Christopher Sherman

This newsletter is celebrating sexual diversity, differing desires, relationship structures, 
and individual choices based on consent. Sexuality is an important part of being human.

Have A Horny Day. 
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FINDING LIGHT IN DARK PLACES

Being yourself is not always easy.

Growing up an unhide-able homo in the late 80’s and 90’s was hard. My oppressor the white capitalist religious hetero seemed to be having a great time in all the beauty and beer ads. The rest of the 90’s mass media programming was about fear, war, hate and hurt. Setting a tone for the world consuming it. One of the first adults - and community leaders - I came out to seeking advice and support told me “I was a sin” while we sat in their car eating Tim Horton timbits. “I was going to spend eternity in hell - and that I shouldn’t tell anyone else I was gay”. This experience become a feature storyline decades later in therapy.

It’s easier to control people when they’re already hurting. There was a lot of darkness growing up in the 80’s and 90’s. But thankfully I had paid attention in at least one science class where I had learned about the power of opposites. And the opposite of darkness - was light. 

I looked for cracks of light everywhere. These cracks are hope in life. Light is the brightness that lets you see things.  These cracks are hope that a place existed where I could be more myself. The person that was inside me; no if, ands, or liking men’s butts. 

These cracks of light were often rare in the 80’s and 90’s. The land before internet was a prehistoric land before time compared to todays media output and availability. Where mediums (Old Legacy - TV, Radio, Print, Advertising Agencies, etc) tried to control a cultural construct around humans ideas ranging from marriage, fashion, to guilt and sex - feeding the masses the “right” way. Like everything man has tried to control and pave over before – cracks eventually appear and this is where the light shines in.

Cracks of light for me growing up included being a proud graduate with honours of all 25 years of the Oprah Winfrey Show. All Things Madonna – At 14 years old I wore a fake moustache that did not match my hair colour to try and unsuccessfully buy the Madonna Sex Book. My Andy Warhol addiction started early and flared up often; I was always obsessed with his own visual language in this world. And Ms RuPaul Charles’s Work It Original Supermodel of the world who sang to me a message of love and joy that came on its own special frequency.

But before I discovered the above list of incredible lights. There was one light that glisten brighter than anything I had ever seen before. Weekly she would be broadcast onto the family floor model television set - presented with slight fuzziness adding to her unmatched glamour - with an unapologetic desire for the love of her life and her love of the spotlight. Her fashion sense was MORE sequins, MORE feathers but tight silhouette around the waist. Always bold colour blocked eyeshadow with more wigs than Rachel Welch. A stunt queen who makes Lady Gaga’s Artpop press and promotion tour seem demure in comparison. I am obviously talking about the fantastic Miss Piggy.  

Under Disney ownership now Miss Piggy has hoof-and-mouth disease caused by corporate conservatism and the all-mighty dollar – her character is now seen through the brand lense of ‘family entertainment’ - But under Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s magic Miss Piggy was a queer collides-cope for many. She was the closest energy I could relate to - She was camp - out glamorizing even the glamazons of the era when she would volunteer to share screen time.

I have always found a model for a better world - and queerness in The Muppets. Bring together frogs, pigs, bears, and whatever’s (Gonza) and collectively change the energy of the world through celebration and joy. (Yes, I know they are puppets). If you want a visual representation of how my queerness feels inside me on most days watch the television special The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show (1982) – or Falcon’s Best of Al Parker. Most star pigs.

Thank you for sharing your light. X

Have a horny day.

Christopher Sherman
Instagram:@christophersherman_photo

FLOWERS MAKE ME HORNY
WRITTEN BY JUSTIN SOMJEN

I spend a lot of time thinking about flowers. Amidst their many desirable and attractive qualities; they are captivating, poisonous, intelligent, and sexual. A flower can be a gift, food, a symbol, a currency, or a remedy. Being the reproductive organ of a plant, the flower evokes sexuality in endless capacities. Apart from the sexual lavishness of a blooming flower, I am intrigued by the evolutionary capabilities of plants. Unlike animals, their intelligence moves slowly. They respond to their environments in decisions that often take lifetimes. They evolve slightly faster than animals by having shorter and many reproductive periods that create slight genetic changes over time. 

Amongst the many flowers that I adore, there are three that possess a near-mythical quality because of their unique nature. 

I wanna lay in bed with you 
with the window cracked open
the fresh air whispering through

The first one is the Sea Daffodil (Pancratium maritimum). It is a sand-dwelling perennial plant that blooms in the dog days of summer. It is native to coastal areas of the Mediterranean, but exists in many European, African, and North American countries. The flower has a delicate lily-like scent and resembles the shape of a classic daffodil with white, slightly spikier petals. It grows in the sand, on the beach, beside the sea—a true King of the Beach. I often think about how this flower bloomed on the shores of the Mediterranean 5000 years ago during the Bronze Age. I imagine an ancient human once looked at the flower, growing in the sand instead of the soil, and questioned “why?”

a bouquet of fresh cut daffodils
in a vase on a side table 

Then we have the Hammer Orchid (Drakaea). Native to Western Australia, this tiny, bell-shaped plant has a unique reproductive strategy. The orchid’s flower has developed to take the form of a female thiynnid wasp, mimicking its body shape, movements, and producing a pheromone similar to that of the female wasp. This attracts the male, and as he tries to mate with the flower, he pollinates it. The orchid tricks the wasp into serving its primary purpose - reproduction. This evolutionary phenomenon is called mimesis, and it is everywhere in the natural world. Plants pretend to be animals, and animals pretend to be plants.  

their scent
wafting in the air

The last flower is named the Fire Lily (Cyrtanthus ventricosus). This small, red plant grows in South Africa in the Fynbos Region, one of the most densely biogeographic areas in the world. This rare and normally unseen flower only blooms after a forest fire decimates the land. Triggered by smoke, this flower blooms after all the plants around it have been burned, leaving it the only flower protruding from the landscape. Because of this, the pollinating animals have no choice but to choose the fire lily as their target. Advantageous from this evolutionary feat, the flower exists as one of several other pyrophilic plants that utilize the potential of heat, smoke, and ash to facilitate their blooms. They are real-life examples of a phoenix. 

as the cold breeze brushes 
against our backs.

Justin Somjen
@justinsomjen

FAVOURITE HORNY MUSIC VIDEO | D’ANGELO “UNTITLED (HOW DOES IT FEEL)”
WRITTEN BY JARED OLSEVER

I remember one of my first experiences with sexuality and music. Growing up in the 90's early 2000's I feel like I was spoiled with an influx of culture. I would rush home to watch Much Music and BET. 106 & Park aired right after school and I had to watch all the newest R&B and hip hop music videos to fuel my thirst. My love for hip hop has always run deeply through my blood. I still pair a lot of my art with the music I grew up with. Hiding my sexuality at the time was something I was getting used to; it was my little secret and there was something special about that.

When D'Angelo came out with the song "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" everyone was talking about it. The music video featured him fully nude but cropped right at the "V" line of his torso. This was the first time I saw a man's body in such a beautiful form. He was glazed in oil and every muscle on him was begging to be touched. It was a simple music video with a black backdrop and his Greek God-like figure singing his heart out. I'm pretty sure I was too young to understand that the video was a depiction of him receiving a blow job but I knew I was turned on.

I had to hide my gaze from my siblings so I wouldn't give myself away, but once I was alone I would find a way to give myself a release. I feel like I pictured him in my mind a lot and tried to find look-alikes on dial-up internet porn. I liked to watch the slow image from the dial-up internet develop on screen. It was like waiting for a prize and knowing at any moment I could get caught. The idea of getting caught was a turn on for me. Growing up with religious fear probably had a lot to do with that. Maybe I was more scared than I like to admit, but now I look back and smile. That was me, developing my sexual taste and it was moments like that that I'll never forget.

That music video still turns me on. R&B for me was always about sexuality and love. I have yet to experience "Real Love" (Mary J. Blige reference) but I'm having a lot of fun figuring that part out. In the wise words of D'Angelo "How Does It Feel?"

So far, pretty f**king good.

Jarod Olsever
Linktree

FAVOURITE HORNY MOVIE | Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN
WRITTEN BY RIO SPORT

A movie that always makes me horny is Y Tu Mamá También. It’s an amazing Mexican film exploring a bromance between two best-friends who embark on a hot summer road trip together. The first time I watched this movie I was a horny teenager in high-school. My buddy snuck the dvd from his parents house and we watched it after school in my bedroom. 5 teenage boys huddled around 1 laptop.

The male leads Julio and Tenoch were very relatable to us as Latinos, naturally we compared ourselves to them in looks, physicality, and personality. The opening scene shows us Tenoch’s booty while he’s having clumsy sex with his girlfriend in a messy bedroom. Tenoch has a meaty, fuzzy butt that jiggles while he plows his girlfriend. In the next scene Julio bares his ass while busting a quickie with his girlfriend. Julio’s butt is smooth and muscular, you can see it flexing while he’s fucking. Within the first 5 minutes of this movie, both lead actors bare their manly butts - that’s already enough to make it a winner in my book. 

In fact there are a bunch of sexy scenes in this movie, but my favourite moments are the horny intimate ones between best-bros Julio and Tenoch. There’s a moment in the film when both guys are showering together after sports and Tenoch notices that Julio’s foreskin is intact. Tenoch on the other hand is circumcised and they both point and laugh at each other’s peens. Curiosity leads to exploration and they compare erections. This moment was very funny for us boys, we laughed a lot. But this was a horny moment for me, because it opened up a dialogue for us to discuss our foreskin status with each other with a show-and-tell male bonding experience.

The next hot scene is when Julio and Tenoch decide to have a stroke session together at an abandoned pool house. They both lay back, boners in hand, cheering each other on with imaginative sex scenes and fantasies until they busted together. It's a very horny scene for me because it was the first time I saw two males openly masturbating together. Masturbation was taboo in my home, so seeing two men acting so natural and shameless about jerking off was an incredibly healthy image for me. Most of us boys in my bedroom called this scene “gay” or said that we would never bate with another guy... but thankfully we learned that it was totally natural for men, straight bi or gay, to experiment together. Later on some of us stroked together regularly, but we always respected each other's manhood and privacy.

While the film does have a very homoerotic vibe, there is a lead female character that enters halfway through the storyline. She’s a sophisticated milf type with a banging body, and both lead characters are trying to seduce her. Near the end of the film she takes both guys into her hotel room and together they begin to undress her. At this point in the film, I stopped to look around the room and we all had raging boners. She then proceeds to go down on both boys at the same time, leaving them standing, breathing face to face. The homoerotic tensions were rising between them through the whole movie, they struggled with it, but it finally exploded in this super horny moment.

As the hot milf gets down to pleasure them, the bros get wrapped up in the pleasure and they slowly, passionately, so intensely begin to make out. Fuck! Suddenly the scene went dark and we were all left there sitting in silence, probably too horny to speak. As the credits ran and everyone left my house one by one, I stayed behind with a whole new outlook on male friendships and sexuality.

Those scenes in Y Tu Mamá Tambien still make me horny, but I love this film mostly because it allowed me to explore the complexities of male friendship and my sexuality. Since watching that movie way back then, I’ve been lucky to find open-minded buddies like Julio and Tenoch. Sex is great, but have you ever busted a nut with one of your homies?

Rio Sport
GypsySportNY.com|
@RioSport

BUSINESS + PLEASURE | THE COLUMN BY SONNY JOSEPHINE

CONTRADICTIONS

Hey bitch, it’s been a minute. We haven’t spoken since last year and I have a lot to catch you up on. I feel like I’ve changed a lot since I last shared a piece of me with you in the fall. We can start with the most obvious change about me, which is my hair. Like many girls before me, I did the post break-up drastic hair change. A classic move signifying a new beginning. I no longer felt like the same person after I ended my relationship with my ex Daddy Warbucks. So why would my hair be the same? I know. I’m cliche. I can’t really help it. I may be 25, but I’m also a person experiencing many things for the first time in my life. I am that messy twenty-something. I thought I learned everything I could about womanhood in a short amount of time since I began my transition at 22, but the truth is that I’ll never stop learning. That’s life. But thanks to hormone therapy and good genetics, and some makeup and style pointers from a few iconic friends, I look enough like a cis woman now to be accepted as one by the world at large, whatever that means. Basically I don’t get clocked anymore. Even if I feel clocky as hell. So it seems silly that I’m a grown woman navigating my emotions like a teenage girl. Because even though I am a grown-up on paper, a certified adult, I actually don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I know that I’m a woman. And I know how to look the part these days. But I feel like mentally, emotionally I'm still just a girl learning how to exist. How to deal with being a woman in this world and the limitations of it. Especially in relation to men. I can’t believe I ever existed as one of them before. Sometimes I feel like they are an entirely different species, like some Alien vs. Predator type shit. Women may be crazy, but men are fucking psychopaths. I guess it’s the same and different. I don’t know. I digress. 

So yeah I’m a brunette now. Actually, I was always a brunette because I was a manufactured blonde. My natural hair colour is brown-black. So I literally just went back to my roots. I had my blonde moment. It was fun. When I was earlier in my transition, I always dreamt about being a blonde. When I became one, I think I began performing what it is to be a blonde. Kinda silly and slutty and soft and feminine. Light and airy. Like Marilyn and Anna and Pamela and Britney and Dolly (or in my case Miss Piggy). There can be a performance aspect to being blonde if you want. And I’m trans and I have BPD, so I find myself performing even if it’s unconsciously. I can see that in retrospect. I think that as a brunette, I’m finally just being myself or something. Without trying anymore. Trying to perform blonde. I know it’s not like that for everybody. You can be very much yourself in being blonde, maybe to you it signifies freedom. I don’t fucking know. But I got rid of the blonde and everything I thought she was (which includes fifty pounds and being in love with a man twice her age). Ew, I’m talking about myself in third person. Are you cringed out yet? 

And as my hair became darker, so did I as a person. I changed my aesthetic. I banished pink from my wardrobe, my old garments now used mostly as cum rags by men who fuck me in my bedroom. I like neutral colours now. I love gray, white, brown and black. Haha, I know, so original. I feel like people treat me differently now. When I was blonde, people thought I was a stupid bitch. Now they just think I’m a bitch. It’s actually much less forgiving.

In terms of my sex work, I feel like blonde hair served me better somehow. I think I made more money when I was blonde but that might just be a symptom of the crashing economy. I don’t think most sex workers are making as much money right now. Some girls are still doing fine. I think when I was blonde, I was somehow more of a sexual fantasy for some men. Since going brunette, I’ve had a few guys straight up tell me that they liked me better as a blonde. One regular in particular I used to see every week. Now it’s twice a month if I’m lucky. Again, I have no idea if it’s my hair or the recession. Actually I know it’s neither. Because there’s also been a shift in my energy. When I first started doing sex work in Montreal, I had an optimism about it. I was bright-eyed and new to the game when I started at a trans massage parlour in November 2021. I was eager to please, naive, fun. That’s how my energy read. That feels like a long time ago. I know I’m not that girl anymore. Since then, I’ve been through a lot. I’ve probably slept with hundreds of men. I’ve had my heart broken several times. Scammed men out of money. Been scammed out of money. I’ve been assaulted. I’ve been raped. I had to learn how to set my boundaries the hard way. And sorry that I’m not as fucking cheery or excited about life as I used to be. I know that clients have felt that shift in my energy. It has nothing to do with my hair. Because even a blind person would read my energy as burnt out and disillusioned, trying to put on a smile and show and often failing. 

Maybe this life isn’t for me. I told myself that I’d do this line of work for the freedom it would allow me to focus on my writing. But the truth is that I’m hardly doing anything. I’m lazy and I haven’t done shit. When I’m not selling my ass, I’m either being fucked over by men for free or laying in my bed crying about all of it. I let the work and the men get to me. I drain myself of the energy to write because I put it all into rolling around in my own trauma. That’s not the life I planned to lead. The other day, my dear friend Lucy told me how they hardly see one of their close friends anymore because he’s so busy doing freelance writing work. And suddenly it dawned on me, why the fuck isn’t that me? Because I haven’t fucking worked for it. I’d rather do enough paid sexual favours to pay two thousand dollars for my next weave or handbag. That’s if I even make enough money. I can tell myself all the lies I want about using this line of work to support a better lifestyle. But I took this job initially to survive. I ran out of money in Montreal and I had rent due in three days. Then I made over a grand on my second night at the massage parlour. I knew sex work would allow me to survive and, at times, survive well. But like I said, a lot changed. I got swallowed up in it. And I let my priorities slip and slide as I struggled to find ways to cope with men in and out of work. Buying bags and doing my nails every time a man let me down. I need to work on myself. Give myself a manual reboot or something. Because I have no idea what love really is. Or self-respect. And I never will unless I actually go back to the drawing board and learn how to give those things to myself again.  

Just when you think you’ve figured it out and you’re loving yourself the best you can, you wake up one day and come to realize you’re not happy with many things in your life. Not just your love life. But also your work. Your goals. Your (non-existent) career. Your credit rating. Your education. Your access to the rooms you want to be in. 

And falling in love won’t fix any of those things. 

This isn’t a fairy tale. 

I’m not starring in some dramedy. I'm not Julia Roberts and Richard Gere isn’t going to show up and rescue me from hooker hell. I need to rescue myself. That's what I’m trying to do right now. Even by writing this column, I’m trying to break old habits. Call myself out. Learn. And actually get back to work. Go write some shit. Get out there and live! Network. Publish. Find a way out of sex work. Get some preventative botox. I’m turning fucking 26 this year. I need to start taking myself seriously again. I know how to survive, but it’s time to figure out how to survive well. Beyond finances. I need to figure out what feeds me as a person, what are the things that I love doing, and how to be the person I want to be. No man can do that work for me. It is time for me to stop pretending that I’m going to find my happy ending in the arms of some bastard! Yet, my underlying motivation, the nasty voice I can’t silence within me says that if I take myself seriously, then maybe a man will too. For once. 

So, of course, I have another one of those stories. Actually many. About the men I’ve seen in my personal life since my last column. The truth is that I’m reeling from another break-up and I don’t think I have all the words to tell you about it yet. Maybe I shouldn’t. I think you can imagine based on what you’ve heard from me before. I’m in and out of love, I’m happy, I’m sad, I deserve more, yada yada yada. You’ve heard it all before. If it sounds repetitive (but on brand) for me, it’s because I’ve allowed myself to be stuck in the same cycle in my personal life, which is dominated by men who don’t deserve my fucking time. I could tell you that this guy was different. But on paper, he’s not. Different man, same result. Maybe I’m the problem. I have a pattern of falling in love with men because of the way they make me feel about myself. All the parts of me that I’m insecure about, I seek refuge from, in the affirmations of men. When I have chemistry with a guy and he tells me that my body is beautiful and that I’m still hot without makeup, I fall in love with believing those words. Because I don’t believe those things about myself wholeheartedly. I don’t know if any girl really does. But what I do is stupid. I take all the self-love they make me feel and get carried away thinking that is a man who loves me, and I should love him, when the truth is that we may not even know very much about each other. This time it really stung. 

I first broke up with him when he canceled our Valentine’s Day plans. On Valentine’s Day. It was too serious, too soon for him and he freaked. Then he begged me to take him back. I did. The second time we broke up was at the end of February. I found out that he was still on Snapchat. A grown ass 30 year old man on that fucking app?! As if I don’t know what the fuck he’s using it for. Finding that out was extremely painful for me, and ironic for him since he was the one who asked me to be exclusively his. He used to always wear a pair of my slippers that he dubbed the pimp slips. I had to put those away when we broke up. But we still kept fucking for most of March until I called it off. 

After that, I fell into my usual toxic self-harm of making a blank Grindr profile to check if he was back on the app. He reactivated his old Instagram account to creep me. Actually I’m giving myself too much credit, he was probably using it to talk to other girls. Every time I saw his username viewing my Instagram stories, I refueled my own delusion that I actually meant anything to him other than a good time. My Instagram was probably being used for his spank bank. Some visual aid to trigger a few passionate memories. Still it means something to me that he can’t go a full twenty-four hours without thinking about me. But that’s fucked because thinking stuff like that is why I can’t go twenty-four hours without thinking about him. 

Two weeks later, he texted me. Montreal had a huge power outage that week. Almost a million people were without electricity including him. He asked if I had power, which I did. Just the perfect circumstances for a little reunion! It was quite obvious that he wanted to hang out at my place. He’d get to use my power and my body. Two birds with one stone. But (to your shock) I wasn’t down. I knew if the roles were reversed, he wouldn’t give a shit about me. He told me that he searched for my escorting ad. He said he “looked it up ngl” and that my new pictures were “really hot”. When he said he wanted to start seeing me again, I noticed the careful choice of words. “Seeing”. Not dating, not in a relationship. It was a safe and vague term to describe him coming to my place a few times a week to fuck me. I wasn’t so quick to buy it this time. He tried to remind me how “good” it felt spending time together and how he misses it. And I just thought so what? What was he offering to change or fix? Did he want to be the man I needed him to be? And when I asked, he didn’t really respond. Not a peep. He left me on read, disappointed that the conversation wasn’t going his way. So I kept sending messages, each one more crude than the last. I wanted him to know how he made me feel. How I could finally see him for who he is. A selfish bastard. In those moments, I thought I was over him. I couldn’t ignore the disrespect anymore. I couldn’t fool myself any longer that I was anything but a whore to this man. Instead of cash, he dangled a relationship in front of me for two months. The delusion of being in love with him was shattered. When he mentioned my escorting ad, he made me feel so cheap. Like my only worth was on my price tag. I wanted to love him so bad. But at that moment, I couldn’t tell the difference between him and any of my clients. So I deleted that blank Grindr profile cause I didn’t care anymore. I blocked his reactivated Instagram profile too. 

And that would’ve been a satisfying ending to this story for you as the reader. I wanted to give you that ending, but it wouldn’t be true. You should know me better by now (and I should know better in general). I unblocked his Instagram. Call it an excuse, but I don’t believe life can be so easily wrapped up in narratives, with a beginning, middle and end, no matter how hard we try to fit it into those boxes. We are not done with each other. There is still something there. It’s hard to explain. I know that on paper, I shouldn’t want him. But in my body, I literally have butterflies in my stomach and that feeling is still so strong. Maybe he’ll be done with me after he reads this. Maybe we both will. And I’ll get over it eventually, just like I did with Daddy Warbucks. Those butterflies will go back in their cocoons until they emerge as something new again. Then he texted me once more…

Jump forward three weeks later and what can I say. We are dating again. I don’t know if we are writing a new chapter or if it’s an addendum to the previous one. He swears he didn’t cheat on me. Seventy percent of me believes him, but thirty percent of me wants to go through his phone. Maybe my perception of things is askew from my own insecurities. He could also be gaslighting me. Whatever. We are just dating, keeping it undefined beyond that. I’ve only told you the bad things here. You’ll never know how much good there is. How euphoric it feels when we are together. You’re not the one living it. There is something special between us. I don’t want us to end yet. And neither does he. We’re still writing this story and, like I said before, I don’t have all the words yet. When I find them, I’ll let you know.  

Sonny Josephine
@sonny.josephine

A HORNY POEM ON EATING ASS
WRITTEN BY JUSTIN

It was the jiggly to his cake that made me wanna have a taste.
When I took my first lick and it made my dick twitch.
Getting hard as a rock, my taste buds clicked.
Double dip in that sauce, it’s finger licking good.
I’m taking my time eating this fASSt food.
It’s all you can eat, when you’re my meal.
Bring a friend cuz there’s a 2 for 1 deal.

Justin
@j.n.g.9.1

FAVOURITE HORNY BOOKS
WRITTEN BY HUSSEIN OMAR

Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a queer manifesto avant la lettre. It was reissued seven times between 1905 and 1915 but Freud’s first thrust was both the most radical and the most penetrating. It’s one of the first attempt to decouple procreation from thinking about sexuality more broadly. The first essay rejects thinking of homosexuality (‘inversion’) as a pathology, argues that there’s nothing inherently ‘natural’ about monogamy and makes the argument that no matter whether we have a dick or vagina all contain both feminine and masculine within us. In other words, there’s nothing biologically determined about the gender binary or gender difference itself. This was a mind-blowing insight then and remains urgent as ever today.

To my mind the person who takes Freud’s gayest ideas to their most logical and dizzying conclusion is the late Leo Bersani. Writing at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Bersani  depathologized the prevalence of the then very risky practice of barebacking, developing on Freud’s insights about the inevitable entanglement of sex and death. All eroticism contains a drive toward death and instead of fearing this inevitability, we might celebrate it.

In one of the most memorable essays in his Intimacies (co-written with Adam Philips) Bersani tries to explain why and how the porn actor and cum dump ‘King of Loads’ became so iconic. Bersani rejects the idea of desire as driven by lack or of sexual union as the marrying of two opposing energies (such as Yin and Yang or the positive and the negative) and instead argues that we haven’t thought carefully enough about homosexual desire as constituted by a desire not for what we don’t have but for what we think we do. Although he doesn’t point to it, this might explain the much mocked ‘boyfriend-twin’ phenomenon among gays today. Rather than seeking to impose firm boundaries between our own egos and those that we desire, we must pursue a kind of egoic death which can only be found in the same-sex fucking that he calls ‘impersonal narcissism’. Bersani’s writing is camp and bitchy and very gay. I often find myself wondering what he would have made of the rise of fisting (‘FF is the new BB’) or the fetishisation of armpits in our own time.

If Bersani’s essays theorise homosexuality in terms that don’t make it parasitical on heterosexuality (he rejects the label ‘queer’ for that reason) and thereby reconfigures it as a form of relating that’s worthy of celebration, three friends recent work take up that task: my friend Kevin Brazil’s book of essays in defence of ‘Queer Happiness’ is a trenchant critique of the ways in which gay culture has reified shame, stigmatisation and a tragic, homopessimism as the markers of its own uniqueness. Instead Brazil argues in Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, we must insist on the joy that is inherent in queer culture and reject thinking of gayness or queerness as unwanted fates that have befallen us whether by tethering everything to the telos of AIDS or recounting coming of-age-stories through the pains of ‘coming out’.

In a sharp dissection of the discourse of ‘Born this Way’ Brazil reminds us that for many of us the pursuit of same sex desire is a set of freely chosen lifestyles rather than an undesirable fate that we must attempt to escape. There’s no greater celebration of the kind of queer joy that Brazil wants than in the fifteen year old diary of Sean DeLear edited by my friend Michael Bullock and Cesar Padilla. This sexstatic daily diary celebrates the coming-of-age of a big dicked black boy (who would grow up to become a celebrated visual artist, musician and intercontinental scenester) in the very racist and Christian LA suburb of Simi Valley. Almost every day of 1979 Sean DeLear wrote humorously of his misadventures: of shoplifting for gay porn, of Donna Summers and of the glory holes he frequented. Perhaps this is the closest thing we have to a phenomenology of the big dick but one that isn’t cocky (like that of the celebrity-fucking, Warhol-loving, poet John Giorno) but entirely endearing. This should become a gay coming-of-age classic and especially so as it’s written by a man of colour in an otherwise very white, pale and stale literary landscape.

Finally a photographer who still isn’t celebrated enough is the singular and very sage Stanley Stellar, whose stunning book Piers, documenting gay life on the Manhattan piers in decades past, has just been published. Unlike much of gay photography that is contemporary with it, Stellar’s stellar photos aren’t the saccharine, sun-drenched polaroids that adorn the coffee tables of many an assimilationist and socially aspiring gay man. Far from nostalgic, they are gritty and truthful and all the more gay (as in joyous and homosexual) for it.

Hussein Omar
@totemsandtaboos

For more than three decades, Inside Out has brought Toronto's 2SLGBTQ+ community together in celebration of the best queer film from Canada and around the world. Through our annual Film Festivals in Toronto and Ottawa, our filmmaker initiatives, our youth engagement and our year-round events and screenings, Inside Out is engaged every day in challenging attitudes and changing lives.

Inside Out’s Co-Head’s Andrew Murphy and Elie Chivi their favourite horny movies ever. PLUS there top horny picks for this years festival.

FAVOURITE HORNY MOVIE | BURNT MONEY (PLATA QUEMADA)
WRITTEN BY ANDREW MURPHY

If pushed to describe the film Burnt Money (Plata Quemada) in a logline, I’d wager it’s ‘An historical gay heist drama as told through high-waisted white briefs.’

Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro, this Argentinian film from 2000 (aka Britney’s Lucky era for the younger set) is a gritty bank heist film set in1965, based on a true story. The accomplices were Nene and Angel - known as ‘the Twins’ - and they were lovers. Lovers who robbed banks. And this particular horny/sexy/messy foreign film had a massive impact on me then and now, personally and professionally.

Nene and Angel’s story begins in the public toilets of a Buenos Aires subway station, as many of ours do. They become inseparable, and notorious partners in crime: in cars, in banks, and in the bedroom. However, karma is a dirty little bitch, and we understand as history dictates, gays must be punished, even the sexy Argentinian ones. A botched bank robbery sends them into hiding. I won’t spoil every detail, but let’s just say Baby One and Baby Two get put in a corner. A sexy, sweaty, scantily clothed, and eventually bloody corner with burnt money all around them. Safe word: BURNTMONEY

Picture It: Just two years into my first festival programming gig (not a queer festival), a gay twink of a film fan who’s face had not yet experienced pain, Burnt Money was in contention. In the year 2000, it was still quite rare for a film - even a foreign film - to take so many risks, centring queer characters in this way that wasn’t a coming out story. It was ahead of its time, incredibly sexy, and don’t think I didn’t keep that VHS screener after we invited the film to play the festival that year. Looking back on my ‘Lucky’ era, what stands out about this film is the romance; although it unfolded amid so much violence, it was a love story based in truth. Though messy, and I’m guessing problematic in parts by today’s standards, it was theirs, in an era where hot gay love was not generally accepted.

I was newly out and navigating my first long term relationship and career path, and although robbing a bank wasn’t on my vision board, rolling about the kitchen and bedroom floors in high-waisted white briefs with an Argentinian might very well have been. I was fascinated that during a time where Will & Grace was the measure of gay culture for the masses, here was a film that didn’t stereotype, rather question how queerness and masculinity - as we understood it 20 years ago -  intersect. Nene and Angel were loyal to each other and defined family on their terms, in briefs. Somehow they found these tender moments amid the chaos. And how is that not relatable content (Am I right ladies? Am I right?). Burnt Money also taught me that gays can be bad people too, and that bad gays are also capable of love. Something I coincidentally got to experience first hand in my early late 20s.

Burnt Money was about discovery for me (and my briefs). Discovering I had something the gays desired, discovering what I found sexy, discovering I was capable of being sexy, and sexual to others (as they have done unto me), and discovering I was worthy of love, even if it would take decades to fine tune that money shot.

Burnt Money remains a sexy conversation starter, a great second date, and if you own high-waisted white briefs and a VCR, foreplay.

Andrew Murphy
@mandrewm

FAVOURITE HORNY MOVIE | BASIC INSTINCT
WRITTEN BY ELIE CHIVI

Yes, choosing Basic Instinct as my favorite horny film might be considered basic, but my instincts are telling me that it’s the only correct choice. Paul Verhoeven’s legendary erotic thriller starring Michael Douglas as a detective and mother of all mothers, Sharon Stone, as the bisexual (maybe) serial killer that he’s investigating, basically defined the genre. Pushing it to occasionally campy, yet always deliciously sultry extremes, it’s safe to say that nothing that came before or after could match the outrageous plot, explicit nudity and uninhibited view of female sexuality that Basic Instinct provided.

Having grown up in the Middle East when it originally came out, I only got to watch a censored version for years. Not knowing exactly what the characters were doing in the many scenes that were cut only added to the allure of this forbidden film. However, seeing Stone play the lead, Catherine Tramell, with such icy, effortless confidence as a little gay boy gave me permission, albeit indirectly, to own my sexuality in the face of a homophobic patriarchal society. Couple that  with the release of Madonna’s Erotica album, S.E.X. book and erotic thriller of her own, the failed Body of Evidence that same year, the puritanical hysteria around these two strong women in positions of power and using sex for their own pleasure was a formative one-two punch I’ll never forget.

Watching the film in its full uncensored glory today, one can see clearly why revisionist feminist history looks both kindly and harshly on this slice of 90’s erotica. Stone has made several statements about how that she felt disrespected on set and blindsided with the final cut of the film, specifically, the full frontal nudity. Concurrently, with a lead character that fucked both men and women with equal abandon and a cliffhanger ending for the books (ice pick, anyone?) the provocative Hitchcockian thriller remains the blueprint that no other film has been able to transcend. However campy it may be at times, Basic Instinct and Sharon Stone left an indelible mark on my psyche and the culture at large, and for that, it will always remain my number one horny film.

Elie Chivi
@elie.chivi

Kokomo City
Through conversation and laughter, director D. Smith presents the stories of four black transgender sex workers in New York and Georgia. These women offer unapologetic and unfiltered reflections on belonging and identify within the Black community and beyond. Dreams and memories, past lives and new beginnings, battles fought and won are openly shared.

Big Boys
Jamie’s dream camping trip is ruined before it even begins when he finds out that his beloved cousin is bringing her new boyfriend. However, Jamie’s initial jealousy of the competent and confident Dan quickly turns into a friendship, as they bond over cooking, games and both being “big boys.” As his burgeoning crush gets him into awkward scrapes and arguments, Jamie begins to come to terms with who he is, and who he desires.

Mens Short Film Program: Let it Be Me (Selections from…)
Pipes
Bob the plumber is hired to fix a broken pipe and to his surprise finds himself inside a gay fetish club.

Krush the Wrestler
Exploring the innate intimacy of submission wrestling, a lifelong wrestler turns his talents into an on-demand fetish video service.

State of Mind
State of Mind highlights the intimacy and beauty found through the experience of power exchange in BDSM/leather/fetish/kink.

Safe Word
Cesar, an emotionally stunted masochist, must confront his self-loathing after his dom, Bear, reinterprets the rules of their game.

FAVOURITE HORNY SONG | HAND IN GLOVE. THE SMITHS
WRITTEN BY GEITH

”Forbidden Fruit”

The year was 2007. I was eighteen. I was a 12th grader within the Saudi school system. Schools were segregated: boys went to school with boys, girls with girls, and that was that.

It was not at all uncommon for people to blame the Saudi school system for making us gay, akin to how
many talk about Catholic schools. I’d always ask people how they were so sure there was a causal
relationship, in an effort to slyly bait them to share a homoerotic anecdote they’d heard through the grapevine. Virtually every single time, they would respond with a story about two men who could not contain their lust for one another. To them, these were cautionary tales. But not to me...

For years, I’d been a good Muslim boy, steadfast in my rejection of the proverbial forbidden fruit. For years, I had relegated my gay desires to the spank bank. For years, I resisted the urge to kiss him. But that was then.

It was around this time that I’d fallen in love with The Smiths discography and Morrissey’s cryptically queer lyricism. Their albums had somehow escaped the clutches of Saudi censorship. And so in the
name of thinly-veiled queer self-expression, I set my screen name to these lyrics from The Smiths’ 1984 debut single, Hand in Glove:

“Hand in glove
The sun shines out of our behinds
Yes, we may be hidden by rags
But we’ve something they’ll never have

And if the people stare
Then the people stare
Oh, I really don’t know and I really don’t care”

Ali was two years my senior. He was my classmate's cousin. He had stumbled upon my overlong screen name on his cousin's Compaq laptop.

"Can't say I've ever met another Smiths fan here in Jeddah."

I was confused. Zaid would never say such a thing. He was as boringly straight as they come.

"I'm Ali btw. Zaid's cousin."

Me: "I'm assuming you go to another school? How come our paths have never crossed?"

Ali: "I don't know. Something to do with rags, perhaps?"

I instantly knew what he meant. It was a covert way of saying "not only do I get your Smiths reference, I GET (!!!) your Smiths reference"

Me: "Lol perhaps... Rags no more though. Except for my cum rag."

I felt so reckless. I immediately began thinking… what if he’s a homophobic tattletale dickwad who do—

Ali: "Hey, maybe you won't need that one either, scruffy..."

Scruffy? I was scruffier than most at the time and my profile picture certainly did not hide that. But the term in Arabic is playful. I had never been called that. My heart was racing. My blood was pulsing naggingly against my hairy treasure trail. My boxers had become uncomfortably tight. The inseams were pulling away from my thighs. I started to feel a breeze coming in from the sides and gently grazing my balls. I had never been that hard.

I suggested that we hang out that upcoming weekend. He replied with his phone number and said “I'm in." Ali had to leave Zaid's so we wrapped up our brief exchange. He texted me right after to say he was looking forward to hanging out over the weekend.

I tried to formulate a mental image of Ali based on the two pictures I had seen. He was an attractive guy with thick, bushy eyebrows and a killer smile. I did not know much else. Frankly, I didn't need to.

"Hey, maybe you won't need that one either, scruffy..."

The words kept echoing in my head. I laid on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I could see his face. But the words were in the foreground. I could not stop thinking about him. How he would sound as he said those words. Would his tone be overtly playful? It was in my head. Everything said not to humor these thoughts. But his words... they felt like an invitation to do exactly that. Did he want me to want him?

That night, my cum rag was soaking wet. 

And that was only the beginning…

*To be continued*

Geith
@geithmb

christophersherman.co

All images by Christopher Sherman. Sharing is caring. xo

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