a place that has always been home. For me, it took a million dollar inner city apartment and an iPhone application called Grindr.

Grindr is a gay social networking site endowed with the cultural values and norms of any gay space – the ability to move from cruise to connection to coitus – quickly. It’s a place where the uncertainties of the physical realm are caught behind a screen, yet grandstanding and cock-parading are all the more pronounced. It proffers a veritable smorgasbord of men, arranged from nearest to farthest in geographical proximity. And for me, the sexual menu provides the means of viewing, taste-testing and even partially cooking the specimen, before ordering him to your door. Never one to let gender get in the way of a conquest (or a restaurant), I was determined to take my seat at the table.

And so my Grindr life began as my life does in any city. With a disguise. My old friend Clark obliged. Photographing his face from the Vanity Fair spread (I had kept it like some divine symbol of my passage to adulthood), I uploaded his picture into my profile. I named myself Clark. And so Clark and I shared this little fraudulent inside joke.

Perhaps if I had been a gay man, the joke would have remained relatively uncomplicated. But my world, most of it imaginary, began that day on Grindr, where an image of a torso or a face or a penis grinds upon an alternate level of beauty. I am a gay man inside a woman’s body. And thus, the story begins. Cloaked and manufactured and glittery.

Kresimir (Fontaine des Innocents, Paris 29/09/11 – remembered, Oxford St, Sydney 25/02/12)

The transvestite trollops of Town Hall and Kings Cross hold immense potential for glamour in the postmeridian. In the morning, they are dogged by dysphoria.

This is the photosynthesis of an Oxford Street Iris. Sagging, almost torn throughout the day, she absorbs the rousing heat of the cars, the greasy restaurants and the endless cigarettes, emerging a glittering evening flower. Briefly blossoming, she will die spectacularly before daybreak. Intravenous tools of renewal catalyse recovery. They may cost a whole night’s tricking. It’s worth it for the extra-terrestrial light they guarantee.

Oxford St has always meant home. The flora and fauna are familiar. But returning home is unromantic. Getting lost becomes difficult. Postcard writing seems overindulgent. Reverse culture shock is less linked with culture than to the realisation that the adventure has found its denouement – ‘conflicts are resolved, creating normality for the characters and a sense of catharsis, or release of tension and anxiety, for the reader’. But normality is loathsome to both character and responder. Catharsis is overrated. Tension and anxiety are mere symptoms of a life well injected with spontaneity rather than the botulism of stability.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the holiday. My instinct is to harvest peripheral memories, to endlessly compare home to idealised befores. And so I think of Kresimir.

Kresimir Dujmovic was four hours of flirtation and cigarettes at the Fontaine des Innocents. It’s a loud fountain, but mostly, nobody notices. His legs were crossed and his pant leg skimmed just above his sock, exposing a little rectangle of skin. Apart from this, he was wrapped in black.

Extremity erotica. A Geisha.

Kresimir was a Croatian-born IR journalist with a weakness for cheating on his French girlfriend with women like me – wigged, naked-backed and stiletto-heeled. He was returning to his home in Berlin the next day, and I, to Nottingham. It was a traveler’s conversation, and a contemporary nomad’s goodbye, complete with a little post-encounter e-communication.

I hadn’t quite learnt from the Kevin Saga. Cluedo’s Miss Scarlet, I’m often too drunk on the promise of stories fresh, that I fail to see the semen being stewed up with blood, and bubbling away on the stove, while Colonel Mustard and Reverend Green have it off in the conservatory. In retrospect I taste the coagulating mass in the mail –

Clue 1: “Everybody’s rattling about the depression which takes over hearts and minds of the majority during cold season. Guess my melancholic nature will find it comfortable and pleasing.”

Clue 2: “One night I stood alone on the balcony, listening to the waves, and I came through the bar fence. Watching the protein fall into the abyss. Didn’t hear any screams from my wannabe posteriority though. Seems they are as suicidal as their wannabe father.”

Clue 3: “Maybe you could come over for a few days. I could point you to several places where you’d collect enough phone numbers and future blog chapters for a long time to come.”

Clue 4: “I’m a fucking elephant that will stomp on anything to reach desired goal.”

So he was going to sell me into sex slavery.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps in my attempt to harvest some interest out of my remaining memories, I’m decontextualising his references to cum, melancholy and elephants beyond that which is autobiographically licensed.

Either way, the giddy memories of an adventure untaken haunt me as I watch the Irises of a twilight Oxford St unfurl. Could I have been a heroine of the fountain, doused in vodka and tracked through Berlin, as lights went out and mine was just flinting?

I crave my own lost photosynthetic process. Settling for life of vicarious flora worship is not an option.

At least without the urban fauna at my watering hole, I can be guaranteed one security…

God forbid I ever catch the fucking Oxford St crabs.

Head of Security (Cordoba 01/01/12)

Religion (n):

1)            From the Latin ‘religare’: to bind fast

2)            From the Latin ‘relegare’: to go through again, read again

Attending church can be a religious experience. Bound to the pew, even the most zealous Christian will escape into passages of glassy-eyed, frankincense-induced delirium. It is a place for people-watching, where the women in mink coats are as weathered as the flooring and it is easy to spot the young – conspicuously in-bloom and invariably shackled to infirm relatives. Read and reread gospels induce divine syncope. It is the art and the extravagant grilles and monstrances that continue to bewitch, long after the fantasies of written Edens, Immaculate Conception and resurrection have lost their lustre. There is some greater grit in the barberry embodied in the grandiose goldenness of church booty.

Cathedrals litter Spain. Once envisioned as synagogues or raised as mosques, the edifices were conquered by the Catholics and converted into sites of Christian worship. The Mezquita Cathedral in Cordoba is a place where the three monotheistic faiths found peace, for a time, and worshiped together. Still intact, it is a relic of that lost era of concord.

The Head of Security at the Mezquita could have been rather handsome, but there was something incongruous about his assembly. It was as if his face had fallen, perfect and complete, through the floor of one designer’s sluice box and stitched to a body that had fruited out of a more practical vision of humanity. Here, the Italian chisel had met the German production line. Deo Design and Construction: under new management. Fuck aestheticism, we’re building human Volvos to get you through an age of terrorism. 

And terrorism was indeed what this man was fighting. More specifically, my mother the jihadist – all five-foot-two-inches clad in brown boots and corduroys, toting a recently doffed hot pink beret. So moved had she been by the emotional tenor of the place that she had decided to perform a full Islamic prostration, kneeling to the ground and bowing her head to the stone floor in the direction of Mecca.

The reaction to the display best parallels a dramatic reading of Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’. Crossing himself and moving with great speed to mother’s side, the guard urgently whispered into his walkie-talkie. Approaching her in rapid Spanish, the word ‘Mussalman’ was launched into the dusty, silent space before mother interjected ‘No habla Espanol’.

‘This forbidden in Spain. No Mussalman. This forbidden. You cannot do this!’

Mothers face went from one of fear to one of indignation.

Ever the star of international diplomacy, I scanned my limited Spanish vocabulary for helpful phrases:

1)            ‘¿Cuánto cuesta?’ – ‘How much?’

2)            ‘Poquito’ – ‘Little’

3)            ‘Rapido’ – ‘Fast’

4)            ‘Caliente’ – ‘Hot’

5)            ‘Muchas gracias’ – ‘Many thanks’

Listing them here brings the realisation that I am ridiculously well prepared for a sexual encounter in a Spanish-tongued city. Not so much for a run-in with the conservative Catholic Spanish church authority.

‘Mussalman, mussalman!’ the guard repeated, and we were surrounded by five other guards, armed conspicuously with large rifles and thickset shoulders. French, English and limited Spanish melted awkwardly together as mother accepted her God-appointed duty to educate the guards in the singular root of monotheistic faith. She was back at St Leos Catholic College in her classroom of teenage boys. She would get through to them. She would singlehandedly herald a renewed world order of religious harmony!

After a long struggle against her increasingly impatient audience, mother realised she was failing. In a desperate attempt to avoid expulsion from the cathedral, she pointed to her ring – rosary-beaded and purchased in Rome – a symbol of her Christian devotion. Security guard defensive mode evolved into deep perplexity. Mother was begrudgingly restored to the status of ‘odd tourist’. We walked around for a time and exited into the sun.

The next morning brought a new resolve to the heart of my flame-stoking, ever-pious parent. She would not depart from the land of the Mezquita without partaking in the Blessed Sacrament at the Bishop’s New Years Day mass. She wished to enter the centre of worship, which had been cordoned off and secured for the midday ceremony.

Sashaying up to our best friend, the Head of Security, she raised her voice an octave “Je suis proffessorio! I am proffessorio de religion!” She pointed to her rosary ring again. “I am the same as you. Same Christian.” By this stage he had realised, like most people who try to argue with my mother, that his only real option was to let her have her way. His team would maintain maximum readiness – alert, alarmed and most importantly, heavily armed. He repeated: ‘No bow. Mussalman forbidden. It is wrong here’. We quietly passed through the barrier and mother dropped to her knees in solemn prayer. She prayed for the miraculous healing of his intellectual hebetude.

Perhaps the Mezquita Head of Security showed wisdom on that final day of 2011. On more than one occasion, my mother has posed both a perceived and very real threat to the male demographic. And people associated with religious practice are more than usually aware of the dangers of castration.

On Sunday the 1st of January 2012, two Australian women left the historical seat of religious harmony with eyes trained on our backs.

Threat of arrest and repetition of the rights – attending church can be fucking religious.

Laurent (Paris 20/09 –30/09)

There is something profoundly transportative about chocolate. The intimate moment a woman shares with her melting cup is one that makes men envious. She’ll wrap her lips around the mug, dipping the tip of her tongue into the dark, inviting liquid, and if it’s the right blend, she’ll feel a pulse race down through her throat, from her chest down to her thighs, reaching the deepest recesses of her active mind until her clitoris throbs with pleasure and her earlobes twitch.

If only this were a woman’s response to cum.

Ejaculate is fucking repellant. Anybody who tells you that the taste of her lover’s semen is even close to tolerable is indulging in serious self-deception. Or perhaps she has her heart stuck so far up his ass that its smell overwhelms that of the white, salty substance flowing out the other orifice. I have always been a swallower. There is nothing pleasurable about keeping the flavour of cum on the palate any longer than it needs to be, and swallowing is the fastest way to remedy the situation. The post-oral-sex taste of number 5 Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau was masked by Marlborough cigarettes and Monoprix mimosa.

The apartment was quintessentially Parisian. There was a small gap between the bed and the roof; it was suspended in an Ikea-esque attempt to double the thirty-square-foot floor space. Climbing five wooden stairs to reach the mattress was difficult when drunk, and a feature charming only to a new resident. By the end of the week it was insurmountable – swallowing feet that had been danced into fatigue, devouring knees that had been bruised by too many blowjobs, and defeating a mind that had only prepared itself for obliging taxis and fast elevators. The apartment had one of those toilets that you couldn’t flush toilet paper down. An invention of personal slothfulness, a plastic bag rested beside the cistern for paper-waste, disposed of once in three days in fits of guilty tidying. Toilet paper itself was an unnecessary expense, and I was given to stealing napkins from restaurants. Often, I would forget to do this and run out of tissue, impatiently waiting for forgiving air-drying minutes to clock by. Once or twice I drunkenly groped for that plastic bag, searching for a napkin that could be reused – a not-quite-so-pissed-on motherfucking saviour of a towelette.

Frustration inspired by the accommodation was matched and exceeded by emotional complication. Laurent was a gay man. And so transgressions of nurtured sexuality and a fucking self-righteous toilet in an architecturally disobliging loft, defined many long days of Parisian sex.

By the time a stereotypically promiscuous homosexual male reaches the age of twenty-three, he has fucked in excess of two hundred men. The math is simply calculated by taking eighteen as the age of the legal clubbing debut, giving him five years to have fucked and been fucked – and conservatively multiplying this by forty – allowing for a weekly one night stand minus days off for illness or the holiday season, during which he may have returned to the paternal nest, taking a brief excursion into abstinence territory. The figure does not account for any number of sexual encounters clocked before adult sexual maturity, and it stands to reason that in most cases, this factor would significantly increase the number of sexual encounters within a veritable ‘little black encyclopaedia series’ attached to each gay male counted. It is understandable then, that when a twenty-three year old male who has operated within the cliché gay paradigm for some five years, fucks a girl, the rules are difficult to relearn.

The math is facile and the stereotype is heavy, but numbers are somewhat arbitrary; the ‘learned’ dimension of habitual sex exists after twenty-five or five hundred fucks. It should have come as no surprise then, that an intelligent gay male caught in the throes of a heated sexual encounter with a woman failed to remember that unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy.

The mundane simplicity of that biological factor caused hysterical laughter to punctuate a moment of sexual intensity as Laurent looked sincerely into my eyes and whispered that he had recently been tested. “We could go without protection”, he implored. It was a beautiful lightbulb moment when I replied, “If you cum inside me, my body and your sperm will work together to create a foetus”.

During those early days, we rotated the heteronormative ideal, turning it about like one turns a Rubik’s cube. The colours were impossibly muddled, but the sex was fucking good. Afterwards, I smoked, watching the spiraling loveliness of the cigarette disappear into the summer of the inside-outside space. The fractured French cliché was complete. Love and romance and sexual energy were conjured out of the cobbled streets below. The heat rose and fucking rose.

My orgasm came delayed. It surfaced post-sex, out of the smoke and my smudgy-eyed smoulder and his twitching muscles. Foreplay is overrated. Postplay is fucking heightening. Postplay is the remaining aggression of a well played sexual episode that refuses to die at the petit mort, but lingers in the gritty instinctual guilt of wet, sticky semen and skin and latex and sheets.

And when the mimosa is gone and when the cigarettes are over, we stain our sheets, we stain our mouths and we stain our lives with chocolate.