| Original Full Text | ROTTENbyPATRICK HUNTERSenior Honors ThesisCreative WritingUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillApproved:___________________________Matt Randal O’Wain, Thesis Advisor1When they threw water on the witch, she says, ‘Who would have thought a good little girl likeyou could destroy my beautiful wickedness?’ That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it tomyself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.-John Waters on The Wizard of Oz2PinkNews 3Rotten 7Sex Ed 13Sticky Fingers 19Skinnyboysclub 25Cheesesteak Slut 25Calorie Asperger’s 28Eugenia/Karen 31Bad Vegetarian 35Bad Biology 38Dildo Shopping 45Scarf-ed Straight, or A Very Disappointing Orgy 48Onion Ring Express 52Van Dick 52Onion Ring Express 54Ass Prevention 56Restoredking 58Got Lust? 60Team D 65Nick 67Dig ‘Em Donuts 69The Mild-Mannered Talk Show 703PinkNewsI am obsessed with PinkNews, this gay news source on Snapchat. It exists outside ofSnapchat, but my only exposure to it has been in this form—in swipeable, tappable, short-formlisticles, full of rainbow-colored graphics and reminders to turn your PinkNews post notificationson. PinkNews was the first account I ever subscribed to on Snapchat, sometime in middle schoolafter being urged to download the app from my friends who probably wanted to start a streakwith me. My relationship with Snapchat has ebbed and flowed, but now I mostly use it to talk tothe few stragglers who refuse to make the switch to text messaging, to see what KhloeKardashian is pretending to cook for dinner, and to read PinkNews.Most PinkNews listicles are about gay celebrities—celebrities you didn’t know were gay,celebrities who have recently come out as gay, celebrities with secret gay siblings—oftenaccompanied by a red carpet photo of a bisexual starlet smiling sultrily into the camera.I find this kind of gay content exhausting, but I can’t get enough of it. Homoness isreduced to only the act of coming out—each celebrity on the lists is followed by some kind ofprofessional statement that they’ve made about their sexuality, usually about how they’vestruggled to get to this place and that they’re happy to finally be themself publicly. PinkNewsnever reports on gay life post-coming out. A PinkNews subject only gets to realize their gayness,but never be gay. It’s Sisyphean—always sowing and never reaping.When the thoughts of my homo tendencies were just beginning to fruit in my mind,coming out YouTube videos were hugely comforting to me. I would watch them tucked all theway under my racecar bedspread, the volume turned most of the way down in case my mom was4listening through my bedroom door. I loved them—the way that the YouTubers would explain totheir viewers, through teary eyes, that they were the same person they’ve always been—but gay.I thought that all of the people making these videos were so lame. I had no idea why theywere so insistent on crying, why they made being gay seem so tragic. I would think they werelosers as the videos ended and I searched for another.I like to think of gay media in relation to Love, Simon, this rom-com from 2017. I saw itwhen it came out in my freshman year of high school, with a group of straight girls who had readthe book it was based on and were eager to see how the film affected me.It’s about Simon Spier, a closeted teen who falls in love with Blue, an anonymous gayclassmate who he meets online. Simon spends the film trying to discover Blue’s identity andavoid being outed to his school and family.Love, Simon is meant for a straight audience—the kind of inoffensive gay representationthat makes middle-aged women with gay sons feel good about themselves. Simon narrates thewhole film, constantly reminding the audience that although he is gay, he is just a regular guy.He’s awkward, masculine, and unthreatening.In the line to buy tickets, Julie—a blonde, bespectacled girl who I had to come out toafter she admitted having a crush on me—grabbed my arm and leaned in to whisper, “Are youexcited?”“Totally,” I said, only half-serious. I was mostly excited to see if Simon would take hisshirt off. He does. When I saw him, his bare-chest exposed, I turned to Wikipedia to see if NickRobinson, the actor playing him, was gay. He was not.5Near the end of Love, Simon, when Simon and his newly-discovered boyfriend kiss ontop of the ferris wheel at their town fair, Julie leaned in and asked me if I was crying. I pretendedI couldn’t hear her.Love, Simon is what I compare all other gay media too—as a sort of jumping off point fordetermining if gay representation rings true or not. PinkNews is Love, Simon-esque. Coming outvideos certainly are, too.I have spent a lot of time wondering why Love, Simon and its siblings bother me somuch. The intentions behind making it were certainly good—the press leading up to the film’srelease praised it for being a landmark piece of mainstream gay cinema. In an interview on TheEllen DeGeneres Show (which is definitely on the Love, Simon side of the spectrum), NickRobinson tells Ellen about how his younger brother came out of the closet while he was workingon the film. “One of the best things that came out of this movie is just being able to talk to him. Ithink that’s the strength of a film like this—it’s a conversation starter.”Perhaps my annoyance comes from Love, Simon’s complete sexlessness. Simon developscrushes throughout the film, but never appears to show any desire—he’s a mound of baggyzip-up hoodies and stone-faced yearning. Even his ferris wheel kiss is chaste and brief.Love, Simon, in its pursuit of gay relatability, falls totally flat. It says nothing and is aboutnothing. It’s completely indebted to the teen comedy formula. It hits the same story beats thatstraight teen comedies do, down to the moment in the third act where Simon’s friends turnagainst him (they make amends no more than five minutes later).6There’s a scene in Love, Simon where Simon comes out to his parents. It’s the emotionalclimax of the film—shots of Jennifer Garner’s monologue from it are sprinkled in all of thetrailers. Simon’s parents remind him that although he’s gay, he’s still their son. Simon sobs thewhole time, naturally.7RottenThe first time I saw Tubgirl I was seven—or eight. I remember clicking on it, my handnot quite fitting on the mouse of my mom’s desktop computer—an all-in-one Gateway that Iripped my first CD onto a few years later. I was tucked away in the corner of our living roomunder a framed photo of a landscape that she had most definitely purchased at T.J. Maxx.I don’t remember exactly how I found Tubgirl, just that I had stumbled onto itaccidentally. I remember waiting for the photo to load on the screen. Pixel by pixel, Tubgirlrevealed herself to me. For the uninitiated, Tubgirl is a viral photo of a nude Japanese woman ina bathtub, her legs folded against her arms, her ass in the air towards the camera. She’s blasting ageyser of bright orange diarrhea into her own mouth.I was horrified. I had never seen anything like this. I knew I had to tell the world about it.“Have you seen Tubgirl?” I remember asking all of my friends afterward. The answerwas usually no, which would have to be remedied. I took pride in pulling it up on myschool-assigned laptop and showing it to them.“Why did you make me look at that?” was the standard response. I didn’t know, just thatsomething about this photo was totally enthralling to me. I loved how gross it was, howextremely and intensely it made me feel. It was wrong and I loved that about it.I loved Tubgirl herself, too— her face completely obscured by shit. Who is she, Iwondered. What does she think about? She’s an enigma, totally anonymous, washed away by theever-changing tides of the internet.The photo first surfaced sometime around the year 2000 on Rotten under the title “FecoJapanese I Really Think So.” Rotten describes itself as “an archive of disturbing illustration” and8says that it “collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with atruly unpleasant experience.” Under an illustration of a human corpse on its homepage, itproudly touts that it has been “pure evil since 1996.” The domain was active until 2018. Becauseof its popularity, Rotten had several spin-off websites, all linked on the bottom of the site.One spin-off site, the Rotten Dead Pool was launched in the winter of 2003. Players onthe Dead Pool would pick ten public figures that they believed would die over the next twelvemonths. They would earn a point for each correct answer as long as the person was not executedor murdered.Suddenly remembering her, I recently tried to seek out Tubgirl. The only place I couldfind the image in its original state was on r/LordoftheRings, posted in protest of website changesmade by the Reddit CEO. One of the comments, made three months ago, says, “Been a whileTubgirl. I missed you.”There was this one video, Making a Cake, that fascinated me for years. I showed it tomaybe a dozen people—or more. And it was really gross. Gag-worthy.The frame is centered on a woman’s vagina in an extreme close-up. Her legs are spread.In it, there’s a whisk. She spends the video pouring assorted cake-related ingredients into hervagina—flour, milk, melted butter, three eggs. At the end, she pulls the whisk out and theingredients have formed a dough.“This is disgusting,” I remember my friend Elena telling me as I showed it to her on mycracked Windows phone before class. She was watching it through her fingers. I had it hiddenunder the picnic table we were sitting at in front of our middle school. Our other classmates weremilling about, talking to one another. They have no idea, I thought. They couldn’t even handle it.“I know. Isn’t it wonderful?”9I wonder what the woman was thinking as she set her camera up, as she filmed the video,as she made the cake. I wonder if it was a request, given to her by one of the members of heraudience. I wonder if she chose to do it without a request—if she wanted to, if she knew heraudience would enjoy that kind of thing. I wonder what the reaction to it was, what thecomments were, how many people jerked off to it. I wonder how many people came to it.The video has long been lost to time but I remember clicking on her Pornhub channel andseeing that she had other videos in the same vein. Her sitting on balloons until they popped, herqueefing in the woods, her pissing on the ground in a public park. I remember her long red-dyedhair and acrylic nails. Some of the videos contained her face, but most did not. Most of them justfeatured her from the torso down, her red hair swinging in the frame behind her. She was aboutforty-five, I think. She had a pink belly button piercing. I remember voice was deep, sultry as shesaid things like Oh fuck, that was a big pop and I’m so fucking full of fucking piss right now.I thought she was totally amazing– powerful, even. I thought it took a lot of guts to put awhisk in your vagina.There’s also 2 Girls 1 Cup, obviously. That’s probably the opus of shock videos—-thecrème de la crème. I can barely tolerate it—I have to watch it through parted fingers or squintedeyes. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the whole thing—I never get more than a few seconds into itbefore closing out of my browser in a cold sweat.In this one, a clip pulled from a Brazilian porn release called Hungry Bitches, two womenare in an office building of some kind, both adorned in business casual. One woman wears aperiwinkle sweater and a pleated skirt, the other, a sheer blouse. They make out for a fewseconds—the one in the blouse pulls the other woman’s breasts out of her sweater. There’s a cut.10The rest of the video goes like this. – the women shit, feed it to each other, and then vomit itback up into each other’s mouths.“Don’t look up 2 Girls 1 Cup,” I remember people saying in comment sections, messageboards. “You won’t be the same again.”It became a sign of pride to have seen it, to have sat through it—like a digital scatologicalrodeo. Thousands of people uploaded reaction videos to it online. One, called 2 Girls 1 CupReaction #1, uploaded by fartenewt, features a man showing two of his friends the video. Both ofthem quickly run off screen to gag. It has fifteen million views.2 Girls 1 Cup has a higher production value than most other shock videos, as it is aprofessionally-produced porn. It’s on a set with studio lighting, sound, different camera angles ofthe shitting, vomiting. It even has a score—the song Lover’s Theme by Hervé Roy plays over theentirety of the video—a soft concerto to set the mood. On an upload of the song to YouTube, oneof the comments reads, “This may not be the greatest piece ever written, but it’s a solid #2.”The production value of 2 Girls 1 Cup raises several questions. I wonder how much thesewomen were paid, if they were paid at all. I wonder how much convincing it took them to do thescene. I wonder how they felt when they got the script. I wonder if there was a script.The director of Hungry Bitches,Marco Fiorito, released the film under his ownproduction company, MFX Media. He is a self described “compulsive fetishist” and “artist in theart of movie making.”When under scrutiny by the United States government on grounds of obscenity forHungry Bitches, Fiorito said in his official statement, “If I knew that the sale of these films viathe internet was illegal, I would have stopped because the money is not the main reason that Imake them.”11FiftyFifty is a subreddit dedicated to rolling the dice with the contents of your stomach.Each post consists of a photo, blurred out, and a caption. The caption presents you with twooptions—one normal and one grotesque. You don’t get to see the photo until you click on thepost. Some recent ones include “A Hot Dog in a Tactical Outfit/Severed Forearm in a Hot DogBun” (it’s the former) and “JLO on the phone on a balcony/Deceased woman with a cellphone”(it’s the latter). The woman with the cellphone has been in a car accident. Her bloody face ispressed into her iPhone. The top reply says, “Don’t drive and text folks!”When I was in sixth grade, I would ride the bus home with these eighth graders, Francisand Hank, who lived in the same neighborhood as me. I would always sit with them, wedgeduncomfortably between them in the front row. Hank would pull up the Reddit app on his phone,go to r/FiftyFifty, and make me click on every new post of the day. I remember seeingmotorcycle accidents, decapitations, life-threatening infections, fungal growths.One post’s descriptor read, “Ball on the loose/Happy seal.” When I clicked on the photo,I was greeted by a picture of a nude man, one of his testicles hanging out of its sack, connectedto his body by only his spermatic cord.“That is terrible!” Francis cried out, leaning over me to look at Hank’s phone. I felt gladmy own balls were safely attached to my body. Hank just laughed.When I got to college, I saw a guy on a dating app who I thought seemed familiar, but Icould not quite place it. He had his Instagram linked so I went to it, scrolled through his profile,and found a photo of him in the uniform for a local high school’s cross country team. It wasFrancis. I was sure of it.We texted back and forth for a few days before he invited me over. I decided to wait untilI saw him in person to mention that I knew him in case I was wrong, that I had accidentally12mistaken him for someone else, that the friend I had in middle school was secretly namedFranklin or Fred or something.When I got to his place, he offered to make me a drink.I thought that this was the best time to ask him about it. “Where did you go to middleschool?”He told me, confirming my suspicions, as he poured vermouth into a cocktail shaker.“Dude, we went to middle school together.”Francis looked at me for a moment and shrugged. He didn’t remember me. He handed methe drink and I took a sip. It was gross.13Sex EdI think I learned what sex was through a Shane Dawson video. It was one of his earlyones, long removed from his channel—a skit called Phone Sex from 2008. I must have been fiveor six years old, using the child-sized plastic laptop my mom had gotten me for Christmas, alongwith a pair of skull-and-crossbone pajama pants (I really loved pirates). I remember seeing it onmy YouTube homepage and clicking on it, not understanding what the title meant at all. Thethumbnail seemed promising, with a pair of lips hovering in the air above Shane’s emo-hairedhead. That reminded me of Jessica Rabbit, who I was very interested in—I watched Who FramedRoger Rabbit with my dad a few months earlier and had to leave the room when she came on thescreen, cheeks red-hot.In Phone Sex, Shane plays Jim, a man who has just returned home from his shift at PizzaHut. He spots an ad for a chat line in an of the National Enquirer that he’s reading to wind down.He calls the number, intrigued. He has to call a few times because he accidentally dials theextension for a gay hotline and is horrified when a man flirts with him on the other line. Hefinally reaches a woman, one he’s chosen by dialing the “All American Girl” extension. Sheintroduces herself as Bunny.“So Bunny,” Jim asks with an adorkable smile, his hair straightened to a gravity defyingdegree. “What do you look like?”The shot cuts from Jim to Bunny, also played by Shane in a fat suit, ratty brown wig, andfake unibrow. “I’m 5’8, I have long, blonde hair, and a tight little beach body—and I’mBrazilian, and I’m not talking about my place of origin.”14The video continues like this, cutting back and forth between Shane as Jim and Shane asBunny. “Do you want me to talk dirty, Jim?” Bunny leans towards the camera, her lip quivering,running a hand over her padded chest.“Sure.” Jim shrugs awkwardly.Bunny bites her lip and says, “I’m going to get a sixty-four ounce Slurpee from 7-11 andfour bags of Funyuns and cream dip and I’m going to eat it until my little tummy can’t take anymore. Then, I’m gonna lean over your naked chest and vomit all over it, until there’s a little poolof Slurpee and Funyun in your belly button. Then, I’ll take my crazy straw and put it in yourbelly button and slurp it up and gargle it like Aquafresh.”Jim hangs up. The video ends.The year I turned eighteen, I set a resolution to lose my virginity. I had been a sexlessloser for too long and I was ready to do everything in my power to change that. I set theresolution on New Years, wasted with my cousins in my aunt’s living room. We were watching alive stream of the ball dropping on YouTube (they had replaced their cable subscription withHulu). The stream was free so it was terrible, constantly fading out and losing connection,cutting to commercial right as musicians started performing.There was a minute left until midnight, a timer on the screen ticked down. I was dizzywith excitement. I asked my cousins what their resolutions were and told them I was determinedto get laid this year. They agreed with that, also virgins, and said that they hoped to do the same.Twenty seconds until midnight, another ad popped up on the screen. We all groaned.I wasn’t entirely a virgin, I will admit—just a virgin in the traditional, penetrative sense. Ihad fooled around with guys before, usually awkward, sloppy affairs, full of pauses and sorries15and disappointment. I decided that I needed to be fucked. I thought that this would give me thesort of sex experience that I was looking for.I downloaded Grindr, figuring that it would be the place to go for this sort of thing. Myonly previous experience on the app had been with an older man that I met up with when I wassixteen who told me that he loved my hot teenage cock before shoving his down my throat.I found a guy who seemed promising enough, a beary, nerdy man named Juan. He wasthirty-two. His bio said that he could host, which was ideal for me as I lived with my parents andmy four-and-five-year-old siblings.I found an infographic on Reddit about douching and followed it to the tee, grateful for ahelpful diagram that showed me how far to insert the nozzle into my ass (a quarter of an inch). Ishowered, threw on a jockstrap, and went on my way.He lived thirty minutes away from me so I had time to think on my drive there. What ifhe wasn’t interested in me? What if he turned me down? What if he took one look at me, myyoungness, and thought that I was unsexy? I couldn’t let that happen.I dug through my glovebox and found a pack of cigarettes that one of my friends hadgiven me, discarded from when her dad quit smoking earlier that year. I smoked it, coughing thewhole time, thinking that my cigarette breath would turn him on and make him think that I wasvery mature. I didn’t know what to do with the butt so I shoved it in the pocket of my jeans.I got to his apartment, took a few deep breaths, and knocked on his door. He opened it,flashed me a flirty smile, and let me in.His bedroom was down a hallway so I got to look at his decor as I passed through. Icaught a framed Golden Girls poster, a bookshelf full of Funko Pops, and several GameBoys. Heled me to his bed, sat me down on it, and took off my clothes. He flipped me over, spit in his16hand, and fucked me. It hurt. I laid there, my face in his pillow, and kept counting to ten to passthe time. When he finished, I rested my head on his chest for a few minutes. I couldn’t stopthinking, I just lost my virginity, trying to make myself excited about it. I was disappointed byhow little I felt.I stood up, got dressed, and asked if I could use his bathroom. I threw my pocket cigarettebutt into his toilet bowl and pissed on it before I flushed it away.In high school, our sex ed unit was like torture—a week-long slog led by Your Choices, alocal clinic designed to entrap pregnant women and make them think that they were gettingabortions, only to tell them that they were murderers. All of the people hired from Your Choiceswere annoying, clad in long denim skirts and gladiator sandals.It was an abstinence only program, so they didn’t teach us about contraception—only thatsex was best practiced in the covenant of heterosexual marriage. They made us do an exercisewhere we stuck two pieces of duct tape together and pulled them apart. They told us to stickthem together again and again, noticing how it became harder to re-stick each time. This, theytold us, was what happened if you had sex with multiple partners.I don’t like to make a habit of deflowering virgins, but I can’t seem to stop doing it. I’vetaken four virginities that I can remember. Here’s a list of them:1. I met Elliot in my freshman year of college. He was a high school chorus teacherand every time we hung out I couldn’t help but think about how he taughtstudents that were the same age as me. Elliot was a recent transplant to NorthCarolina, and I took him to get his first Cookout tray. Sitting in my car in his17apartment parking lot, he ate his last hushpuppy and leaned in for a kiss,tongue-first. He told me that he had just come out and that he had never had sexwith anyone before. I took him upstairs and fucked him.2. I did not know that my my ex-boyfriend, Thorne, was a virgin until after we hadfucked. The first time we hung out, we picked up Mediterranean food and broughtit to her room, where we watched a horror movie a safe distance apart from oneanother. We didn’t touch, and we didn’t eat our food, either. We kissed for the firsttime on our third date and had sex immediately after. When we finished, Thorneput her head on my chest and told me that this was her first time and that shedidn’t eat on our first date because she thought she was going to bottom. I told herthat I didn’t eat because I didn’t want to be the only one eating.3. I was the first guy Michael had ever hooked up with. I was eighteen and he wastwenty-three. We had been friends for years, always playfully flirting with eachother but never acting on it. The flirting eventually evolved into us sendingpictures of our dicks to each other, so I decided to invite him over one morningafter my dad had left for work. We made out on the futon in my room, purchasedwith money from my first job, and I thought that he was one of the worst kissers Ihad ever kissed—stiff and dry and closed-mouthed. After jerking him off for anhour, he told me that he was on antidepressants and that he probably was notgoing to cum. He left and I never saw him again.4. Zane never told me that he was a virgin, but I suspect it anyway. He came over tomy apartment and made a joke about how we were sinning by seeing one another.I thought it was weird to bring up sin on a first date, so I didn’t laugh. We got18under the covers together and made out. He was another terrible kisser—full oftongue and slack-jawed slobber. He came the second I touched his penis. I invitedhim to spend the night and he declined.There was another video I found on YouTube, originally an episode of a Britishdocumentary show called A Girl’s Guide to 21st Century Sex. I saw this one in the fourth grade.Each episode covers various sex-related topics like penile enlargement, sex dolls, and erectiledysfunction. The episode that had been uploaded to YouTube had a segment on squirting,illustrated by a woman sitting by the edge of a pool, legs spread, blasting squirt through the air. Ithought she looked free.19Sticky FingersThe last time I went to my dad’s house for dinner, I inevitably found myself standing infront of his bookshelf looking for something to steal. I only ever steal a few things at once, but Icannot stop myself from doing it every time I visit. All sorts of things—books, knick-knacks,DVDs, my dad’s ratty band tees. I like bringing them to my place and displaying them in myroom—like a sentimental bird bringing something back to my nest. Instead of sticks, mud, andbark, my nest is made up of baseball cards, pocket knives, and baby photos. Buddha statues,comic books, and tackle-boxes.I don’t feel guilty about taking them, as I feel I am taking them out of love—out of areverence for the things my father has chosen to fill his life with. I suspect that if left unchecked,I will take everything my dad owns, one trinket at a time.Once the heaping plate of my stepmom’s chicken parmesan began to digest in mystomach, my hands got to grabbing. I skimmed through the shelf—spotting beach-read crimenovels, Star Wars prequel novelizations, and books my dad bought for a world religion class.One copy of The Satanic Bible sat on the book shelf for years until I nabbed it for my room. Hewould regularly joke that he kept it there in case he needed to scare off the Jehovah’s Witnesseswho came knocking on our front door.After slipping a few Stephen King paperbacks into my bag, I spotted some of my dad’sjournals tucked away in the corner of a shelf. I recognized them well—having spent countlesschildhood afternoons flipping through them, sprawled out on the carpet of our living room. Ipocketed them too, eager to pore over them when I got back home.20The journals are all black—two of them being hardcover and one of them being soft andleather. Each of them have drawings, lists, and poems and are only about thirty percent full.One’s a moleskine and written on its front page,In case of loss, please return to:Patrick B. HunterAs a reward: $My Gratitude.It’s in his usual neat handwriting—polite with scratchy, uneven lines. Knowing my dad,this meant that he wrote it with a pencil he sharpened by hand, with a pocket knife. He regularlywould whip one out to sharpen my pencils for my homework. I remember the way his whackswith the knife would make the tips of the pencils jagged, the wood a stack of uneven edges.None of the journals are dated, so I am unsure about how exactly old he was at the timeof use—but some look older than others. The pages of one are starting to yellow and the bindingis wearing thin. In the Moleskine, under his name, my dad has written his address, which Irecognize as my grandparent’s address. This means that he was twenty-one or twenty-two.In the leather one, unwrapping the string reveals that he has written one journal entry,flanked by lists of tools he needed for a job. It reads:I would like to write a book. A book about what? Hmmm, you know I’m not sure what towrite a book about. I could write about my interests, but I think people would become boredrather quickly after reading a few pages about my gun and porn obsession. Haha.My thoughts are short but my brain is full. If I don’t find a way to spill it onto these pagesmy head may explode. Not a lot of opportunity to debrief all the crap I pick up on a day-to-daybasis.21After bitching about his coworkers, he writes about my stepmom—judging by the state ofthis journal, this is near the beginning of their relationship. He must have been close totwenty-four.I am however lucky to have an outlet now in the form of a wonderful lover. She judges mythoughts at times by who wouldn’t? I am pretty nutty and most random thoughts that come to mybrain should be taken with a grain of salt. What does that mean anyway? To be taken with agrain of salt.For my entire life, the Hunter side of my family has referred to me as L.P., short for“Little Patrick,” of course—even though I’ve had half a foot on him since I was fourteen. Whenasked if I was a junior, my dad would be sure to correct them and say that I was not—that inorder to be a junior you needed to share a first and middle name. I was Patrick J. and he wasPatrick B. and that was a fact.When an aunt or a grandparent will use Little Patrick on me, they usually apologize andsay that I probably don’t enjoy being referred to that way, on account of the fact that I’m allgrown up now. I always assure them that I don’t mind and that I think it’s sweet, which is true.Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, it’s as if my dad is looking back at me. I see it inour eyes, our foreheads, the way my beard grows in different-colored patches. We’ve embracedthis mini-me thing proudly. As a toddler, he dressed us up as Batman and Robin for Halloween.We dressed up as Batman and Robin again for a nerd convention he took me to as a preteen, afterwe started reading comic books together22We probably looked the most alike when I signed up for Cub Scouts, inspired by a TroopLeader coming into our school to advertise the organization. I thought that the idea of runningaround in the woods sounded like fun, so we went to an interest meeting the next week.It didn’t take long for my dad to fully immerse himself in it, becoming one of the leadersof our troop. We would meet in a shed in the back parking lot of a methodist church—ourscoutmaster Mr. Dornbush, a nice man with a thick, white mustache that stretched outhorizontally, told us that he had attended scout meetings there as a boy. The shed smelled like rotand mothballs, but I loved it all the same.When we would do Pinewood Derby, I would come to the shed and find all of the desksand chairs tucked away in the corners of the room. The leaders would set up three ramps for us tolaunch our cars. My dad and I would procrastinate getting our car together until the night before,and our frantic, store-bought cars rarely took home prizes. I won a trophy for third place in theDesign category one year, probably because of some cool flames I drew on the side. I still havethe trophy, sitting on top of one of my dad’s weightlifting magazines.My dad and I would get dressed in our Scout uniforms together—Little Patrick and BigPatrick—our badge-covered shirts tucked perfectly into our khaki shorts. I always hated wearingthe hats, but he would tell me that we needed to get a good return on investment on it. Iunderstood his point, so I relented.Under my television, you’ll find two of my dad’s Playstations—a PS2 and PSP—tuckedaway and slightly dusty. They are each at least twenty years old, well-played and well-loved. Isnatched these a few years ago, wanting to revisit my dad’s copy of Kingdom Hearts. It was the23first video game I ever played—sitting on his lap. I remember having to wait until I was oldenough to read to be able to play it by myself.The PSP is still in my dad’s original case, packed full of the system’s trademarkplastic-covered disks. Tomb Raider, Daxter, and LittleBigPlanet. A Family Guy Greatest Hitscollection, a My Chemical Romance tour documentary, and Lego Harry Potter. I rememberplaying on his PSP as a kid, struggling through a level of Patapon, while I waited for him tovote. He gave me his I Voted! sticker and I wore it proudly for the rest of the day.In the case there are two little plastic memory cards, one of them containing eight videosof fat lady porn. I discovered these at some point in high school, was horrified, and had to showthem to all of my friends as soon as possible.The videos have a date attached to them—12/31/2007. I was four and he wastwenty-three. They were uploaded between 2:15 and 10:30 pm. I have no idea why he spent eighthours of his New Year’s Eve downloading porn onto his PSP, and I don’t think I’ll ever ask him.Three of the eight videos are of a woman with black hair stripping in various locations. InTight Jumper, she’s sitting on a chair in front of a pink-curtained window. She spends a minuterubbing her stomach and staring into the camera. In Valentine, she’s in lingerie on silky pinksheets. She rubs a single rose over her ample chest. In Wine Bar, she’s in public, sitting on a stoolat the titular location. She’s wearing a black cocktail dress and she pours a glass of red wine overherself.Three of the videos are various entries in the Pacific Northwest Stripping series—allfeaturing pierced, leather-booted women in hotel rooms taking off their clothes. One of thewomen bends to pull her panties down, shoving her razor-burn-covered ass into thecamera—God bless her.24One of them has two girls with thin glasses and leather wrist cuffs masturbating togetheron a bed. Credits at the end of the video reveal that they are named Chloe B. and Shelly B. Thelast one is from a series called Hot & Sexy Plumpers, and two busty ladies in corsets fool aroundand pose for a photoshoot.It’s worth noting that none of the women in any of these videos are particularly fat,despite being marketed as such in the intros. They are all fairly average, albeit curvy. The 2007porn market must have been a tough place. I wonder how my dad found them. I wonder how hefelt, hunched over his parent’s computer, waiting for the Pacific Northwest Stripping footage totransfer.I remember when he found porn in the search history on my first phone. He sat me downin the living room and read out each of the titles to me. Each one was more embarrassing thanthe last. He told me that he wasn’t mad, but that I should know that these videos weren’t real. Heasked me if I had any questions about them. I shook my head and ran back to my room.There is only one photo saved onto this PSP memory card—it’s of a four-year-old me inthe back of my dad’s car, freshly woken from a nap. One of my thumbs is in my mouth, my hairis standing straight up, and I’m holding one of his DVDs pressed against my chest.25SkinnyboysclubCheesesteak Slut“This is all I’m going to eat today,” Henna tells me in between bites of her philly cheese.A small piece of bread falls from the end of it into the wax-paper clad plastic basket that thecafeteria serves all of their food in.“Yeah? What about your mom—dinner?” I pick at my own sandwich, staring at a glob ofmelted white American dripping over a charred Steak-umm edge.Henna shrugs—she’ll figure that out later.We are sixteen and hanging out in between classes. We have just gotten off the bus thattakes us from our high school to our local community college for a dual-enrollment program.The bus driver is our friend’s mom, a Jehovah’s Witness named Ophelia who makes the guys andgirls sit on opposite sides of the aisle.“Carson’s presenting today,” I say to Henna before looking over at him. Carson is myex-boyfriend—a tall, purple-haired, ex-Mormon and Eagle Scout. We have been doing finalpresentations in the Sociology 101 class we take together and I am eager to see what Carson’spresentation is going to be. He’s been pissing me off so I hope it’s terrible.Carson is sitting with his friends a few tables away from us. They’re playing Magic: TheGathering. Carson plays a card that makes one of his opponents furrow their brow. He’s winning.That pisses me off more.Henna is drinking green tea in an attempt to preserve her vocal chords for her upcomingperformance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—“I’m Mrs. Potiphar!” shecalls me to say when the casting decisions come out. “I get to be a slut!” The show starts in two26weeks and when I go to the opening night performance, I will meet her brother for the first time.He’s hot! I text her the next morning, to which she responds Ew!“That’s lame,” Henna says, putting her philly cheese down and resting her chin on top ofher cup of soda-fountain Diet Coke. I nod—it is lame.“Going to try to go for a run later,” I tell Henna, picking up a grilled green pepper inbetween my pointer finger and thumb. I pop it in my mouth and crunch. “If you wanna comewith.”Henna shrugs, “I think I’ll just do, like, a hundred sit-ups in my room tonight.”Henna is my best friend and we have recently decided to pursue a path of thinnesstogether—working out, counting calories, purging. “I just hate the way I look,” I tell her one day,staring at myself shirtless in the full-body mirror in her room. I pinch at a section of fat hangingover the edge of my jeans.“Me too—I mean, look at this,” Henna lifts up her arm and points to the area below herarmpit.“I think if I was rich—like, Mark Zuckerberg rich—” I lay down on her bed and shefollows suit, landing on my chest, her curly hair sprawling out across me like a furry bikini top.“I would just eat whatever I want and get it liposuctioned out of me. Think about it, unlimitedphilly cheese.”“That’s the dream,” Henna closes her eyes and inhales deeply, as if she can smell theSteak-umm.“Do you think they let you keep the fat when you get lipo?” As I say this, I turn to aposter of the band Queen hanging up on her wall—I purchased a matching one at the same time.27The one in my room is in much worse condition, though. It hangs right above my bed, and myhead rubbing against it has all but torn it to shreds. I have the tattered edges duct-taped to mywall—Henna’s is pristine.“No, but maybe we can steal some. Make a suit of armor or something.”“Or something.” I make eye contact with Freddie Mercury. He’s wearing a black tank topand his arms are crossed. I wonder what he would think about this. If his face on the poster is anyindication, he does not approve.Henna pulls out her phone and opens the Tumblr app. We have each made thinspoaccounts where we repost photos of skinny bodies and weight loss tips. One such tip—thesuggestion that you should chew every bite of food ten times before swallowing it to slowyourself down—swims through my head during every meal.My username is tradingmemories and my profile photo is a selfie of me pouting andlooking bored, originally taken for my profile on a sugar baby dating website. I never succeededin finding a sugar daddy so I am grateful to have found a way to repurpose the picture.My bio reads: 16 / Male / 6’3 / Starting Weight: 225 / Current Weight: 213 / Goal Weight:200 / Ultimate Goal Weight: 180.One of the posts I’ve reblogged is from the user skinnyboysclub, which is a selfie takenin a public restroom mirror. His face is cropped out. The caption says, “I did really good todaywith not eating,” followed by an alien emoji.Another post, this one from anxieuxboy, is a collage of men’s collarbones, covered inpink eyeshadow to make them look bruised, emaciated. The caption, “Don’t you wish you had acollarbone like these? So stop fucking eating!”28I regularly go back to one post in particular—another one from skinnyboysclub— aclose-up photo of the lower bodies of two men sitting next to one another. Their thin,denim-covered legs are tangled up together. One man’s hand is on the other’s knee. It’s intimate,erotic. Seeing it makes my breath catch in my throat.I pull it up and stare at it for a moment before showing it to Henna, “I need this.”She nods and answers, “I need a philly cheese.”Calorie Asperger’sIn the Netflix original movie To the Bone, Lily Collins plays Ellen, a twenty-year oldwoman living with anorexia. The film begins with Ellen leaving an in-patient program where shestruggled to make any progress.In a scene near the beginning of the film, right after Ellen has returned to her father andstep-mother’s house, her half-sister quizzes her on her ability to determine the calorie counts ofthe foods making up their dinner.“All right, ready?” Kelly gets out her phone to fact-check while Ellen stretches like she’sa wrestler preparing for a big fight—she’s dressed like one, too. The costume designers haveplaced her in loose black clothes to show that she’s trying to hide herself. Her sleeves are pulledup to her knuckles.Ellen begins, “Two-eighty for the pork, three-fifty for the buttered noodles,one-twenty-five for the buttered beans, one-fifty for the roll, and fifty—no, seventy-five forbutter.”Kelly is impressed, “You got all of it. Dang!”29Ellen applauds herself before Kelly continues, “Oh my god—It’s like you have calorieAsperger’s.”In the next scene, Ellen’s stepmother weighs her. Ellen lifts off her shirt and the cameralingers on her chest, her ribs, her collarbones.By the time I make it to high school, I am well acquainted with calorie counting apps. Iam practically a professional.My favorite is called Lose It!, which I appreciate because of the coordinating and colorfulclip-art next to every piece of food you log. A premium membership to Lose It! gets you macrofunctionality with pie charts for each one. Protein is colored purple, but net carbs are a sky blue.I really like Lose It! because of the water logging capabilities, making sure you get at least eightcups in every day.There’s also MyFitnessPal, the one my mom recommends to me sometime in the fourthgrade, to which I respond by downloading it on my iPod Touch. MyFitnessPal is a more robustapp than Lose It! (it even comes complete with a low-cal recipe section) but I find the blueuser-interface less appealing than Lose It!’s orange.Most calorie counting apps include a feature where you can track your weight every day,providing you with a line-graph of your weight-loss progress. I relish watching my line droplower, lower on the graph.During the press circuit interviews for To the Bone, when asked about her dramaticweight loss for the role, Lily Collins talks about her own experiences with anorexia as ateenager—she was willing to take on the job to challenge herself as an actor, to shine a light on a30taboo topic. On her appearance on Live with Kelly and Ryan, she says she hopes to “makeeveryone feel less alone who’s going through it.”When I think of Ollie’s, I think of red copper cookware. The discount store’s homesection is full of the stuff—it’s everywhere you look. It’s inescapable, mass-produced during theproduct’s brief infomercial-driven fame and forgotten about. Ollie’s is full of these kinds ofthings—the has-been and once-was.I go pretty frequently with my grandparents before I’m old enough to refuse to. I hate themascot, Ollie, a cartoon drawing of an old man who covers the walls in various funny outfits—amermaid tail, a sombrero, a chef uniform. I think he is terrifying. His white hair andbuck-toothed smile would plague my dreams—like an octogenarian Freddy Kreuger.I always haunt the book section while they peruse the rest of the store, filling their cartswith slightly-expired snacks and misprinted graphic tees. I am always frustrated by Ollie’s lackof first books in series—they only have sequels.One such trip, I spot a book with an icy blue spine on a shelf in the young adult section. Ipick it up and look at it. The cover is the face of a teenage girl, completely frozen in ice. The titleis written in a wobbly, cursive font in front of her—Wintergirls. I decide I want it immediately,thinking it looks appropriately emo. I take it to my grandparents and sit it down in their cart ontop of a red copper pot.That night, I tear through the entire thing in one sitting, unable to put it down.Wintergirls follows Lia, an anorexic teenager recovering from the death of her bestfriend, Cassie. She copes with this by cutting herself and being sassy in her narration throughout.When she eats food, the author includes the calorie counts of each item in parentheses.31On page 220, after Cassie’s ghost starts haunting her, Lia says, “If I weighed 010.00, Iwouldn’t be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough is 0.Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.”My grandparents make me breakfast the next morning and I refuse it, saying that I don’tfeel well.You can read Wintergirls in its entirety on silentscreamsandskinnydreams.weebly.com.I watch To the Bone several times with my cousin Nikki, whose eating disorder socialmedia of choice is MyProAna, a minimalist, forum-style website with sections likeThinspirations, Accountability, and Diet Results.I have never seen the ending of the film because Nikki always grabs the remote and endsit about two-thirds of the way through, when Ellen starts to recover.“It just isn’t as good after that,” she tells me while turning it off and I agree.Eugenia/KarenEugenia Cooney is an online personality best known for her vlogs, cosplay, emo makeup,and anorexia. Despite never having said explicitly that she has the disease, nearly all of thediscourse about her is outrage about her body, how thin she is, and how she is a bad influence forher underage fans.Dozens of online petitions have been made to remove her from various social mediaplatforms. A current one on change.org has over a thousand signatures. One from 2016 had overten thousand.32Eugenia is aware of this outrage. A recent video from her is titled I’m Going Away,implying that she is leaving the platform, perhaps due to the numerous petitions asking for herremoval. A click on the video reveals that it is a vacation vlog, she has gone away to DisneyWorld. All of the top comments are about her body, how ill she looks, how they fear for her. Onefrom sarah6292 says, “I’m so sorry that this awful disease has robbed you of your life. I hopeyou find peace, wherever you end up.”She has more titles like this—Why I Left, Things Are Really Bad Right Now, I’mChanging My Lifestyle. In each of them, she starts the video as her usual cheery self. She smilesinto the camera, does her makeup, tries on clothes. She never mentions how the clothes hang offher body, how her cheeks are hollower with every upload.In 1981, Karen and Richard Carpenter go on the British talk show Nationwide to promotetheir new album Made in America. Made in America is the Carpenter’s tenth album in twelveyears. They’ve taken a three-year break since their last one, Christmas Portrait, came out in1978. They have not let this hiatus (or the new decade) influence their classic Carpenterssound—Made in America is full of the same airy melodies and soft guitar that marks their othermusic. Karen’s voice rings loud and sweet over each track.On Nationwide, Karen and Richard sit together on a couch across from interviewer SueLawley. The press has been concerned with Karen’s thinness and their break, believing that sheis ill. Lawley is determined to get to the bottom of it.“It was eight years of being constantly on the road and all of these tours andthen—nothing,” Lawley says as the Carpenter siblings watch attentively. It’s their third take atanswering this question after lighting mishaps interrupted the first and second. “Why?”33“We just took a vacation. We wanted a little break,” Karen explains.“It wears you down,” Richard is leaning towards his sister on the couch. His shirt ismostly unbuttoned, revealing a shiny chain dangling from his neck.Lawley gets to it. She’s been holding back up until this point, but now she’s ready tostrike. “Karen, there are rumors that you’ve been suffering from the slimmers’ disease—fromanorexia nervosa. Is that right?”Karen shakes her head and furrows her brow. Her smile fades. “No, I was pooped.”Eugenia Cooney regularly does talking-based livestreams where she sits in front of herwebcam and responds to viewer comments and questions as they roll in. Many of thesecomments are about Eugenia’s appearance, how she needs to eat, and how close to death sheappears. She always reacts to them with a polite laugh, carefully choosing her words as to notreveal too much on the subject.In one such livestream, from April of 2023, Eugenia sits on a pink Naruto-themedgaming chair at her desk. She’s dressed like Spongebob, complete with matchingyellow-and-green cut creased eyeshadow on her lids. Behind her, dozens of Hello Kitty stuffedanimals rest on a plush throne. She still has a Christmas tree up.Someone in the first few minutes of the stream asks how Eugenia feels about intermittentfasting, to which she says that she “can go a while without eating” and that, “I eat when I eat!”She makes sure to cover her tracks by saying that “it works for some people.”A few minutes later an eagle-eared viewer comments, in an attempt to catch her, “Shejust admitted to not eating! She’s in massive denial about having an ED.”34Eugenia reads this one with an exaggerated rage, as if to show how ridiculous the personis being. “No I didn’t. I eat every day. I never said that.”Each of her livestreams follow this same formula, full of her inoffensive, politicalresponses to viewers trying to make her admit to an eating disorder, probably from people tryingto repost clips of her for views in the event that she slips up.It’s easy to imagine how lonely this must feel, constantly being at the receiving end of afiring squad of these kinds of questions. She’s always visible, always criticized—always madepainfully aware of the body she’s in.The eighth track on Made in America is called “When It’s Gone (It’s Just Gone),” it’sslower, more somber than the rest of the album—a contrast to the cover with the Carpenters’airbrushed, smiley faces overlaid on top of one another.The song ends with Karen singing, “There’s no word for the sadness. There’s no poetry inthe pain. There’s no color in the stain where tears have fallen. It’s gone, it’s just gone. It’s gone,it’s just gone.”She dies two years after Made in America’s release due to anorexia-induced cardiacarrest. Her blood sugar level is ten times the average because of her overuse of ipecac syrup, anover-the-counter medication meant to induce vomiting.Seven years after Karen’s death, New York City punk band Sonic Youth releases “Tunic(Song for Karen),” a song written from her perspective. In it, the band’s bassist and guitarist,Kim Gordon sings breathlessly, stumbling over her words as she works her way through Karen’spsyche.35“I feel like I’m disappearing, getting smaller every day,” she sings on the bridge, hertrademark bass searing behind her. “But when I open my mouth to sing, I’m bigger in everyway.”Gordon, who also wrote “Tunic,” cites Carpenter as an inspiration to her, an example ofhow women are treated in the entertainment industry, writing in her memoir, Girl in a Band,“The only autonomy Karen felt she had in her life was exerted over her own body. She was anextreme version of what a lot of women suffer from—a lack of control over things other thantheir bodies, which turns the female body into a tool for power—good, bad, or ugly.”She publishes an open letter to Carpenter in a magazine around the time of the song’srelease. In it, she asks Karen, “What’s it like being a girl in music? What were your dreams? Didyou ever go running along the sand, feeling the ocean rush between your legs? Who is KarenCarpenter, really, besides the sad girl with the extremely beautiful, soulful voice?”Bad VegetarianNikki shows me Freelee the Banana Girl and we quickly become obsessed. Freelee is anAustralian raw vegan YouTuber who makes videos about health and veganism. In the past sixyears, she has moved into the wilderness and gone off-the-grid—hiking, growing her own food,showering in waterfalls, etc.Half of her videos are of her critiquing other YouTubers' diets. She bounces on a yogaball in front of a green screen, with the video taking up the frame behind her. She pauses it everytime they eat an animal product and chastises them, pulling up slaughterhouse footage andeducating them on various forms of animal mistreatment. Through watching them with Nikki, I36know that baby cows are separated from their mothers to make milk and that eggs are chickenperiods.The other half of her videos are showing what she eats in her day-to-day life. She feastsat tables full of dozens of bananas, watermelons, and strawberries. She devours them all, withher voice describing what she’s eating in voice-over.In all of her videos, Freelee is sure to plug her work—a self-help, weight loss ebook,called Raw till Four. She proposes that the human body is only really meant to digest raw fruit,and that one should eat that until 4 pm. The cover, which she always includes footage of, isher—blonde and smiling—with two bananas held over her flat stomach. In all of her videos,Freelee includes clips of her lifting up her shirt to reveal her abs.In one from January 2014, called A Day in the Life of a Raw Till 4 Vegan, Freelee startsher day with a bike ride and a two-gallon banana smoothie. For lunch, she has three containers ofcherries and for dinner, she has six potatoes pureed into a soup.Nikki and I make fun of her relentlessly. We make fun of her voice, her editing, and theway she tears up when talking about livestock mistreatment.Even though we are making fun of her, we can’t help but notice how thin she is. Wedecide to stop eating meat shortly after.I hold onto my vegetarianism for years, sticking through it for all of high school. I facecomments from my family constantly. “You’re not sick of that rabbit food?” My dad asks mebefore offering me a bite of his hamburger. “I won’t tell anyone.”37The truth is that I want to eat meat desperately—that I think about it constantly. Everytime I see a chicken wing, I imagine myself ripping the meat off of the bone. I imagine the greasedripping down my face.Henna also chooses to forego meat with me, and we sneak meat constantly—neither of uscan resist the call of late-night Burger King runs, sausage biscuits, and pepperoni pizza. Despitethis, we still choose to label ourselves as vegetarians, thinking that all of the flack we’ve receivedfrom our families would be worth nothing if we folded.Even after moving away from home, I held up the facade for months—hiding burgerwrappers in my car like corpses.38Bad BiologyAfter I hooked up with that methhead, my dick felt like this monstrous thing. It felt like a giantleech, attached to me at the crotch. I kept imagining it sucking out my life, swelling up with pus,and bursting all over the poster-covered walls in my room. There would be nothing left ofme—just goo and ooze and nastiness. I couldn’t stop thinking about my pus dripping from myceiling fan. Surely, in the event of a pus catastrophe, my landlord would keep my deposit.I don’t remember the methhead’s name (maybe Greg?), but I remember his house. “Sorrythis place is a bit messy,” he said when I walked in, having been summoned by a late-nightmessage on a hookup app. “I’m just getting settled in.”“You’re alright.” He looked older and balder than his pictures, but I had already driventhere so I figured I would stay. I would hate to waste the gas.I took a look around to see what he was apologizing for, to see if it was warranted. Hishouse seemed put together enough, although there were unpacked boxes tucked into some oddcorners. He put his hand on my back and led me to his living room.His living room consisted of a couch, a desk with at least seven computer monitors on it,and various nautical decorations (netting, little striped lighthouses, buoys, a sailboat in a bottle,etc). It reminded me of the lighthouse wallpaper my grandfather put up in his living room when Iwas in middle school. I tried not to think about how I was going to fuck a man who reminded meof my grandfather.“Do you get high?” he asked me before sitting me down on his couch. There was a bongon his coffee table.39I thought about the bowl my roommate and I smoked together on our porch earlier thatafternoon. I ground up lavender and rose petals to put inside and I felt really fancy, like somekind of THC barista. “Yeah, dude. Definitely.”I noticed that he had a video pulled up on his TV from the website SketchyDick calledTweaker faggot gets railed and cums. I thought that this was a little intense but I didn’t think Iwas in a position to pass judgment. Just that morning, I had jerked off to a video called Stayingwith my Guncles (a portmanteau of gay and uncle, naturally), wherein a young otter stays withhis uncle and his uncle’s husband and seduces them both. Let he who is without sin cast the firststone, I thought. At least the tweaker faggot gets to cum at the end.“Awesome.” He pressed play, took his pants off, and grabbed his dick. It was thick andpurple and veiny. He held it the same way he held his TV remote.I followed his lead and did the same.“You’re so sexy,” he told me, leaning into me, his warm breath hitting the side of myneck.“You too.” I couldn’t tell if I was telling the truth.He got down on his knees in front of me and started to blow me, his gray beardscratching the inside of my thighs. I tried not to flinch and let him know that his beard wastickling me. After a few minutes of that, he stood up, wiped his mouth off, and walked to hisdesk. “Let’s get high.”I watched him as he made his way to a spot next to his computer monitors where Inoticed a small pile of white powder, which he scooped up and brought to his bong. I realizedthat at the end of the bong, where a bowl would normally be, he had affixed a small glass orb.Oh shit, I thought. I just agreed to smoke meth.40My heart started beating quickly in my chest and my thoughts started to race. I didn’twant to be rude, but I knew I should leave. I looked around for an escape—an open window,maybe?“Um!” I shot up from the couch. “Can I use your bathroom?”“Of course, man.” He pointed me in its direction before taking a hit of meth.I zipped to the bathroom, whipped out my phone, and quickly Googled Can you get AIDsfrom a blowjob? and Can you get secondhand meth high? The answer to both was probably not,which was reassuring. I used his hand soap to wash my cock in the sink before I left—just to besure.“I had long suspected that God had a special purpose for me,” Charlee Danielson deliverswith conviction in voice-over in her climactic monologue from Bad Biology, a trashy 2000shorror joint by the king-of-sleaze Frank Henenlotter. Her character, Jennifer, is one of BadBiology’s two protagonists. She is a woman with a hyper-evolved reproductive system, born withat least seven clits (she’s sure there are more but she can only see that many). She has aninsatiable need for sex and murders her partners after fucking them.She’s delivering this monologue while the penis of the other protagonist, Batz, is insideher. His dick, pumped full of steroids, has leapt off his body and gone on a rampage, sneakinginto women’s homes and fucking them. Watching Bad Biology with my friends in the theater, Ihooted and hollered at a scene where the dick attacked a woman as she stepped out of theshower—ripping her towel off and throwing it to the ground.Jennifer continues her monologue. “I had long hoped that someday God and I would belovers—and finally we are. I can feel God deep inside me. This is rapture.”41She begins to float off the ground. Heavenly music plays. “I can feel it all inside me—the garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, Armageddon. And they’re all inside my pussy.”The other time I had to wash my dick in a sink, I stopped at a gas station to do it. I pulledover, feeling disgusting—like my skin was peeling off of my body. I tip-toed my way to thebathroom, brushing past one of those machines that lets you whip up your own milkshake. Iwould always beg for those on childhood road trip stops, but hated the way they turned out. Ialso didn’t know if the spoon the machine used to stir the shake ever got cleaned—gross.I locked the door behind me, grateful that I had chosen a place with single bathrooms.There was one of those machines that pumped out dick-enlarging pills and condoms bolted to thewall. I cataloged that in my brain for later.I whipped my cock out, positioned it over the sink and started washing it. The foam ofthe soap from the automatic dispenser slipped off the slope of my balls and into the sink. Itreminded me of a nature documentary I watched about penguins—the way they would slide ontheir bellies on the ice. I don’t know if penguins have balls.I snuck a glance at myself in the mirror—hunched over, holding my shirt up with onehand and my prick with the other—and thought I could feel my dick itching. I had just left aman’s house after attempting to fuck him. He was only a few years older than me and had a liferaft up on his wall in his bedroom. It hung over a shoe rack full of Sperrys.He pushed me onto his Pottery Barn bedspread, took his shirt off, and sat on my lap. Istared at the freckles on his shoulders, trying to make patterns in them. I was starting to see theoutline of a minivan when he leaned in and stuck his tongue in my mouth.42I grabbed his hips and started grinding against him. He liked that and got off me, took hissweatpants off, and put his ass in the air. I followed suit in stripping and assumed my positionbehind him. I realized my dick was wet almost immediately.I froze. What was happening? Had I pissed myself? Did I slice my dick open withoutrealizing? Had he pissed himself? I looked down and was devastated to learn that my dick wascovered in his shit. It was the worst possibility, Murphy's Law in action. It could happen, so itdid.This harsh confirmation only brought me more questions. How could he not know thathis ass was full of shit? Does he not wipe?I backed up and silently went to his ensuite bathroom. A pile of dirty underwear restedagainst the wall opposing his toilet. I hunted for skidmarks. I didn’t see any, but I didn’t want tolook very hard.I grabbed a wad of toilet paper, wiped my dick off, and slid my underwear back on. I lefthis house without saying a word. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had done this intentionally,set out some kind of fecal trap. As I closed his front door behind me, I wondered, Did I just getshit-attacked?That night, I dreamed that my dick was a giant kaiju monster attacking a city. Thegovernment sent in an android version of my dick that they had built to destroy it. Theyfought—flesh against steel. I woke up when the mecha-dick blasted my balls with its laser eyes.In the coming-of-age horror flick Teeth, Dawn, played masterfully by Jess Weixler, is aspokesperson for an abstinence group at her high school. She starts the movie buttoned-up,dressed only in pastels, proudly passing out purity rings to her classmates.43Dawn meets Tobey at a group meeting and is instantly attracted to him. He’s all shaggyhair and skater-boy charm, wearing a v-neck and leather cuff bracelet. She hangs out with himalone at a swimming hole and when he tries to force himself on her, his dick gets cut off when itgoes inside her vagina.Dawn does her research and realizes that she has vagina dentata (a vagina with teeth),probably because of the nuclear power plant near her house that the director is sure to includeseveral shots of.At the end of Teeth, Dawn fucks her douchebag stepbrother Brad and uses her toothypussy to bite his dick off. She lets his rottweiler eat it. He spits out the pierced tip and the camerafocuses on it for a moment—blood-flecked and discarded.If my dick is a monster, surely it's a parasite.I remember learning about a parasitic worm that infected grasshoppers and crickets in ahigh school Biology class—netamorphs. They live in bodies of water. When they come intocontact with insects, they enter them, growing and reproducing until they are totally in control ofthe host's body. I remember my teacher saying that they could grow up to two meters long. Sheshowed the class a video of the worm leaving a grasshopper’s body, long and twisting andspindly. It looked evil.I sometimes think that my penis has this sort of control over me, its roots connecting allthe way to my brain, piloting me like a mech suit. It forces me to make the worst decisions, tothink horrible, horny thoughts. It’s responsible for my sleaziness, my trashiness, my rottenness.I read the book Sideways Stories from Wayside School in the first grade, at my friendEthan’s house. Ethan was a few years older than me and our parents were friends, so I would44spend my afternoons after school at his place. One of the stories in Wayside School was aboutthis boy named Sammy, who always wore a big coat. When his teacher made him remove it, sherealized that actually he was wearing several coats and that he was in fact not a little boy, but adead rat. I wonder if you did that to me, peeled away all the extra stuff, all that would be leftwould be my dick.Sometime that year, Ethan took me up to his tree house and asked me if I wanted to seehis privates. He told me that if I said no, he would push me out and watch me hit the ground.45Dildo ShoppingI have never bought a dildo, but I have spent a great deal of time thinking about it. I haveresearched online, rather extensively, which dildo would be the best for me– keeping in mind itsblend of materials, size, shape, and cost. To help me in this decision, I’ve turned to Reddit (as Ido with most questions I have).On the reddit post “Where to buy a dildo,” posted to r/AskGayBros, user richn1987 asks,“I’m looking to buy a dildo online, but I’m not really sure what website I should use? Any goodrecommendations for a good realistic dildo? Thanks for your help.” The Gay Bros have severalanswers to his question, which I am happy to read.The top reply, by CanucksRN says, “Amazon. Read the reviews and decide for yourself ifthe dildo is right for you.” HockeyJock91 agrees, adding that Amazon is “cheap, easy, fast anddiscreet.”A user with a deleted account says, “Dildo is overrated just buy lube and use fingers thenstart fisting.”From Euphylia99– “Fort Troff I like, just ordered their robo rimmer which is basically apossessed buttplug. They sell a bunch of other stuff too.” The original poster responds to this,saying that he placed an order from them and got a free cock ring.MeowskiesQQ has a more comprehensive list. He endorses specific brands, such as BadDragon, Aneros, and Lovense (a brand of bluetooth-compatible sex toys that are popular withcam performers).46Coconut_0il asks, “Is Bad Dragon’s cum lube good?” MeowskiesQQ answers that helikes how goopy it is, but worries that it shouldn’t be ingested orally. He includes a link to aseparate forum post to illustrate this. The link no longer works.A click on Meowskies’ profile reveals that he is active on Reddit, a moderator in ther/gay community, and that he lives in Akron, Ohio. His avatar is blonde with glasses. In the pastfew years, he has gone from being over three hundred pounds to being under two hundred.He is insecure about his loose skin, evidenced by a post in r/LatexAdvice where he asksfor advice on his potential purchasing of a latex catsuit. “Would it hold everything in place?” heasks, to which Synthetic responds. “I look better in latex than naked, and I’ve lost 40lbs.”Meowskies comments on more posts than he creates. His most recent comment is belowa post made to the GaymersGoneWild subreddit, where a man— stardustgravity— has uploadeda video of himself jerking off with the caption “would you rather swallow my load or get filledby it?”Meowskies chooses not to answer the question. “Oh dang, you’re really handsome.”On another post in the same subreddit, this one being a photo of an erect penis in front ofa deck of Magic the Gathering cards, Meowskies comments to ask how he intends to use thosecards in gameplay.Attached to a photo of his penis, wankwoofwimble on the twinks subreddit asks,“Want ataste?”From Meowskies– “From base to tip, let me taste every inch.”Meowskies is a moderator on the gay subreddit, where he has used his admin powers totake down a post for containing “gratuitous eye candy.”47One of a few posts made by Meowskies is from September 2018 titled “Woo! Goodbyevirginity and anxieties it caused.” In this post, he details his previous struggles as a twenty-eightyear old virgin, his first sexual experience, and the joy he feels following it.“My insecurities didn’t exist in that moment,” he writes, “I had a pretty decent time.”Scrolling farther back in his profile reveals more posts by him about his path to losing hisvirginity. In May of 2015, he posted a selfie with the caption, “Am I as ugly as I think I am?”July of 2016, “Holy $@#$ someone finally responded to me,” with a story of a man sharingnudes with him on a dating app.Meowskie’s first post is from July of 2012, where he writes about his long-distancerelationship with a man from Moscow. He asks for advice on going about moving in with him. Inhis next post, made in August, they had broken up.48Scarf-ed Straight, or A Very Disappointing OrgyIt started on Sniffies, as all good things do.Sniffies is this gay hookup app—the modern, digital answer to cruising. Instead of a park,a hiking trail, a gym shower, a mostly-unused parking lot, Sniffies works from your smartphone,the palm of your hand. The UI of Sniffies is a map, showing you the locations and profile photosof the users around you. These photos are usually explicit– zoomed in, anonymous nudes. Ashredded torso with a hint of pubes poking out from the corner of the frame. An erect penis,viewed from the head on. An asshole.This morning, a check on the Sniffies website revealed the jockstrap-clad ass of a man athousand feet away from me. He had his fetishes listed on his profile—socks, facial hair, bodyhair, feet. He’s 26 years old and 175 pounds.Sniffies has a feature where you can organize group events. People request an invitationand, if accepted, they are added to the group and are able to see its location. I saw the group forthis orgy about a week in advance. Forty people had already been accepted. Shiiit, I thought. Igotta get in on this. I was accepted as number forty-one. The location was a room of an EmbassySuites hotel about thirty minutes from my house.I remember watching the total rise as the week passed. Three days out it was at sixty-two.On the day of, it was seventy.Calling this orgy disappointing is misleading, I suppose. It implies a certain level of hope.It implies dashed expectations. Admittedly, my expectations were low.49I thought that the best-case scenario was that I might find a hot guy there, fool aroundwith him, and then leave with a new experience under my belt, a fine layer of sweat sticking tomy skin (or would it be lube?).The worst-case scenario was death. As I drove there, I couldn’t help but imagine myselfbeing murdered– the seventy person event being an elaborate ruse organized to kill me. Iimagined all seventy of the attendees watching me as I entered the suite, knives in their hands. Iimagined them stabbing me as I begged for mercy, like a faggier ides of march.I wondered how they would dispose of my Prius in the parking lot. Maybe they woulddrive it into the bottom of a lake. I would hate to see all of my CDs gone. The chewed-upsquirrel-shaped dog toy that lives on my dashboard drowned and waterlogged, never to be seenagain. I guess I wouldn’t care, as I would be dead.Honestly, I just wanted to know what seventy horny gay men would look like packed intoone hotel room. What would it sound like? What would it smell like?The orgy was meant to start at seven, but I didn’t want to go then. I thought that Ishouldn’t be too early, but I didn’t want to be too late either. I knew that there were few thingsworse than being one of the first people to show up to a party. I didn’t want to have to makesmall-talk with these guys as we waited for things to get started, after all. I decided on sevenforty-five, thinking that this would be the ideal amount of lateness for this particular event. Ihopefully wouldn’t be the first to arrive nor the last.When I got there, I was apprehensive. The parking lot was vast and mostly empty. Iwaited in my car for a moment, double-and-triple checking that I was in the right location, that Ihadn’t somehow typed the wrong Embassy Suites into my GPS. I imagined walking into thewrong hotel room and stripping my clothes off only to be greeted by a horrified family of50tourists– maybe a businessman there for a conference. “Wait!” I would plead to the policeofficers arresting me for indecent exposure. “There’s been a mix-up! I promise I’m not apervert!” I doubt they would be very understanding.I left my car and made my way to the hotel’s automatic doors, being guarded by asecurity guard who was about a foot shorter than me. I shot a closed-mouth smile and a nod hisway. I hoped that my polite demeanor would communicate that I was certainly not there for anorgy. I came up with a cover story in case I was caught— “Oh, I’m just visiting a friend.” Itwould be very convincing.I walked into the hotel and checked the room number again. It was on the fifth floor. Isearched for the elevators. I ran my cover story through my head a few times as I walked past thecheck-in desk, manned by a woman with a tight blonde ponytail. I thought of the way I wouldsay it, with a casual shrug. Maybe I would even put my hands in my pockets—cool and casual.As I passed her, she didn’t even look up.I got in the elevator after two men, probably in their mid-forties, and saw that they hadalready pressed the button to the fifth floor. I took one look at them, with their perfectly trimmedbeards and patterned cargo shorts, and knew that they were there for the same reason I was. Icould tell that they thought the same for me. We spent the elevator ride staring at each other inheavy, loaded silence– terrified to say anything in case our gaydars were mistaken. They weren’t.We found the room and shared a knowing glance before we stepped inside.The suite consisted of two rooms—a living area which the front door opened into and abedroom with two queen beds. The living area was pitch dark.I followed my elevator-mates into the bedroom and was greeted by four men—two oneach bed—having sex with each other. Where were the seventy men I was promised? I stood51there for a moment with my elevator-mates, watching them fuck. The only thing I could thinkabout was how lame this was. Somehow, I had not factored in the possibility that this could belame. Dangerous, maybe. Gross, for sure. But lame? There was no way.I spotted a small pile of orgy supplies on the TV stand across from the beds. A fewcondoms, two squeezy bottles of lube. A bottle of poppers. I wondered what the normal rules fororgies were. What would seventy people worth of lube even look like?My thoughts were interrupted by a man opening the front door, light flooding into theliving room. He was wearing a scarf, a fedora, and an overcoat. It was the middle of August.He stripped off his clothes and ran into the bedroom, sprawling out onto one of the bedsnext to one of the fucking pairs. He was nude but had decided to keep his scarf on. I took onelook at his almost-naked body and decided it was time for me to go. I went through a Taco Belldrive-thru on my way home.I think about the man in the scarf often. Why did he keep his scarf on? I just can’t wrapmy head around it.I hope he’s having a good day.52Onion Ring ExpressVan DickThe man’s name is Jace this time.He’s wearing striped-blue board shorts with tan flip-flops. His brown hair is croppedshort and an arm-length tribal tattoo pokes out of a gray tank top, like a Rorschach test made outof knives. He’s smoking a cigarette.“Jeff, right?” the man filming him asks while the van he’s riding in slows to a stop. “Wemet at Suzie’s birthday party?”Jace shakes his head, walks up to the van, and scratches his neck with the corner of hiscell phone. “No, that’s not me. I’m Jace.”“Jace, yeah. I know you.”Jace laughs and points towards the other man, “Sure. What’s the deal with the camera?”Without an answer, the cameraman slides open the door to the van, revealing a blondewoman who has pushed her turquoise tube top down to reveal her large breasts.She lays back on her elbows, flips her hair out of her face, and says, “I thought since youdidn’t remember our faces, you’d remember these. Do you?” At these, she uses her shoulders topush her breasts together.Jace steps towards her, “I could get used to them.”There’s a cut in the video and Jace is now sitting in the backseat of the van next to thewoman with her tits out. She sits, her patterned-legging covered knees pointing towards him. Shehas one hand buried in his board shorts.“Are you ready to get your dick sucked?” the man behind the camera asks. He’spositioned himself on the van floor opposite them.53“That sounds great and all, but the camera is really tripping me out,” Jace says, as thewoman’s hand digs farther into his shorts.“I have an idea,” she says. “What if we blindfolded you?” She reaches behind herself onthe van seat and pulls out a green bandana.He acquiesces, and she ties the bandana around his face. She gets down on her knees infront of him, slides his shorts off, and strokes his hairy thighs with her long nails, “I’m going togo put my hair up, okay?”He nods silently, as she uses his legs to push herself up and move herself into the otherside of the van.The cameraman laughs, “This guy is getting his dick sucked today!”A man crawls into frame, a pornstar named Jeremy Stevens, replacing the blonde woman.He assumes his position on his knees in front of Jace, and begins to blow him.This goes on for a few minutes until the blonde woman, now fully clothed, sitting next toJace on the van seat, leans in to say to him, “You know what I would really like?”Jace, realizing that she isn’t the one blowing him, throws his blindfold off, pushes Jeremyaway, and covers himself with a pillow, “What is going on here?”The cameraman tries to reason with him- “Come on dude, her jaw got tired.”“No,” Jace reaches for his shorts. “This is bullshit. I’m not a faggot.”“She was going to come right back.”“I’m not a faggot,” Jace repeats. “I’m not a fucking faggot.”Jace, whose full name is Jace Chambers, is a gay porn star best known for his work in thehunk and jock subgenres. He usually tops. A click on his XVideos profile reveals titles such asMuscle stud works on his cock while getting toe sucked. In the thumbnail for this one, Chambers’54socked feet are getting licked by a bearded man in a gray graphic tee that reads “Meet me in thebar.” Another video, titled Tattooed dude with schlong rims and pounds, features Chambers asthe titular tattooed dude. This one belongs to a porn production company named XXL Buddies.The video in the van cuts again, this time to reveal Jace, having been convinced by thevideo crew, fucking Jeremy.“An asshole is an asshole, right?” the cameraman asks.Jace laughs, moans, and shoots back, “Fuck you, dude.”The video ends with Jace ripping off the condom he was wearing and ejaculating ontoJeremy’s chest.“I wish that was me,” the blonde woman adds, out of frame.This video, posted to XVideos under the title Get Your Ass In The Van! I Want Dick!,belongs to a series called Bait Bus. All Bait Bus videos follow the same format- a straight man,always played by a gay porn star, is picked up off the street. He is convinced by a woman,usually with large breasts, to receive a blowjob for which he must be blindfolded. He is blown bya man, another gay porn star. There is always a moment where the “straight” man figures it allout, rips his blindfold off, and proudly proclaims that he is not gay. The man is always angry,sometimes threatening violence on the Bait Bus crew. They always end the videos convinced tofuck the other men. They always top.Onion Ring Express“Mateo is fucked up if he thinks he’s topping me,” I say to my roommate, Abby, tryingcarefully not to spill my full glass of wine as I point my hand towards myself for emphasis.55“He probably does,” she takes a sip from her own glass, before scrunching her nose up indisgust. She’s sat on our couch, making eye contact with me through the window that leads fromour kitchen to our living room. “He definitely does.”“I really can’t tell if he’s straight or not,” I make my way to the living room and sit downon our couch- cheap, hard, faux-leather.“Why don’t you just ask him?” Abby sits her glass down on the coffee table.“I can’t do that. It would be weird, right?”“I don’t know if it is.”Mateo is my latest crush- a tall, curly-haired boy who had, up until recently, beenregularly having sex with one of my best girl friends before she broke things off. He was theroommate of another one of my friends, so I saw him frequently, mostly in passing. We wouldmake small talk in their kitchen, joking about movies we had watched or video games we hadplayed.One night, Mateo and I attend the same house party. Spurred by a freely-available sportscooler full of jungle juice in the kitchen, I decide to flirt with him. I lean in when he speaks, restmy hands on his back, and dance pressed up against him. Later that night, we drunkenly ridehome together in the back of my friend’s car, where he grabs my hand. When we stop at a stoplight, he laces his fingers between mine.I spend the rest of the weekend thinking about it.“Have you seen this?” I pull a picture up on my phone and turn it towards Abby. It’s aphoto of a buff blonde man, sitting on a loveseat. It’s blurry, the product of being screenshottedand shared over and over again. He’s looking straight into the camera. In front of him, white textreads, For every girl who won’t treat you right, there are three gay guys who will eat onion rings56off your boner. Next to the man’s head is a smiley-face emoji with a banana hanging out of itsmouth.“Ew, gross. That’s weird.” Abby frowns and looks away from my phone.“I think it’s true,” I respond, finishing my glass of wine, before slamming it back on thetable with a clink!Mateo comes over a few hours later. We sit on my couch, watching a movie together inthe dark. I rest my hand on my knee, and slowly inch closer to him. When our knees touch, hemoves his legs away from mine.Ass PreventionIn a video uploaded to GayCK.com under the title Humongous, Dumb, and Hetero, a mancalls his girlfriend. “Hey babe,” he says, holding his phone up to his ear, his light brown hairsitting like a loaf on the top of his head. “I’m still at the store. I think I’m going to be a littlelate.”The man is sat in what appears to be a stockroom. He’s on a plastic fold-out chair next toa matching plastic table. He’s being recorded by a camera hiding in the corner of the room. He’sjust been locked in there after a security guard has accused him of stealing. “Wait here,” theguard barks at him before leaving the room. “I need to get some paperwork.”The guard returns, sits across from the man, and begins to question him, reading off of aclipboard. “Have you ever been arrested?”He shakes his head.The guard is unconvinced, “You’re going to need to take off your clothes.”“Am I under arrest? You’re not even a real cop.”57“I’m going to need to recover the property you stole. You can either strip now or in aroom full of cops.”The man relents, takes off his clothes. The guard begins to search him, patting him downand bending him over the plastic table. The guard reaches into the man’s ass and pulls out anecklace.“Do you regularly keep things in your ass?”“It was a present for my girlfriend.”The guard writes this down on his clipboard, “You could have this on your record forever.Do you want that?”“No.”The guard is sat right in front of the camera, hiding his face, “Well, maybe we couldcome to a compromise.” He stands up and unzips his pants, walking towards him.They begin to have sex.The guard asks, while his penis is in the other man’s mouth, “Do you like that?”“I’m working for my freedom,” He removes the penis from his mouth. “So no.”“You have to make me like it if you want to get out of here- if you want to get back toyour girlfriend.”This video belongs to a series called YoungPerps. They all follow the same format,although there are sometimes multiple guards interrogating and having sex with the thief. On theYoungPerps website, a blurb on the homepage reads, Our security guards and loss preventionofficers are hung and hungry for straight boy ass!Above that, a close-up photo of a blonde man frowning is next to a graphic advertising asale on website memberships- sixty percent off. He’s covered in cum.58Restoredking“Bisexual guys are so hot,” Patty says, each word a blast of warm air against my barechest. “I mean, they could have sex with a woman and they’re choosing me?”“I think they’re hot,” I respond, looking down at them, feeling their weight against thecrook of my arm. “But I haven’t met one who isn’t terrible.”“You’re right.” They look up at me. We have just hooked up for the first time aftersending each other nude photos of ourselves for months. It’s summer, my room is hot, and thesweat on our skin makes us stick as we lay together on my bed.“You know Steven?” I ask, referring to a possibly bisexual friend of ours who I haverecently become acquainted with.“Yeah, we made out at a party once. He was super hot. I grabbed his dick- it was verynice.”“Was he hard?” I ask. This seems important to me, like the hardness of Steven’s dick is adetermining factor in the possibility of his bisexuality, with direct proportionality. I imagine agraph mapping it, wondering if hardness would make a better x or y axis.“Sort of.”“Nice.” I think of my own interactions with Steven, mostly involving him texting me,asking me to hang out, and then not following up when the time came. I remember ranting to afriend on one of these nights as we sat together in my car, saying things such as “Metrosexualityis killing me!” and “We will never be free!”Patty kisses my cheek and stands up to search for their underwear, a pair of white briefsthat had made their way onto the edge of my dresser. As they move, their now-flacid penis does59too. I sit up, grab their hips, and place a kiss on it- right on the tip. They look down at me.“Thank you.”“No problem. Anytime.”“Can you tell I’ve been restoring my foreskin?”“Restoring it?”I grab their penis and inspect it, like a monkey inspecting a banana it wants to eat forlunch. It looks mostly standard, as far as circumcised penises go, save for a band ofslightly-loose skin around the shaft, where the circumcision scar used to be.“Every morning, I tug at it right here-” They pinch the loose skin, and pull it over thehead of their penis. “And I hold it for, like, a minute.”“Does it work?”“I think so. I have this friend, Evan, who restored his. You can’t even tell it’s not real. Doyou want to see it?”“Of course.”Patty finds their underwear, puts them on, and sits down on the edge of my bed, phone inhand. I sit behind them and wrap my arms around them, resting my chin on their shoulder. Theyopen Twitter and pull up an account with the username restoredking.Restoredking’s bio reads, “NSFW 18+, I’ve been restoring my foreskin for 4 years usingonly manual methods.” He has 247 posts, most of them containing photos taken before, during,or after him stretching his foreskin.One post, made the past August, features him from the mid-torso down, not wearingpants. His dick is erect. The caption reads, “I love having a foreskin to protect my shining pinkhead,” followed by the hashtag foreskinrestoration.60His foreskin looks natural, as far as I can tell, covering the whole head of his penis. I ask,my mouth against Patty’s ear, “Does it hurt?”“Sometimes. It really hurts if you get hard while you do it.”I nod, thoughtfully, “What’s the point- why do you want to restore it? Why bring itback?”Patty closes their phone and peels the elastic of their briefs away from their waist to lookat their own penis, “It’s just hot. I don’t know- manly, or something. Cavemen had foreskins.”“Cavemen had foreskins,” I repeat.The next morning, I try to tug at my own circumcision scar. It burns. I think about doingthis for years, keeping up with it, keeping track of it. I wonder what it looks like when theforeskin is only half restored, or three-quarters. I wonder if it would ever shrink back to itsoriginal, un-restored state. I go to the Wikipedia page for foreskin restoration, where I see aphoto of a device used for it, involving a tube attached to a man’s shaft that is tied to hismid-calf.It looks torturous. I never try to do it again.Got Lust?“Come on, friends,” Mrs. Morgan says chipperly to our Kindergarten class. We’restanding in our cafeteria, and our backs are facing a short brick wall near the entrance. We arewaiting in line to use the bathroom before we make our way to a school-wide assembly in ourgym. “Quiet down- other classes are still going on right now.”“Sorry, Mrs. Morgan,” Montana pleads from right beside me. She’s standing in front of aGot Milk? poster featuring The Rock. He’s standing, wearing a blue silk shirt, unbuttoned to61reveal his muscular physique. Text next to his sunglass-wearing face reads The People’s MilkMustache. One of his eyebrows is cocked.“Suck-up,” I shoot at her, under my breath. Montana turns to me, messes with asnap-bracelet on her wrist, and sticks her tongue out.She has just broken up with me after I called her bossy during a coloring activity in class.We will get back together next school year during a class trip to our local YMCA Splash Pad.She sends her best friend, a blonde girl named Brayden, to ask me if I want to beboyfriend-and-girlfriend again (“Montana says that you look really good in your swim trunks!”).Ten years later, in high school, Brayden tells me that she only has sex with men who own trucks(“You think I’m getting fucked in the back of a Camry?”).The line moves forward as one of my classmates finishes drinking from a water-fountainaffixed to the cafeteria wall, something he does by putting his mouth all the way around thespigot. He joins a line forming beside my teacher.My attention turns to Christian, a boy a few spots in front of me in line. His soccer jerseyis drenched in sweat from our recess earlier in the day. I remember seeing him play soccer withhis friends, something which I found particularly interesting from my vantage point sitting atopour school's newly-renovated orange monkey bars. I noticed the way his sneakers drug againstthe playing field, sending dirt flying behind him. The way he lifted up his jersey to wipe sweatfrom his brow, exposing his belly button.“Who are you looking at?” Montana whispers to me, careful to be quiet under Mrs.Morgan’s watchful eye.“Christian. He’s so weird.” I watch him poke one of his friends in the ribs.“I know. Jamal told me that he pulls his pants all the way down when he pees.”62“Gross.” I look at him and see that he is two people away from being in the front of theline. I decide that I must get behind him, see for myself if this is true. I snap Montana’s braceletoff of her wrist and go forward.I push myself into line behind Christian. The boy I am cutting in front of groans to whichI explain, “I really have to go.”We move forward, and now Christian is next in line. I pray that he is not finished peeingby the time I reach the front. I pray that I catch him, pants down.He goes next and disappears into the bathroom. I can feel my heart beating faster.It’s my turn now, as a boy wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt has just finished washing hishands. He uses his camo cargo pants to dry them.I walk past a tile half-wall to the section of the bathroom containing the urinals and I seehim there, his gym shorts in a pile on top of his sneakers, his butt exposed.The urinal next to him is empty, so I assume my place at it, keeping my eyeslaser-focused on the bathroom wall. I do not have to pee, so I just stand there for a momentbefore zipping up and walking away. When I see my reflection in the mirror above the sinks, mycheeks are bright red.I make sure to sit next to him at our assembly. A few years later, Montana and Christianbegin dating. They break up sometime before we leave for middle school.Daddy“Oh, I just hate this stuff,” James clutches tightly onto my arm. He hides his face behindmy shoulder, turning away from the television screen in front of us, perched on the edge of hisbed. On it, a woman gets stabbed in the throat by an evil nurse brandishing a killer syringe. She63screams, and blood spurts out of her wound. It sprays the nurse in the face over her surgicalmask. James peeks over my shoulder. “Is she done yet?”She isn’t.The nurse shoots her hand forward, grabs the syringe, and twists it. The victim chokes onher own blood.James jumps, “Oh my god!”“I’m sorry. I forgot it was like this,” I tell him as the nurse pulls the syringe out, wipes itoff, and puts it in her scrubs pocket.James is a man that I regularly have sex with. He is tall, bearded, and twenty years olderthan me. I meet him online shortly after I graduate high school. “It’s okay. I’m just a baby.”The scene changes and he sits back up. He wraps his arm around me, pulling into hischest. I run my pointer fingernail down a patch of hair in between his pecs, “Nothing wrong withbeing a baby sometimes.”On the television, the victim’s friend finds the victim’s body and screams. The camerazooms in on her mouth before cutting to the next shot.James takes out his phone to respond to a text. “Look at what my ex-wife sent me,” helaughs and turns it around to show me what’s on the screen. It’s a photo of his son, who appearsto be about six, holding up his hands towards the camera. They’re covered in green paint. He’swearing footie pajamas. Both of his front teeth are missing.I stare into his son’s eyes. I had no idea that he had been married before or that he hadchildren.“Ex-wife? Are you bi?” I ask him, eyes focusing on a long white hair growing on hisright nipple.64“I suppose, technically—I don’t know if I’m ever going to fuck a woman again, though.”“Why not?”“I did that already. For a long time.”“I guess that makes sense.” I flip around and look up. His alarm clock has a projector ontop that shows the time on the ceiling. 1:35.I can’t help but ask the question that’s weighing on my mind- “Who’s better, then?”“What do you mean?”“Men or women. Having sex with them.”“I can’t answer that, it’s two different things.” James runs a thumb over my earlobe. “Mywife was so conservative about everything—she wouldn’t let me go down on her for years. I hadto beg her to do it.”I laugh at this, now unsure how to respond. I think about the sex I have with James, howhe calls himself Daddy.James puts his phone away and stands up, telling me that is going to get a drink, “Do youneed anything?”“I’ll have whatever you get.”He shoots me a thumbs up. “Sure thing.”He brings me a can containing a sugar-free health soda and cracks it open. It starts to fizzslightly—foam grows over the opening. He brings it to his lips and sucks the foam up. “Sorry,”he says, handing me the still-cold can. “I always do that for my kids.”Me and James stop meeting up when I leave for college. A few times a week, I open myphone to see that I’ve received a text from him.It’s usually a picture of his penis.65Team DTati Westbrook has on a smokey eye.Her nails are short, painted a glossy maroon, her hands resting on top of her left knee,which is pressed up to her chest. She’s in front of a pristine, all-white vanity. A display of JeffreeStar branded lipsticks sits on top of it—pink, erect.“Hey, you guys,” she starts, looking into the camera. “Welcome to today’s video.”This video is titled Bye Sister, in a reference to the way James Charles, another beautyinfluencer, begins his makeup tutorials- with a quick, snappy “Hi, sisters!” Westbrook, frustratedwith Charles’ promotion of a hair vitamin and supplement brand, SugarBearHair, that rivals herown, Halo Beauty, uploads Bye Sister as a takedown of him. It is forty-one minutes long.In it, she describes her allegiance to Charles and how she’s functioned as a mentor to himthroughout the beginning stages of his career, saying that she stuck with him even when “no onewanted to work with him because of his Ebola scandal.” This is in reference to a tweet made twoyears earlier by Charles, reading, “I can't believe we’re going to Africa today omg what if we getEbola?”After talking about her mentorship and Charles’ supplement-related betrayal of her, shestarts to go after his character, saying that he is wild and unprofessional— “Everything isover-sexualized. I finally have had enough.”Charles is openly gay and Westbrook, now addressing Charles directly, brings up anothertopic, his pursual of “straight” men.66She alleges that he has a history of messaging young, confused straight boys and“tricking” them into giving him sexual favors—“It is really disgusting to manipulate someone’ssexuality, especially when they are still emerging into adulthood.”She ends the video in tears, telling James that he needs to “go and get some help.” Itreceived over thirty million views before it was deleted off of Westbrook’s YouTube channel. Inthe span of three days after the upload, Charles loses three million subscribers.Other internet personalities take to social media, calling Charles a predator and sayingthat he needs to have his channel taken away from him.Zara Larrson, a pop singer, tweets that Charles tried to flirt with her boyfriend onInstagram, saying that his obsession with straight men is “concerning considering that they willnever give consent, since they don’t play for team D.”Eight days after Bye Sister drops, James uploads his response—a forty-three minutevideo titled No More Lies. In it, the frame is centered on his face, although his french-tippednails can be seen gesturing in front of his chest. His eyebrows are perfectly manicured, with falselashes glued onto his eyes. He’s wearing a Balenciaga-branded tracksuit zipped all the way up.He spends the forty-three minute runtime refuting every one of Westbrook’s claims, withscreenshots of text conversations from him, Westbrook, and men that she references in her video.The video ends with Charles saying, “The last few weeks of my life have been the mostpainful time that I’ve ever had to deal with. My brain went to a lot of dark places that I didn’tthink I would ever come out of.”He pauses and takes a shaky breath before continuing, “I can’t believe I just admitted thaton camera.”67Nick“I am so bored,” I groan, watching an animated eighteen-wheeler drive over the bridgeI’ve constructed for it. Once it reaches the middle, the bridge buckles under the weight of thetruck, sending it flying into a river below. Bold text on the screen appears and reads FAILED. Isigh and kick my feet out in front of me, sending the wheelie chair I’m in careening away frommy cubicle. “This is stupid.”“I don’t know- I think it’s fun.” Nick says from beside me. I look at his computer screenand see that his truck has passed over the river with ease, moving him onto the next level. Thistime, he has to build a bridge that can withstand two eighteen-wheelers and an earthquake.When the earthquake hits, everything on the screen shakes and a beam connecting thecenter of the bridge to the river wall falls into the water. His first truck makes it but the secondone does not.We are on the third day of a week-long engineering summer camp for middle schoolershosted by our local community college. So far, we have made robots with Legos and used 3Dprinters to make fidget spinners. Today is our lesson on force and our instructors, all engineeringstudents, have chosen to illustrate this by having us play a game (aptly) titled The BridgeDesigner.Nick is my friend—a tall, athletic boy who lives a block away from me. Our mothers areboth nurses and work together at a doctor’s office nearby. I regularly go over to his house, sit inhis room, and watch him play video games.I am in love with him. I spend my time at school drawing him, thinking about him, andlooking at him from across our shared English classroom. Unfortunately for me, he’s straight andhas been texting one of our classmates, a girl named Jade, for weeks.68A week before the end of sixth grade, I get invited to Nick’s house for his twelfthbirthday party. His parents have rented a GameTruck- a trailer hoisted onto the back of a Fordpick-up truck containing three flat-screen televisions connected to a PlayStation 4, an XBox 360,and a Wii.I ask the GameTruck attendant if they have Grand Theft Auto and am denied, as Nick’sparents said that we were not allowed to play any M-rated games.After the party, Nick comes over to my house to spend the night. Sitting in front of mytelevision, tucked into sleeping bags, empty bags of potato chips scattered around us, Nick spotsmy flute poking out of my backpack. “You should play something for me.”I shake my head, No.“Come on,” He pesters—I can see a fingerprint smudge on his transition lenses, nowturned clear. “It’s my birthday.”I give in and pull out my flute. My book of sheet music has been forgotten, tucked awayin my band room cubby for the weekend, so I play the only thing I can remember—Jingle Bells,which our class learned for a Christmas concert the semester before.When I finish playing, Nick looks into my eyes and starts to lean in. Before he can getany closer, my mother peeks into the room to tell us goodnight.Nick laughs and sits back up.I spend the rest of the night wondering if he would have kissed me had my mom notinterrupted. I wonder what that would have been like—kissing somebody, kissing a boy. Iwonder if I would have been good at it. I wonder if we would have become boyfriends, if wewould have held hands. I think about how easy it would be to zip our sleeping bags together andsleep cuddled next to one another. I think about how he would have felt in my arms.69After he goes to sleep, in the darkness of our TV room, I jerk off in my sleeping bag. Icum into a pair of bright-red gym shorts, which I stash next to my thighs until the morning.Before he wakes up, I run downstairs and hide them in between my mattress and boxspring.By the end of the summer, Nick has moved away.Dig ‘Em DonutsCharles Rhines was born July 11, 1956 in McLaughlin, South Dakota. The youngest offour siblings, he had to work hard to stand out.“He was a discipline problem. He didn’t like to conform to rules. He had very few friendsthat I knew of,” his former principal W.O. Rorvig said to a reporter at a local newspaper. “Hewas always in some sort of trouble or another.”Rhines dropped out of high school at seventeen and joined the Army. He served for threeyears, then went to the University of South Dakota. He was kicked out before finishing hiscourse for burglarizing another student’s room.In 1979, Rhines put on one of his mother’s wigs, sawed the barrel off of a shotgun androbbed a liquor store in a nearby town. He was caught and sentenced to ten years of prison. Heserved seven of them.In 1991, Rhines was hired as a night baker at Dig ‘Em Donuts in Rapid City, SouthDakota. He was fired the next year for insubordination. When Rhines was running out of moneya few weeks later, he decided to rob the store in the middle of the night. Donnivan Schaeffer, atwenty-two year old employee at Dig ‘Em Donuts, came into the store as Rhines was there to getsupplies. Rhines stabbed him in the stomach. He died that night..70“What would you do?” Rhines told investigators after his arrest. “You’re standing therewith two thousand dollars in your hands and there was nowhere left to run.”He was put to trial in 1993. Rhines was gay, a fact that had been brought up during histrial. While deliberations were taking place, members of the jury sent a note to the judge askingwhat life would be like for Rhines in prison, if he would be allowed to “mix with the generalinmate population,” “marry or have conjugal visits,” or “have a cellmate.” One juror said, “Ifhe’s gay, we'd be sending him where he wants to go.”Charles Rhines was sentenced to death. He was executed in 2019.The Mild-Mannered Talk ShowJenny Jones holds a small stack of notecards and a microphone close to her chest. She’swearing a yellow blazer on top of an orange button-down shirt and her hair is cut into a bob. Theedges have been bumped towards her neck- almost as if she’s wearing a perfectly-styled blondehood over her head. She’s standing in a studio audience full of people, all sitting. They are eagerto hear what she has to say.“Now,” she starts, looking straight into the camera pointing at her. “Which of these wayswould you choose to reveal your crush on someone?”A camera pointed solely on the audience reveals a man in a striped sweater vest staringdown at his feet.Jones continues, “A—would you write that person a letter? B—would you tell the personin private in case he rejects you? Or C—Would you tell that person that you’re gay and you hopethat he is too on national television in front of millions of people?”71After he is, the audience begins to clap and cheer, nearly drowning out Jones completely.A group of audience members throw their fists up in excited glee, sat in front of a white signreading The Jenny Jones Show in an all-lowercase font. Jones laughs politely with them, a smileon her face.“Listen,” she says, the audience still cheering. She pauses for a moment, shaking herhead. “It takes a lot of guts to do this- a lot of guts. We have flown six men and women intoChicago here who know someone has a crush on them, but that’s all they know.”Jones introduces her first guest, a woman from Kentucky named Jennifer Blevins.Jennifer’s hair is long, quaffed, and curly and she’s wearing a floral-print halter dress. Hereyebrows are plucked thin. She sits in a chair, in a row of three, on the Jenny Jones Show stage.“Jennifer, could you describe this person to us?”“Well, his name is Richard. He’s a bartender from Louisville and he’s tall and realmuscular.” She speaks with a soft, sweet southern drawl.“Richard?” Jones asks, “This is a show, if you heard the intro, where people have crusheson the same sex- and his name is Richard?”Jennifer nods and responds, succinctly, “I’m a transexual.”The audience erupts with laughter. A few men, sitting behind where Jones is standing,start whispering to each other and pointing towards the stage.Jones does not laugh, but she smiles, still politely. She lets the audience's reaction to thisbombshell do the talking for her. It’s 1995, and she’s in the fifth season of her eponymous talkshow. She has not lasted four years on the air by being controversial or by taking hard stances.In a profile on Jones for The Washington Post, written in 1991 to coincide with therelease of the first season of the show, titled The Mild-Mannered Talk Show, Jones says to writer72Michael Abramowitz, “I'd have to go really out of my way to offend someone, because I don'thave it in me—I can't do it. I'm such a non-confrontational person, it's very hard for me to insultsomeone. I'll try to find my own interesting way to challenge people without being offensive.”Later in the profile, a representative for Warner Brothers, the company behind The JennyJones Show, says that the show is an “alternative to the harder-edged, more tabloidy kinds ofshows out there.”Jones continues speaking with Jennifer, “Does Richard know you’re a transsexual?”“I think he’s got an idea. I’m not sure.”At this, Jones introduces Richard onto the stage. He’s wearing a threadbare purple muscleshirt and he flexes when he steps out in front of the audience. They cheer in return.Jones tells Richard that Jennifer has a crush on him and then asks her, “Is there anythingyou have to tell him?”Jennifer looks over to Richard, now sitting beside her on stage, and says, “I know Ihaven’t had the time to really talk to you about this, but do you know I’m a transsexual?”Richard shakes his head, and responds, “I had no idea.”An audience member stands up and asks, “Would you still date her?”“I think we could be friends.”The crowd hoots, hollers.After a brief commercial break, a new admirer is brought out, a man named ScottAmedure. He is blonde, wearing a black vest over a white dress shirt. He’s there with his friend,Donna. Jones introduces her, “Donna has been helping Scott pursue his secret crush on John.Scott, tell me about the first time you met John.”73John moves around in his seat a little, his hands clasped together in front of him, “Well,he was under a car. Fixing Donna’s brake lines.”“What was your first impression?”“I only saw the lower half of him, so you can imagine.”The audience likes this. A few claps can be heard from off-camera.Jones continues- “You’ve had fantasies about him?”“A couple, yeah.”“And?”“It involves whipped cream, champagne. Stuff like that.”Jones asks Donna about what she’s been doing to help Scott with his crush. Donnareveals that she’s John’s neighbor, that she’s been inviting them both over for dinner in the hopesof bringing them together.“Do you think he’s gay?” Jones asks.Donna shakes her head and says, “I’m not sure.”Jones calls John out to the stage. He hugs Donna and then steps towards Scott. Scottreaches for a hug, and John pulls away.“Guess what,” Jones says to John, when he’s sat down, her white teeth shining in thestudio lights, “Scott has a crush on you.”“Interesting,” John responds.Jones replays the clip of Scott talking about his fantasies. The camera operator makessure to keep the camera focused right on John’s face. He’s embarrassed. He buries his face in hishands.74Jones asks him how he feels about this, to which he says that he is definitely straight andnot interested in other men.That night, after the show is finished taping, Scott and John go out drinking together.Afterwards, they have sex. Three days later, Scott goes to John’s apartment and leaves a note onhis door. John finds the note, purchases a shotgun, and goes to Scott’s mobile home—shootinghim twice in the chest, killing him.The episode never airs. |
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