Mandate

Jan ’85 I bought my first gay porn mag, Mandate. I’d started the diary up again in my poetry notebook, writing brief one-paragraph diary entries between poems. In those paragraphs I kept pushing myself to buy a Blueboy. Blueboy? I liked the title.

Maybe the store didn’t have any Blueboy. Of Mandate I remember huge close-ups of penises. I still don’t find such things erotic. Frankly I think the penis looks absurd. Objectively there isn’t anything about the male body I find preferable to the female (except maybe the lack of breasts, which seem to me rather in the way). I also didn’t find the fiction erotic – the pumping and gasping and jerking, often in a public (or semi-public) place. I was taking home from the library drier sociological reading (which was hard enough for me to get to the check-out counter). I was on the look-out for what fit me.

Porn still makes me uncomfortable. Because it’s dirty? Yes, I suppose. I don’t want anybody to see me looking at it. They might think badly of me! Philosophically I have no problem with porn, but it’s always been the case that my emotions have been stronger than my reasoning mind. Intellectually I knew how ridiculous it was to think I’d die if I asked at the counter for a porn mag (or an employment application) but the part of me that knew better was in control. I almost said, “in firm control”, but firm isn’t the word -- hysterical, trembling, panic-stricken maybe.

What a struggle!