Lee generally “tops” in S/M and B&D scenes, which is the most enigmatic of
his paradoxes. I’ve known him for several years and can’t imagine this
gentle soul screaming orders or beating someone. He’s worked in various
nonprofits helping rape and incest victims, substance abusers and AIDS patients; now he’s a massage therapist. Yet in his off hours, he dominates grown-up “boys” who call him “master” or “daddy” or “sire.” (Peacenik Lee prefers the last to the more military “sir.”)

While studying yoga and meditation, Lee says, “I discovered that my
spiritual energy was erotic.” He found fellow travelers among the Body
Electric, an Oakland, Calif., organization that hosts erotic massage workshops called Celebrating the Body Erotic (CBE) around the country. Most of the workshops are for gay men, who come to learn what Lee describes as “basic tantric approaches, breath work, erotic massage and sacred and intimate bodywork.” At the start of his first CBE field trip, Lee was disappointed by the hunk shortage, “but by the end of the weekend, I loved these men and was comfortable being erotic with them.” The man running the workshop told Lee he was a natural healer and invited him to skip the usual prerequisites and start running CBE workshops.

Lee ran a few CBE sessions and then found the world of S/M, which fit
him like a rubber tank top — despite the fact that he lacked a discernible mean
streak or a fascination with physical pain. What Lee likes talking about
are S/M’s rituals of limit: how a safe word always stops the play, how red, yellow, green mean, respectively, stop, slow down and baby don’t stop. Lee also loves negotiations, and gets plenty of them whenever he co-creates “safe, sane and consensual” guidelines. Many “players” fill out two-page contracts before they ever pick up a riding crop. As he talks, I start to suspect that S/M and B&D serve society best not by channeling dark urges,
but by absorbing would-be lawyers.

“In terms of controlling a situation, I’m more of a top,” Lee explains —
unnecessarily. He not only requests that he and a psychotherapist friend
see my story before I file it; he says, “And I want something on you too,
like how Roman soldiers would cradle each other’s balls to prove trust.” I
offer, truthfully, “Lee, you know I would love to have sex with you –
doesn’t that give you power over me?” Without missing a beat, he says, “OK, well, how would we work that in?” We’re drinking coffee in the sun; I start
to sweat and change the subject. I hadn’t meant to bluff or challenge him,
just to show underbelly in place of Roman testicles. (I suppose I was also
leaving him an opening to say, “You want me? In that case I
renounce all slave boys and turn my healing love on you.” A girl can dream.)

Lee is intimate with several people at any given time; many of his
friendships are sexual and include role-play. When asked what he thinks of
commitment and monogamy, Lee sighs, “I just knew that paradigm was going to
come up.” Lee believes power is key to any relationship, so ritualizing
it is a more honest intimacy than most marriages achieve. Instead of
paying lip service to equality and then scrapping passive-aggressively, why
not improvise your way to the most emotional scenes? And you get to dress
up! Lee says dominant-submissive games are a shortcut to “the stuff that
feels very juicy and real without spending a lot of time making that person
be everything I need.” Rather than force a monogamous fit, Lee wanders the
city like Cain in “Kung Fu,” applying his sexual healing where it feels “juicy
and real.”

Race is one of those wounds that attracts Lee. “I like topping white men,”
Lee admits. “I work through a lot of power stuff. As a little gay boy, a
little Japanese-black boy, a boy who looked like a girl, I had my power
suppressed a lot.” Lee says his white slaves unconsciously gravitate to
his Eastern half: “It seems easier for a European-American man on a
spiritual journey to identify with an Asian master than with an African master … I can be the Buddha, the teacher.” Sometimes it’s not a Buddha scene, though, so Lee has access to a uniform collection — “guards, military, fascists — very strong images.”

A monk in a sexually playful religion, Lee reminds me of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince when he takes his S/M worldview to its spiritual conclusion: “I’m always topped by the ultimate top, my God, my universe.”

Lee first met Perceval at a men’s healing circle weekend three years ago,
but they did not enter their master-slave relationship until a few months
ago. Perceval watched how Lee ministered to someone he was flogging in an
S/M clubhouse and afterwards approached him. Perceval said that he was
usually a top — a “daddy” to several “boys” — but he wanted Lee to top
him. Lee was honored at that abdication of power and sensed that the two
could have some enriching scenes.

Perceval is not Lee’s only boy, but he’s the boy with the most cake right
now. They get together several times a week. “Master is hot, beautiful,
sexy, erotic, exotic, hypnotic, commanding, vulnerable … magnificent,
magnanimous, generous with the riches that are his,” Perceval writes in a
20-page story called “Myth in Four Movements” about the affair. In the
piece, he weaves together third-person accounts of their ritualized sex scenes,
several myths, including that of the Arthurian knight Perceval, and his own recently unearthed memories of childhood incest and rape. Perceval, a wiry
57-year-old with a white beard and guarded blue eyes, shows up at Lee’s
apartment wearing a suit and carrying two bunches of yellow roses. He hands
one to Lee, then kneels and tongues Lee’s feet extravagantly.

We sit on the floor of Lee’s “play space,” an attic empty except for the
floggers and a few sitting cushions for the interview. Though they address
each other as “Master” and “Boy,” Perceval and
Lee act more like teenagers in love, nuzzling and grinning at each other.
Lee seems more “Daddy” than “Master,” and more maternal than either. He rests
his big hand on Perceval’s chest and directs his breathing when Perceval
recounts the most horrific details from childhood. Perceval is in his
fourth year of “recovery work,” with a psychotherapist, a massage
therapist and a very understanding wife all helping him. All three know
about his relationship with Lee and applaud the results.

Lee says his form of domination resonates with victims of incest and child
abuse as well as the larger group of gay men who “still needs to hear his father or his church say, ‘You’re OK.’ When I hear that boy, I stand in as the father who approves of him.” Shame about being gay — a denial of sexuality — strikes me as very different from the over-sexualizing of incest and abuse, but Lee believes they’re “on a continuum. Both are erotic, both are done on physical and psychic levels to people.”

What’s hardest for me to grasp is that sexual abuse can be healed with
rough or dominating sex. Sexuality is one of the things child abuse steals, along with childhood, strong emotion and, often, the will to live. Like many incest survivors, Perceval has attempted suicide several times.

Lee and Perceval say they are uncrossing sexual wires that have been snarled since Perceval’s mother began pushing enema hoses into him and dragging his naked body up her naked body — starting when he was 2 and continuing for 10 years. Perceval recalls, “My mother was either amorous or punitive, and I never knew from moment to moment what it would be. She would treat me like a lover in the one mood and fuck my ass with something that hurt when she was in the other.”

Lee explains why his relationship with Perceval is the most fulfilling part
of his life now: “Nothing stops me but my own limits … I can say ‘Boy,
do this’ and … even if it’s making me breakfast, he’s doing it because
he loves me; he wants to show me his gratitude for the safety I give him,
for teaching him about himself and helping him get through pain and trauma.
… I can’t say I understand how that all gets mixed together sexually,
but it is, and it’s very powerful when I role-play something and it feels
really real.”

Both men use the word “conscious” a lot, and the myth they’re building
together seems too conscious, too theatrical to possibly achieve the slow
“work” of 12-step groups or therapy. Yet being Lee’s “boy” has awakened
more dead parts of Perceval than anything he’s done in the four years since
his father died and he began revisiting his pre-teen years. Perceval says
the play with Lee — which they also call “the work” — is successfully
“recording over certain messages.” But only the details of his story can convince me.

Carver grew up on welfare, with her mother in and out of hospitals and her father in and out of jail. She did a six-week stint as a teen hooker; married and quickly divorced a French performance artist at 19; attempted
suicide several times; drunkenly brawled and balled onstage and off; had a baby with someone who is or pretends to be a Nazi; and most recently converted
to Judaism and got breast implants. At 18, she first got naked onstage with the performance troupe Suckdog, whose interactive “operas” broke bones in rock clubs across the country. “Dear Lisa Suckdog: Remember me? You beat up my date,” begins a typical letter to Rollerderby, which Carver started publishing when she was 20.

Carver has lived her entire adult life in public. Besides Rollerderby and the two books it spawned, she also puts out long personal essays and a weekly coumn called “Sex Diaries” on the Web site Nerve. In a phone interview, Carver says that her oeuvre is autobiographical “because I can’t write fiction and I’m a bad researcher … I can’t not write. I try to get control of reality by paragraphing it.”

The paragraphing does give shape to the reality, but more and more the reality is controlled by the need to generate copy, especially since she took on the weekly Nerve gig early this year. She’s honoring her commitment to produce steamy columns with the help of her fianci, Boston musician Dave Goolkasian. “It’s my real life, but doing kinky stuff is an impetus to write and make money,” Carver admits. Since taking up with Goolkasian, she’s given him head in the back of a porno store while other patrons watched and flown in a woman she met in a Chicago bar to have sex with them. She’s storing up other adventures for future columns: “The past is catching up to the present, but I’m still a few months ahead,” she explains.

When I ask Carver if she ever feels shame, she replies, “Almost anything,
if you feel good about it, people think it must be neat. Do whatever you did and then say, ‘I liked it,’ and it’s automatically attractive.” She
seems stuck in that groove, as if she needs to prove over and over again that her audience still finds her debauchery “neat.”

At the same time she preaches her lifestyle, however, Carver also seeks guidance from her acolytes. In Issue 23 of Rollerderby, she interviews Christian Scientists, Buddhists, Jews, Catholics and a Satanist about their beliefs, arguing for a system that will embrace her as she is. “I think God is life, is being alive. I tried to be good, I abstained,” she complains to a Christian friend. “It made my soul irritable and withered. Carousing, depravity — I give life that way.” In the next issue, however, the first letter printed is from her copy editor, imploring her to get control of her drinking.

One of Carver’s toughest sells was her affair with her son’s father, Boyd Rice — known in his underground circles for being a Nazi (or an appropriator of Nazi imagery) and a Satan worshipper. She printed the appalled letters from her friends and fans under the headline “Rollerderby Readers Review My Boyfriend.” Carver used one of her favorite tropes, the Harlequin romance, to present her surrender to this “dark stranger,” but the short-lived liaison seemed more like a response to the lousy parenting she’d received. The much older Rice both stood in for Carver’s emotionally abusive father and allowed her to flout authority. Another unpopular
chapter was the breast-enhancement surgery, which she tells me was “a defiant thing. All my friends disapproved and that made me decide to do it.”

When I first call Carver to set up the interview, she admits she doesn’t
know how long she can keep her current life up. “I only want to be a sex writer for a few months for the same reason I only wanted to be a prostitute for a few months — it starts to take over. I feel like I’m the pimp and Dave’s the prostitute — I get the money … It makes me wonder if I’m just doing it for work, working on his body.”

By the time Carver and I talk a few days later, however, she’s gotten back with the program. “Sex writing doesn’t separate me from sex like prostitution did … Sex is so amorphous, but if you’re thinking about writing it, you make it yours, not this cloud. It’s like writing about dreaming — when people keep a dream journal, they remember their dreams better.” Sex writing also suits her Protestant work ethic, she says. “I’m not normal, I’m obsessed. I like to have sex four times a day. It could be a waste of time, but now it’s work.”

It’s as if she’s trying on the opinions of Lisa Carver, Adult, constructing the next volume of her life. She began to shed her wild-child skin in a recent Nerve essay, Lying With My Father. After all the Harlequin romanticizing of boyfriends pushing her around, she lays bare
the roots of her power obsession, describing a spectacularly unqualified parent and the 15-year-old who idolized him. Ken Carver picked up women and abused them for his daughter’s entertainment, teaching her contempt, mistrust and emotional chaos. Carver grapples with his influence throughout the essay, blurring their identities, assuming the blame. Appalled by him as an adult, she tries to break the mold.

“As an experiment, I decided not to talk about sex for that entire summer … I learned that I talked about it constantly, no matter who I was talking to. It also became apparent that it made people uncomfortable, and that I was not comfortable unless no one else was. Just like my father, I needed to keep everyone around me off-kilter, so I could control and direct the situation. I had become a monster.”

She risks a lot in this essay. (When I compliment her on its courage, she calls it “whiny and humorless and no fun.”) She says her father hasn’t seen it and she hopes he doesn’t. But she’s cutting an even more important tie by disavowing the sex-talking monster she “had become.” It is, after all, the in-your-face Lisa “Suckdog” Carver whom Rollerderby readers embraced and Nerve hired.

Carver says she recently attended a party whose theme was “what will you do
for a dollar. Everyone was like, ‘Oooo it’s Lisa Carver, she’ll do anything,’” she complains. “I’m not a party girl anymore; I’m not crazy or poor, so I’ve started to figure out how to live beyond all that … In high school I went from being ostracized to being so weird people were in awe of me. With Suckdog and Rollerderby, I caught up with the sex image of myself and I dragged that stage out for 10 years.”

Carver just turned 30, and her son is 4 — old enough to read soon. She
has just signed a contract for two books: the partly written “Sex Diaries” and an account of two cross-country trips. One trip will be a composite of Suckdog debauchery and the other her honeymoon with Goolkasian, scheduled for this summer. She is finishing up the 25th and final issue of Rollerderby and grappling with “how to fit myself into institutions like marriage” and motherhood.

Carver’s son comes into her office while we’re on the phone. She patiently asks him several times to go downstairs, she’ll be down in 10 minutes. He argues reasonably, not brattily, then goes away. “Be a good boy,” she calls after him. He singsongs back, “Be a good woman.”

The government’s slow response allowed AIDS into more and more lives, where it kept on provoking extremes of choice. Healthy people with sick lovers faced the un-gray options of full-time nursing or fleeing the preview of their own deterioration. In 1986, I first heard of infected young hustlers fucking as many unwitting johns as they could on their way to the grave. It struck me as a genuinely fresh spin on evil.

Other HIV-positive people were moved to martyrdom. My friend L.J., a public health expert from Mississippi, saw several people undergo a “spiritual awakening” when they contracted the virus. “You can almost see the halo,” says the agnostic L.J. He met one of these radiant souls in 1988 at the second International Gay and Lesbian Health Conference on AIDS in Boston. In this story I call her Beverly.

L.J.’s the kind of Southerner who twangs his “how y’all doin’” a few notches past natural. The self-mockery helps him get away with saying “bitch” or “faggot” around the politically fierce wolves he runs with; it also hides his streak of saintliness. I’m surprised how devout, how star-struck he sounds when he talks about Beverly. He’s kept a file on her that includes stories about her from People and Time, stories she wrote for smaller magazines, and her 1991 obituary.

L.J. had already given his talk on needle-exchange programs and was feeling irritable and alienated after a few days at the conference. He was riding up to his hotel room one evening when Beverly stepped onto the elevator. “This tiny angel of a woman looked me in the eyes and said ‘Hi’ in this gorgeous Southern accent,” he recounts. “I just knew she wasn’t gay. I was surrounded by strident activists and she seemed quiet, gentle, sweet.” To keep the contact alive, he guessed her home state — Arkansas. It’s Georgia, she said, but not bad. She agreed to have a drink with him.

Beverly reluctantly told L.J. her story in the hotel bar. “I spill my guts for a living,” she said, “so I’d rather keep it light right now.” A cute, Southern, 29-year-old married white woman who contracted AIDS via transfusion during childbirth, no less, she was a PR dream for the movement, or as she put it, “a palatable poster child for AIDS.” When delivering her second child, she said, she began hemorrhaging so badly that she would have died had the hospital not poured into her blood they knew was untested. They also gave her a complete hysterectomy. She had come to Boston as a member of ACT-UP, collapsing in a “die-in” during the FDA commissioner’s speech. She also spoke as president of the National Association of People With AIDS.

When she told L.J. that she sued the hospital for infecting her, he teased, “isn’t that a little tacky? They did save your life, sweetie.” Beverly loved the flirting and his lightness. When they parted a few hours later, she suggested they go to the Boston Museum of Art the next day.

L.J. was very drawn to her, but he was also feeling more pity than he’d let on. One story in particular haunted him as he fell asleep that night. Beverly’s neighbors had rallied around her in sympathy, she said, but the day after she and her daughter went swimming, the community pool was closed for repairs. “It just ripped my heart,” says L.J. “At a time when she really needed people to give to her without flinching, they were rejecting her, putting up barriers.”

The next day was warm and sunny, and they walked with all the couples along the Charles River. Beverly told L.J. she expected to live about a year. She was already sick and thin, exhausted from the disease and the medications. Her energy surged when they got to the museum, however — Beverly knew almost every painting from the art books in her hometown library. She pushed herself to painting after painting, marveling at their beauty “in person,” and stopping to rest at every bench. “She was meeting and saying goodbye to those pictures,” L.J. recounts. “I felt privileged to see them through her eyes, but it was overwhelmingly sad, too.”

They took a cab back to the hotel so Beverly could rest, and L.J. invited her to take her nap in his room. They lay down together on his hotel bed, and Beverly launched into a sarcastic lament: “Here I am in a man’s hotel room, but what good does it do me? I’ve had all my plumbing yanked out, I don’t even know if anything down there works anymore.” She told L.J. that her husband had withdrawn from her even before she contracted AIDS and had her “plumbing yanked.” He hadn’t touched her since she became pregnant with their first child five years earlier. They lived in the farmhouse her husband had grown up in; Beverly theorized that she reminded him of his mother after she began having children.

Beverly said she felt barren, empty, like she didn’t have a sexual bone in her body. “It was almost like an apology,” L.J. remembers. He asked if he could hold her and she said, “yeah, that’d be real nice.” He wrapped her in his arms from behind, both of them on their sides. He started caressing her hair, her arm, her back; she’d stopped wearing a bra because she’d lost so much weight. They were not speaking or looking at each other while he touched her. “I was trying to give her the pleasure that had been denied,” L.J. says. He rotated her toward him onto her back a little and slipped his hand inside her drawstring pants. “She’d been going on and on about how nothing worked, but she was dripping wet,” he says. L.J. caressed her slow, rhythmic, then faster until she came, and they fell asleep spooned. After they awoke, she left to spend the night in the hotel room she was sharing with several men and women who also had AIDS. “The tops of the dressers in that room looked like a pharmacy,” L.J. remembers.

The next day, Beverly brought toothbrush and toothpaste to L.J.’s room. She brushed right before they kissed for the first time because she had thrush. “You won’t catch it, you’ll just fight it off,” she assured him as she apologized for her damaged body. All the symptoms didn’t keep L.J.’s affection and pity from manifesting as lust. “I didn’t have to overcome a mental barrier to be physical with her,” he explains. “It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, this will make her feel good.’” He undressed her, then himself and they made out lazily for hours. “She was so tired and weak she’d doze off in the middle and I’d doze with her, like cats.”

Eventually, Beverly rolled on top and straddled L.J. and asked if he had any condoms. (Incredibly, in a hotel hosting an AIDS conference, neither of them did.) The two experts discussed the medical research, which in 1988 indicated that female-to-male transmission was rare. Beverly said, “Look, I have AIDS, you don’t. This is up to you.” L.J. remembers that he stayed hard throughout these negotiations. They stopped talking, resumed kissing, and he rolled her over onto her back.

As L.J. pushed gently into her, Beverly looked up and said, “I’m giving you everything I have.” I can’t help but shiver when L.J. relates this, but he seems surprised that I assume a reference to contagion. He says he heard only gratitude, abandon, and the same hunger that had pushed her through the museum. L.J. was not thinking about getting AIDS while he made love to her, but he was thinking, “this is the last time she’ll ever have sex.” Explaining why he didn’t take the five minutes to go buy a condom, he says, “I wanted to be a part of her. Don’t read that literally to mean I wanted AIDS, it’s that the intimacy was more important than the sex. I wanted to prove I was willing to embrace her without reservation.”

Again, Beverly left to sleep in her own room, though L.J. begged her to stay. “If I spend the night with you,” she told him sadly, “that makes it real.” The next day, they exchanged numbers and said goodbye quickly. They never saw each other again. Beverly would call from speaking tours every few months and say in a weak coquette’s voice: “Tell me the story about how we met in Boston.” L.J. said he didn’t understand the request at first — “I thought she was having some kind of memory loss from the AIDS.” He was halfway through the retelling the first time before he realized she was masturbating. “I would leave out the sadder parts and just talk about how I’d touched her.”

They never said goodbye, L.J. says, because “saying goodbye was about AIDS.” Only once did Beverly refer directly to her condition: She asked L.J. a year or so after Boston if he’d had an AIDS test. He said yes (he’s tested negative every year since), and she yelled at him, “How could you?” He joked her out of her anger, warning, “if I get AIDS, baby, I’m going to sue you for all that hospital money.”

Her reaction confused L.J. then, but it makes sense now. Together they’d carved out a piece of her life where she wasn’t dying — no pity, no condom, no husband, no transfusion, no goodbye. When she told L.J. she was giving him everything, she meant it the way any young lover does. His AIDS test broke the unstated rules of their affair. It made it real.

Sex, those parties say, is something men want and women deny. The boys hear the same message, which makes them ashamed of their filthy urges at the same time it lets them off the hook. Boys will be boys, and if sex happens, it’s the girl’s fault. Since sex is our responsibility, I realized early on, part of my job was to obviate the shame that men carried into bed. Though that context has eroded considerably over the past 30 years, women’s sexual power is still largely that of withholding something that they generally want too. Though politically I resent this ancient, absurd assignment, it does have its sweetness sexually: Submitting is both transgression and absolution, a blessing bestowed and a taboo broken. Even the most confident lover betrays an initial shock and gratitude that he’s welcome inside my body.

Women’s hold on the supply side of sex may explain some of the patriarchy’s most tenacious tenets: Outspoken, independent women still get tagged as dykes, bitches, dominatrixes. The rape victim — if she can be portrayed as sexual in any way — still asked for it. Single women are suspect while they’re nubile, and after that they’re invisible. But other attitudes lurking in the public sphere can’t be traced to the supply and demand of sex — especially not nowadays, when women generally do give it up to the men they date. Why has contempt for the slut persisted? Why does the military struggle so hard to keep women and gay men out? And why is homophobia as murderously vehement as ever?

Sociological, historical, economic and biological theories of male
domination and privilege don’t fully answer those questions. They can’t explain the anger and contempt for women and gay men that keeps bubbling up into the culture. The dissonance is sad and baffling, because I like men and often identify with them. Men are straightforward, generally easy to
get along with, and I like having sex with them.

All these contradictions carved out a blind spot, a gap between the personal and the political that made room for what I can only call an epiphany — a glimpse of something not in me, but out there, pervasive and invisible as air. I had my revelation about the patriarchy when — I challenge the gentle reader to put this more delicately — I strapped on a dildo and fucked my boyfriend in the ass.

Before Adam, I’d never considered the business end of a dildo, partly
because I hadn’t known a heterosexual man who wasn’t utterly cowed by the taboo. I’m not interested in being anally penetrated myself, but I’m not
interested with much less intensity than the noninterested guys I know.
Women have no analogue to the horror — not universal but widespread among straight men — of taking it up the butt. It’s so frightening that other men’s allowing it is an affront. I’ve heard tolerant, sane men equate anal penetration with castration, an act with the almost magical power to transform men into “bitches” or “little girls.” Adam certainly had lugged this baggage around America, too, but managed to set it down so we could have our adventure.

It was autumn when we took up. We were both coming off chilly partners who’d left us frustrated, each convinced we were undesirable, oversexed. We were as grateful as teenagers to find each other, and we spent eight months in a fever state, a long erotic crescendo. We never fell in love; we were not soul mates, but perfect sexual playmates.

From the start, I noticed role reversals outside of bed. I talked more than he did in groups; he would fret later about not being articulate. (But inarticulate men make the best lovers; as Colette said about a reticent paramour, “Speech is not his language.”) Adam was vain and fussed more with his hair and clothes and imaginary fat than I did. He was insecure, which
sometimes manifested male, in bragging and resentful ranting. In bed, though, his desire to please went beyond experienced-guy pride in competence and his affection for me. There was something warm and yielding in him, a sexual fantasy looking for a creator. This self-gifting reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. Since I was writing a play, I decided that made me Arthur Miller. I was the smart one and he was the pretty one.

But he had the medical information that got us thinking. He told me how the prostate gland was, sensation-wise, an extension of the penis and ran right up alongside the rectum. This was revelatory: I had assumed that all the bottoms of the world, men and women, were just good sports. So I’d not done much knocking at my boyfriends’ back doors. Adam was initially embarrassed to tell me how erogenous a zone it was for him because, he said, of the homosexual implications. I assured him that, to me, the fact that his body derived pleasure from certain sensations meant only that. His gratitude for such basic tolerance made me wonder about the women who’d come before me.

Meanwhile sex was getting better than I knew sex got. Adam tended me like a gardener, coaxing orgasm after orgasm from my body. He plowed like a champ too; I’d never been fucked so exhaustively. He could reduce me to a small puddle, and from that grateful goo a resolve formed — to give back. I wanted him to know the joy of being pounded into, rocked and rolled. And now I knew he wanted me inside him. Still it shocked me when, looking down on his high narrow hips while he slept on his stomach, I heard myself think, “I
want to fuck him.” It was the first time in all my gender-questioning, sex-experimenting life I’d had such a thought.

A few nights later, we found ourselves shopping in a marital aids boutique. Adam, always thoughtful, wanted something with a knob that would penetrate me while I wore it, but we found no such animal. We settled on a battery-powered vibrating number mounted on rather ghastly “flesh-colored” rubber panties that Velcroed on the side. It was called the Boss. I kept saying, “Are you sure? This is huge,” but Adam nodded stoically. As we picked it off the shelf, a male stranger gave Adam a congratulatory pat on
the back that confused both of us. The sales clerk, a perky dyke, tried to put us at ease as we paid (Dutch treat).

We unpacked it back at my house. I decided not to fill out the warranty card. Again, I worried about the size. Adam closed his eyes, angled it out from his lap and grabbed it with a practiced hand. “Mine’s wider,” he reassured me. It was true, but I couldn’t imagine either one buried in my
butt.

I felt embarrassed and shy as I Velcroed myself in, unsure of how to play the man. We lubed the thing liberally, than Adam got up on his hands and knees. I gingerly poked at him from alpha doggie position; he stopped me and flipped onto his back. He wrapped his legs around my waist, which sent the first shock of non-recognition. What had always felt rather take-charge from below felt completely passive from above, a nervous welcome. The Boss had a weird consistency, so I rolled a condom over it. As Adam reached up
to help, as I had so many times, I felt the second shock. As his hands fluttered around this missile in my lap, he was like a child playing at a grown-up task. I marveled at how much the penetrator drives every part of this act, something that had never been apparent to me as penetratee. Adam’s eyes widened as I pushed in slowly, a little at a time, stopping to ask “OK?” every minute or so. His breaths were shallow; he urged me on.

As “my” huge appendage disappeared inside him, his eyes showed shame,
trust, fear and a sort of helpless adoration. In a way I’d never understood those words before, he was mine. The knowledge I could really hurt this person by being less than careful made me feel responsible, protective. The vulnerability appalled me at the same time; it was vaguely
disgusting that he would let someone do this to him. Mixed in with the disgust was possessiveness. The thought of anyone else penetrating him
seemed revolting. These observations clicked into place in quick succession; I felt like a projector being loaded with slides of maleness, of male seeing.

I saw all this as if from a distance, perhaps because my nerve endings weren’t involved directly in the drama and perhaps because Adam and I weren’t in love. Were souls entwined, I imagine, the Boss would dive much deeper into power, identity, empathy. But my experience was weirdly sociological and clarified much that had confused me. I saw why men feel
entitled to women as possessions, why women must be protected from other men, especially from sex with them. Why a woman’s, not a man’s, virginity is “lost” and why her sexual activity inspires disrespect. I also felt the allure of a virgin, of being singled out for that gift.

This view of heterosexual sex looked far less like a mirror than my woman’s view. I realized as I fucked Adam that at some of the most connected-feeling moments of my life, I was having an utterly different experience than the man pushing into me. Regardless of who’s initiating, who’s on top, or who holds what emotional reins, I realized, surrender is at the center of my sexual experience; invasion at my male partner’s.

With the Boss, I was conquering, silent, responsible, the taker. With his legs spread, Adam was agreeable, inviting, ashamed, taken. I felt closer to him that night than any other time, because we changed in front of each other’s eyes. Parts of ourselves that had been locked away from it engaged in sex for the first time.

The world looks different since then. I was riding up a steep escalator a few weeks after I took Adam’s cherry, idly watching the butts up ahead of me as I usually do — as a pleasing shape. And suddenly a slide clicked over the round female bottom perched above me: Access. Men aren’t just admiring the curve of a butt the way women do; they’re negotiating access. It’s a hill to be taken.

And men do love access. Clubs, fraternities, committees, old-boy networks — they’ve built a world where access is power. They like slit skirts, open-toed shoes, crotchless panties. They like finding a way in. I think the name of the highest-profile condom brand is no accident — the Trojan Horse was the original tool of access!

Adam and I never took the Boss out on that particular ride again; we both discovered our loyalty to the home teams. That night shook my
heterosexuality much less than it shook my feminism, my wishful thinking about natural similarity. The fuckers are different. Getting in looks male now, and giving in seems female, something I never wanted to believe. Perhaps fucking, or the man’s-eye view of it, is the template for much more
of the world than I ever realized. Which is somewhat limiting in the
bedroom and terribly so out in the world. A template offering two choices to nearly 6 billion people is bound to punish, squelch or misrepresent the female tops, the male bottoms, the complexly gendered and everyone else who falls somewhere between a Cosmo quiz and a Desert Storm on the vast continuum between prissy and macho.

But if our differences do stem from sex, what better place to explore what feminine and masculine really mean? Digging around at the roots of those distinctions was not only more fun than a women’s study seminar or a lawsuit — it was more illuminating.

Clinton’s androgyny may be part of what Kenneth Starr has against him. Starr correctly assumed that men in Congress would share his own revulsion at Clinton’s kinky hybrid of male power-tripping and womanly waffling. The president’s male critics, who seem to feel entitled to know everything about him, have subjected him to a global version of the male gaze, the judging surveillance, subtle and unsubtle, that women undergo. Hillary surrendered to the demands of the gaze at first, changing her name and her hair and apologizing to Tammy Wynette fans. Then the gaze got bored with her and turned to him. The people needed to know what kind of underwear he wore, and there was fretting throughout the land about his chubby thighs.

This unprecedented shift in focus to the first lady’s husband reflects Clinton’s feminine traits but also the historical moment. Some time in the last few years, fashion porn got integrated and men became sex objects. The young, wet, half-dressed beauties wallpapering billboards and buses are now male as well as female, and the rules are changing for normal unphotogenic grown-ups, too. The way men are judged is merging with the criteria for women, leaving Clinton improvising frantically.

His televised apology on Aug. 17 and its aftermath crystallized his role as diva in some theater of the absurd. The speech was reviewed instantly by men on TV: “He’s not acting sorry enough.” The macho defiance at the end was deemed unacceptable. Clinton bristled at this for a while, but as always, buckled down to work and honed his apology chops in a series of sincere performances, which everyone else then pretended to believe or doubt.

Clinton can still occasionally work the male gaze — people admired him for looking smooth and unruffled while he prevaricated on camera in his grand jury testimony, for instance. But the gaze is notoriously quick to turn on you, and men (props to Toni: white men) are now lunging at Clinton like hounds around a treed possum. The years of defending philandering politicians with a cast-off “boys will be boys” have been forgotten; the president must be savaged for his sexuality. Certainly, Monica Lewinsky and her thong have come in for some criticism. But far more scrutiny — and derision — has been focused on Clinton’s sexual behavior. That’s not because sexual politics have evolved beyond the old roles, but because Clinton is the femme fatale this time.

Clinton’s critics defend Starr’s crusade against him with perhaps the oldest misogynistic excuse of all: He was asking for it — recklessly cavorting in the White House and then lying about it when it was clear he was about to be found out. Certainly he played the girl in his affair with Monica, in which she pursued and he was caught. There was a teenage-girlishness to his love-play — the hours on the phone, memorizing her phone number, wearing her ties on special days. He played hard to get; he wouldn’t go all the way. And every time he needed to turn ruthless, he nurtured instead, comforting and flattering Monica instead of sending her packing.

How much of the contempt heaped on Clinton is just bad cultural timing and how much is due to his prowling anima? Many of his failings as a leader stem from his widely acknowledged and classically feminine need to be liked. He can’t bear to be shunned by the clique in power, so he drops all his unpopular friends: Lani Guinier, Joycelyn Elders, gay soldiers, welfare recipients and labor unions. (It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.) He’s also more dove than hawk, though his youthful opposition to the Vietnam War seems like his last sort of genuine expression of it. His military actions as president have felt half-hearted and compensatory. Whereas Ronald Reagan and George Bush reveled in the neat toys and war games deployed in Grenada and the Persian Gulf, Clinton bombed Sudan and Afghanistan not as part of a war, but impetuously, spanking an international bully.

In his affair, Clinton played the old girl game of Technical Virginity — staying good by doing “everything but.” Who knows what exactly drove his refusal to come, but it’s generally women who associate orgasm with trust. A normal guy may or may not worry about his partner’s pleasure, but he damn sure gets off. Was his sexual brinksmanship male power tripping, or female withholding? All we can say for sure is that Clinton is too approval-starved to be a complete [son of a] bitch, but he resents those for whom he performs. Stumbling through his repertoire of half-measures, he pleases everyone he cheats and cheats everyone he pleases.