Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody's memoir "The Black Veil"; calling the book "lies" and "criminal," and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as "heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses'; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov ... the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis ... wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's ... and the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of DeLillo."

Continue Reading...

Frank discusses with equal ease the bounce/rump-shaker move and the self-reflexive nature of the post-tourist, and her experience reflects less mind-body dissociation than one might expect. She created a set she calls her Ode to Baudrillard at one of the clubs, stripping off layers to songs (one from "The Matrix" and one by White Zombie) that reference the philosopher who argues that reality -- sorry, "reality" -- has become indistinguishable from its representations, or simulacra. (Had she not retired to academia, I would suggest that Frank add Hole's "Doll Parts" with its Baudrillardian refrain, "I fake it so real I am beyond fake.")

Continue Reading...

We're all the same when we're filling out our online dating profile; it's a democracy of self-display in the little boxes for favorite books and movies, hobbies, pets, political affiliation. For "Body," I check "Slender," "Athletic," "Muscular," "Average" and "Could Lose a Few Pounds" to communicate the static of womanhood in America and still seem hot. My mature dream guy will get the joke. He'll also get my screen name: "barely legal."

I end "What I'm Looking For" with "Divorced, kids OK," which is actually an understatement. I love children, and I'm not driven or wealthy or brave or selfish or selfless enough to have one by myself. So I've pretty much bid adieu to my nubility (which spell-check wants to change to "nobility." Fuck you, Microsoft).

Continue Reading...

Twenty-five years later -- who'da thought? -- as many classic rock boomers as punks are on oldies tours. For a few C's, I could watch the Stones twinkle in a logo-draped stadium, playing songs that stopped being about anything around (their) age 30. I'm glad Dylan found his grizzled voice, and wearing that wig and fake beard to Newport was genius, but his songs have narrowed to either nostalgic Americana or curmudgeonly bordering on nihilism. I love that Patti Smith is playing rallies against Bush's fall-winter product line (Manifest Destiny is the new black), but as Jon Langford boozily pontificated at the CBGBs merch table, "she hasn't made a good record in 20 years so she can fuck off."

Continue Reading...

That scene falls toward the end of "12 Monkeys," which is, like "Vertigo," a love story between a damaged detective and a dead beauty. Willis' James Cole, sent from the 2030s, hides out with his psychiatrist, kidnap victim and lover, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), in a theater where "Vertigo" is showing. It's late 1996; a viral plague will kill her and 5 billion others in a few weeks. On-screen, Kim Novak's first incarnation explains her bogus "past life" to Jimmy Stewart, pointing to the dated rings in the trunk of a fallen redwood. "I was born here, here I died."

Continue Reading...

Now Kansas officials want to make it even easier to extend sex offenders' incarceration, requiring only that the prisoner be deemed "dangerous" and have "a serious mental health problem," rather than be "unable to control" his behavior. One offender, Michael Crane, who was confined to a Kansas mental institution after completing his prison term, is now challenging the state's practice. And for the second time in less than four years, the Supreme Court will decide whether Kansas is going too far to protect its citizens from sex criminals.

Crane was twice convicted of sex crimes, exposing himself to a tanning salon attendant in 1993 and more recently, aggravated sexual battery (attack without penetration) on a video clerk. "Proof of dangerousness ... linked to a serious mental problem" is enough to meet the standards set by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997, insist Kansas officials.

Continue Reading...

Impossible, I argued. The soul mate package comes fully loaded: sexual, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, sense of humor. You never need anything translated because you completely get each other. And you know immediately because you've found your missing half, as in Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium.

"Have you had that?"

"Sure," I said. "I mean, not for that long, and the guy turned out to be crazy, but for a few months there ..." I trailed off. I realized I had no idea why "soul mate" had outlasted the other myths I'd retired from my personal cosmology, like unconditional love and no work relationships and the man who maintains all his initial enthusiasm for cunnilingus.

Continue Reading...

As the only heterosexual male at RMP (for Rolf's Media Plaything, a fictitious name), an S/M video production studio, Juan fit in where women often do in male-dominated workplaces -- he was more object of desire than one of the guys. At the same time, his technological prowess made him indispensable, and the combination brought out the worst in his co-workers and his boss, Rolf -- all gay men. "Because the porn people couldn't be bothered with technology," he explains, "I had to be exposed to everything. They treated me like a tool; they'd talk about anal sex in front of me just to make me uncomfortable, like they were trying to crack me."

At first Angelika seemed like the antidote to Juan's sick work life. Before they took up, he'd spend 12 hours a day editing S/M videotapes, then go home to an empty bed. Now he was sharing the bed and his stories about the goings-on at work. Angelika soon figured out, long before Juan did, that he was being abused at RMP.

Continue Reading...

But Juan says the problem wasn't porn; it was management beating up on labor. The teasing he got as the only straight guy fits the "hostile environment" definition of sexual harassment, and Juan also endured the needy contempt that suits everywhere heap on the math whizzes in tech support. When he tries to explain why he stayed so long in an abusive work situation in the late '90s, when techno-nerds ruled the earth, Juan shrugs. "I don't know, I guess I'm a submissive."

Juan is a big, amiable fellow with a scraggly beard and an orange knit cap he seems to wear 24/7 in the winter. He grew up on welfare in the South Bronx, then got academic scholarships to Hampshire College, where he studied mathematical physics. After a one-year stint working for a certain monopoly near Seattle, he returned to New York, where he had trouble finding work. "There are still barriers for a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx looking for a job at an Internet firm," he says. "People thought I was lying about college."

Continue Reading...

Neither furtive family man nor flamboyant queen, Aaron arrived at his New Year's Eve drag debut by a uniquely convoluted path. It started in art school in Washington, where I first met him. At the time, he was photographing and videotaping himself naked over and over, with bananas duct-taped to his nipples, with bacon stretched across his mouth, with his torso corseted in black paint. He was painting nudes, too, but his female professor pushed him toward the naked performance art. "She told me it was better than my painting," he shrugged as we leafed through his portfolio in his Brooklyn, N.Y., loft.

Continue Reading...

Despite the bargain price, Joe says the night never felt cheap. "It was the purest, least complicated, least guilt-ridden sex I'd had in so long ... I don't feel like I exploited him at all. He was willingly participating and he enjoyed it and he profited from it. I'm not naive enough to think I was his ideal partner, but I liked that he enjoyed it." (With male prostitutes, the client doesn't have to wonder if he really came.) To Joe's surprise, paying for sex exorcised some of his gay-hating Catholic school demons -- and they've stayed away. "It really is a Christmas miracle," Joe exclaims breathily.

Continue Reading...

Since the ad appeared, Willy Mal (the name he's using for this project) has sold 100 copies of the Exoptic Fields tape. He decided to aim the second "deflective" video at something more compelling than turning off the television: sex. He enlisted video artist Benton-C Bainbridge to produce a video to pull viewers' eyes toward the bodies in the room. The result is the 45-minute "Blind Heat." Bainbridge and Mal chose the length because it was 10 times the national average for coitus, according to a stat they read somewhere.

Continue Reading...

Rubin knows that "women who look like that want guys with money or power or high-level something, which is fine. I'm holding out, too, for a hot woman, sort of a trophy woman, I guess." (I like this logic of parity. I want Liam Neeson, and Liam Neeson probably wants something he can't have, too. Ergo, we are compatible.)

Continue Reading...

The only thing argued with more passionate wrongheadedness than politics is sex. Put the two together, and you're back in the surrealistic wonderland of 1998, where "is" might not mean "is" and humans copulate with cigars and blue Gap dresses. The impeachment fiasco hovers over today's election like a taunting Cheshire Cat, causing candidates to clutch their wives and invoke God more often than a Grammy winner.

Continue Reading...

Hotaling left the streets in 1989, and now she tells her story to rooms full of johns. To one such group, she described her old self as "homicidal and suicidal. I was waiting for one of you to take me out somewhere and act a little crazy or ask me to do something I didn't want to do or push my head a little bit harder down on your dick, and I was going to kill your ass. And I had a plan and I had weapons and I had a deep desire to do that, because I was so full of rage."

Her captive audience was attending "john school," the most celebrated branch of a diversion program Hotaling developed with the San Francisco Police Department and the district attorney. Under the First Offenders of Prostitution Program (FOPP), charges against first-time johns are dropped if they pay a $500 fee and attend a daylong educational session. During the seven-hour class, health department officials, police officers, the D.A.'s staff and former prostitutes detail the ways prostitution reverberates beyond the trick.

Continue Reading...

None of them are sleazy people. They all struggle to keep their mini-relationships fair and honest. Most would prefer one steady guy or gal, but they fill the niches that come available in the meantime. Naturally the boxed become boxers themselves, constructing their own sets of friends and flirtations and fucks and arm candy. As a four-year New Yorker put it, "Back in Iowa, you'd find one OK guy and stay with him. Here you can find the perfect sex partner, the perfect party date, the guy who loves opera as much as you do, but he's never one guy." And if that guy did exist, he'd likely be dipping into the stream of single women rushing through New York.

Continue Reading...

But First Guy faded away this summer. He told her to get a passport so he could take her to Europe, but he took his fiancie instead. Mary Lou has seen him only once since May, and she now makes the safety phone call to her aunt. So when Mary Lou met a man who told her he could get her more clients in exchange for a percentage of her earnings, she arranged to meet him at a small nightclub in a rough part of Washington.

She waited for the man for more than an hour and then struck up a conversation with three guys standing outside the club. They asked her her profession; she told them, "I escort." They invited her to their house, "just to party," and started watching a movie on TV. One guy led her upstairs into a bedroom and inquired about her price, and Mary Lou told him $200. When he protested, "I can get a girl on the street for 20 bucks," she said, "Well, I don't work the street. I wasn't working the street when you met me and this isn't how I do business, and I charge this much for an hour."

Continue Reading...

Vermont has struggled with the "M-word" all year. The state Supreme Court ruled in December that same-sex couples must be allowed "the common benefits and protections that flow from marriage under Vermont law." The court pointedly left it up to the Legislature whether to let gays into the hallowed institution or set up "a parallel 'domestic partnership' system." In January, lawmakers began hearing public testimony in the gold-domed Statehouse in Montpelier.

One of the citizens testifying was Montpelier plumber Ann Ross. She has lived almost half her life with Emily Tanner, the last 14 years in a huge Victorian house painted lavender. She declared to the Legislature, "I've been wanting to marry Emily for 20 years."

"I used the word 'marriage' and the word 'wife' in my testimony because it's part of our culture in the United States," explains Ross. "You want to run up to someone and say 'I got married today,' not 'I got civil unioned today.' The words are painful and stressful. It's like when you refer to your 'partner' and people say, 'Oh, what's your business?'"

Continue Reading...

Carol (not her actual real name) wasn't really the sorority type. Nor was she really a stripper, and becoming Bambi (her actual fake name) put some more distance there. "I was dabbling in it," she says of stripping. "I'm more of a performance artist than a lifestyle pervert." Was the art form dance? "No, more like acting, acting like a stripper, infiltrating their world. It's a work in progress of a voyeuristic artist actually living the life of a stripper, living a fantasy."

The acts in the Bambi pageant so far include stripping, fetish modeling, mermaid geeking, pantyless cheerleading and what she calls her "professional psychosexual role-play sessions." Even after the bombshell years are over, she plans to keep making her life her art, joining the venerable tradition of kooky ladies who spice up the demimonde with outre stunts and costumes. Bambi also has company in her mid-30s cohorts, where lots of extroverts blend dissociation and irony the same way she does. The seniors of the Gen X class are the demographic Most Likely to Call Embarrassing Stuff Performance Art -- that includes not just sexual exhibitionism, but aerobics classes, job interviews and dating.

Continue Reading...

Bambi works the sexy-gross-funny combo off the boardwalk, too, as a fetish model, dominatrix and professional baby. A trashy-wholesome bleached blond, Bambi loves her work, including the few years she spent as a stripper. She uses sexually loaded words -- fantasy, exhibitionist, turn-on -- when she describes her happiness at the center of attention. But she's seen men in the grip of real fetishes, and admits her pleasure in being ogled isn't quite the same thing.

Continue Reading...