A Brief Interview with a Disturbingly Honest Man

Is there a specific �type� of woman you find particularly attractive?

Like Ike, I like dykes. (During World War Two, eggheaded Eisenhower verbally countermanded an order that would have initiated a witchhunt of lesbians in the WACs. (As everyone knew, finding a dyke in the WACs was only slightly more difficult than finding a sailor on a battleship.)) One of the great tragic facts of my erotic life is my overwhelming attraction to hardcore butch lesbians: Steins and Toklases, leather women, dykes on bikes, bulldykes with buzz cuts and labrys tattoos, really mannish women, businesswomen with strap-ons in their carry-on bags, they�re all irresistible. And the fact that they, pretty much by definition (not to mention natural selection), have no sexual interest whatsoever in me ensures that they will always remain irresistible--always the tantalizing pussy-flavored fruit hanging just out of reach. Well, miles out of reach, actually. It is the safest imaginable form of sex because it can always and only be imaginable. The moment a dyke fucked me, I would cease to desire her, because she would cease to be the object of my desire. Ideals can only disappoint us.

Have you attempted to requite this desire?

Your terminology is delightfully archaic.

It�s yours.

Just so.

The Question�

Ah yes, have I ever fucked a dyke�Rather difficult, by definition, no? I have had ample opportunities for friendships--some brief, some extended, some continuing to the present--with women who prefer the aqueous grotto to the rigid jade. It is to remembered images of the closest of these friends that I masturbate every morning in the shower between 6:48 and 6:51 a.m., a fact that would surely surprise none of them, given that at least a few of them seem to consider the penised of the species to be descended from a sub-branch of Neanderthal that never satisfactorily evolved. Which would be another reason I love them.

Have you speculated as to the etiology of this desire?

It started on the elementary school playground, where all love begins. A short, fat, unathletic, nerdy, geeky, glasseswearing sissy boy, I eschewed boyish things and played with the girls. I swung on the swings with them, slid down the slide, jungled on the gym (which I�ve always thought of as a �Jungle Jim,� as though it were named after some forgotten Mungo Park with a sideline in tubular construction). I was especially drawn, for reasons that will be unsurprising to dialecticians of eros, to a pair of boyish girls, best friends, named Hannah and Kate. They were tomboys, their jeans scuffed from rough play, their shirts stained from tree-climbing, their conversation weighted toward tractors and combines and firing their fathers� firearms. I envied them; I suppose I wanted to be them even more than I wanted them, whatever �wanting� might mean in the third grade. They were carefree and independent and fearless and many more now-forgotten things that I desperately wanted to be. They were more thoughtful, more mature, than those silly boys arguing over kickball on the grass. (The boys were the children we other children disdained.) I loved all the tomboys on that playground (and since it was a rural area fertile with farmgirls, there were many to choose from and no need to choose), yellow and brown and tawny ponytails bouncing behind them as they ran in rowdy gangs across the gray pavement, leaping all cracks to avoid maternal chiropracty; or whirling in a girly blur when they spun the old wooden roundabout, chips of blue paint (lead-based, surely; brain damaging as all bejesus) raining to the ground below their kicking feet; or hanging upside down on bent knees from the monkey bars, their pigtails flying back and forth as they swung simianly through the crystalline winter air. Oh, I loved them with an unspoken, unthought purity of love that can never die and never has. It has merely matured along with my mind: the girls giving way to tomboyish teens and eventually to the dykes of the present day. There have been feminine men too--transvestites, chicks with dicks--but these were brief excursions, daytrips off the highway of pure desire. Call it fixation if you wish; I�ll call it love.

So there is an element of pedophilia in your desire.

Is that a question?

If you wish�

�Element� is a useful word. Covers a host of unspeakables, n�est-ce pas?: the element of hatred in love, the element of Oedipal revenge in filial identification, the element of infantile incest in adult attraction, the element of masculinity in femininity and its elemental vice versa, we�ve more elements than Euclid. Yes, there is an element--a radioactive one, deadly if mishandled. Let me be clear--

Please.

--There is an element of pedophilia in everyone�s erotic desires, from mine to Caligula�s to Pope John Paul II�s. As children, we were all pedophiles. We were powerfully attracted to other children. And the memory of that desire remains in a disavowed portion of the adult mind--like the pornographic backroom of a family video store (a simile that dates me, I fear, to the ancient PreNetflixian Era), a special backroom that, when finally entered, will be found to contain nothing more scandalous than a shelf of Disney films. But as adults we bar ourselves from that mental room. And therein lies our rage at the adult pedophile (who for his crimes deserves every beating he gets; I�m not in the apologia business, you see, except for myself): he is a classic scapegoat upon whom we project the desires--yes, the elements in our desires--that disturb us unspeakably. We despise the pedophile not because he is alien, but because we know him all too well. We understand his desire because we formerly shared it. He is our most secret sharer. A different fall of the dice, and it could have been any of us parked beside a playground and masturbating against the steering wheel when Barney Fife rapped his flashlight on the window and sent us to hell. This is all rather obvious, isn�t it?