:: Ten foot penis, by j.a. holland

Well, crap. I wanted to post something light and funny from the Sprigs archives today so I could get away from all the death and sad that’s in the air. But then I started reading this piece and remembered that Heath Ledger is in it, which means this piece is now full of death and sad. Fine. I will post this. But then I am going to lie down and wait for tomorrow to happen.

*I wrote this piece Nov. 18, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
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Today, I was with an acquaintance of mine at a bookstore. We were perusing the magazine section when he turned to me and said, out of the blue, Let me ask you this. Does the thought of two men together turn you on? This is not a typical question for this acquaintance to ask (after all, he is only an acquaintance), so I was a little taken aback. Until he explained that he was asking because the movie Brokeback Mountain (which he’d seen featured on a magazine cover) was being marketed to women.

Now, I don’t know what rock I’ve been under for the last, well, however long people have been talking about this particular flick. But I have clearly been under one. It is simply unconscionable for me not to know one of my favorite actors, Jake Gyllenhaal, will be getting hot under the buckle with fellow hottie Heath Ledger. I think my grabbing the magazine off the rack and tearing through it to get to the article on the movie answered my friend’s question: Yes, I am turned on by guy-on-guy action.

I didn’t always know this about myself, though there had been some signs. For example, I owned a couple of gay-and-lesbian poetry anthologies in the early ’90s, and I would sometimes become a little flushed when reading the poems written by gay men. But I didn’t realize I was attracted to images of men getting busy until …

Hold up. Let me set the scene for you. It was 1995, Kansas City, the dead heat of summer. The temperature was hovering at around 110 degrees, which, thankfully, included the heat index. It was so hot, you could have fried an egg on the sidewalk. However, it was also so hot that nobody in their right mind would have entertained the thought of actually walking out into the blistering sun, finding a suitable patch of sidewalk and dropping an egg on it. Instead, people were sensible. They remained in the air-conditioned goodness of the indoors. Kansas Citians aren’t dummies.

I was living in a third-floor apartment with my friend/roommate, a gay man. We were not fortunate enough to have air-conditioning. My roommate was out of town, so I had the stale, festeringly hot place all to myself. But I couldn’t enjoy my solitude because of the oppressive heat.

I had to take my clothes off, not because I was feeling sexy but because they made me feel like I was wrapped in electric blankets. I got a bath towel and soaked it in cold water. That was a trick my roommate had taught me a week or so earlier. Poor man’s air-conditioning, he’d called it. I laid down on the faux-leather sofa in the living room and covered myself with the wet towel. It felt great. For about 10 minutes. At which point the towel was dryish and warmish, so I had to repeat the entire process. I would be trapped in this endless cycle all day: wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa, wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa.

I needed something to do, but without cable TV, my options were limited. I didn’t even have the energy to read a book. (Plus, holding my arm up to read would be work, which would produce heat, which would be completely counterproductive to my goal of cooling off.) My gaze fell upon my roommate’s gay-porn collection. What the hell? The TV was right there, and I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I popped in a tape.

You might think this sounds pretty pathetic: naked girl covered in wet towel watching gay porn. But it wasn’t pathetic at all. Nope, I wasn’t pathetic watching that first tape. Or the second. Or the entire collection. Twice.

At first, I told myself I was just watching for research purposes. But that story doesn’t really hold up when you are on your ninth or tenth tape, although I did come away with some new moves I could try out on LoveShack. (Yes, I was dating LoveShack way back then. I wonder where he was that day. Lying on the sofa at his place watching lesbian-porn videos? Probably.)

I know what you might be thinking: I just watched all those videos because I was loopy from the heat. Not so. I was, in a word, turned on. (OK, that’s two words. But I wanted to avoid the word “horny” because I have an aversion to it. The word, that is. Not the state of being horny.)

Sadly, I was also literally too hot to do much of anything about it, an irony that was not lost on me at the time. (I think LoveShack got more than a spoonful of lovin’ from me later that night, though, once the temperatures dropped a smidge.)

Now, don’t start drawing any weird conclusions about this post, like thinking I am really a gay man trapped in a bisexual woman’s body. That’s just ridiculous. And please don’t leave here with the impression that I go seeking out gay porn. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I haven’t seen a gay-porn film since then. Watching a whole gay-porn video library in one day is enough to sate my desire for a good long while.

But today, a decade later, when I heard Jake and Heath were going to make out in Brokeback Mountain, well I knew it was time for another gay-movie fix. Even if I will be fully dressed in an air-conditioned movie theater. And even if it isn’t exactly gay porn.

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Process Notes

It wasn’t really hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Apparently, pavement has to be at least 144 degrees for that. Even at a sweltering 110 degrees, the pavement wouldn’t have been quite that hot. But the image worked in the post, so I used it. I’m a liar like that.