Object of Worship

I wonder, what is a penis?

It's a part of the genitals. Genesis. In the beginning. The generation of new life. The power to create life, to impregnate, to generate. Isn't the power to create the province of God - the Most High God? Didn't he create the universe? If he did, how did he do it?

If man is made in the image of God, then we have a big clue sitting right between our legs. A man creates with his penis. Does God, who created man in his image, also create with his penis? And is it his seed that is the vehicle of creation? Just like a man?

I wonder why there are happily married men who nevertheless visit cruisy parks and public toilets, just to suck cock? The mild-mannered accountant will happily suck the cum right out of you, and thank you for the privilege.

Why do characters in gay porn, when they first lay eyes on a dude's big dick, always exclaim "God!", or "Jesus!" Why is this most carnal piece of flesh such an object of worship?

Why are some men compelled to "exhibit" their cocks to strangers? What is so fucking cool about our dicks that we want others to see them? What are we "witnessing" about?

Why do Jews ritually circumcise their dicks? Why do they symbolically castrate themselves?

Maybe because our cocks are the one body part made most in the image of God?

Brothers In Arms

I've been mulling over how similar Star Trek's Borg are to AKA's Transformed, and how they may be related to "Joel's army". Wha...?

The Borg

I watched Star Trek: First Contact from Blockbuster last night. It showcases the Borg in all their evil glory. The Borg are Star Trek's ultimate villain - an implacable, intelligent and nearly unstoppable force. They're assured of their own righteousness - and only wish to spread the gift of Borg assimilation to the whole galaxy.

Last year I had a hunch and I googled for "borg cube heaven" and I found The Borg of Heaven. It details how the immense Borg cube is modeled after the description of heaven given to John:

And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. --Rev. 21:15-16

The author reveals plenty of other uncanny similarities between the Borg and the heavenly host. I'm thinking - maybe not a coincidence? A little more googling and I found out that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek and the Borg, was into the occult. He circulated within the same California sci-fi/military industrial complex stream as L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Hollywood's weirdest religion.

For whatever reason, Gene has cast the Kingdom of God as the invading Borg.

The Bible

Jehovah and his "Chosen People" of the bible - the Israelites - are a ruthless, invading horde. After coming out of Egypt, they invade Canaan and make the promised land their own. Maybe the Borg aren't so far off in their characterization - or maybe we don't know the backstory.

In the Book of Joel, there's a prophetic description of a future (latter days) army of the Lord:

They shall run like mighty men; they shall climb the wall like men of war; and they shall march every one on his ways, and they shall not break their ranks: Neither shall one thrust another; they shall walk every one in his path: and when they fall upon the sword, they shall not be wounded. --Joel 2:7-8

The Borg march like no other army. They walk side by side, "every one in his path", and they never "break their ranks". They have an invincible force field that constantly learns and adopts from every weapon sent against them. Though weapons fall upon them, "they shall not be wounded".

The Transformed

Transform is a collection of erotic muscle growth stories that organically grew into a novel. The author, AKA (Also Known As), takes muscle growth erotic fiction "where no man has gone before". It took me a month of reading (and stroking) to work my way through the whole thing, but when I was finished, it was like a light went on.

AKA describes the results of a secret government project to create the ultimate soldier. The scientists create a serum that hypes up all the masculine sexual characteristics to a level approaching perfection. Anyone injected becomes immensely muscular and powerful, grows a huge dick and a libido in proportion. They also gain the ability to pass this power on to others. The power of Transform becomes stronger than the military's ability to control it. It's a long and involved story, but as I was reading, I realized how similar the Transformed are to the Borg!

• Both are immensely strong, individually and more so, together.
• Both have great abs.
• Both are male. (At least as originally visualized by Roddenberry. Later incarnations show female Borg).
• Both are practically invulnerable to weapons.
• Both have alien "seed" swimming in their veins - the Borg call it nanoprobes, the Transformed men call it "Transform". It is the vehicle of their power.
• Both seek to make other men into their image. They use their "seed" to infect other men, and when infected, they are "Assimilated", or "Transformed".
• Both Borg and the Transformed feed off the new "recruits" - the Borg gain new technology, the Transformed gain new powers or heightened erotic potential.
• Both do not kill. They only Assimilate or Transform, and kill only in self-defense.
• Both have a zero recidivism rate. Once Transformed/Assimilated, you never look back.
• Both are connected telepathically. They know each other's thoughts and can instantly call upon the collective knowledge (and eroticism) of the whole
• Both are reviled by the "powers that be". The Borg are resisted by the Federation, the Transformed by the U.S. military.

What if these three mythic stories are all describing the same event, but from different points of view?

The Alien Savior/Threat

Science Fiction has two themes of perennial strength:

1. The aliens are coming and they'll bring peace/enlightenment. 2. The aliens are coming and they'll enslave/destroy us all.

Noticing the self-destructive path of the human race, it's not difficult to understand the popularity of both themes. Looking even the slightest bit ahead gives uncomfortable predictions of great woe - climate change, economic collapse, famine, pandemics, mass extinctions, environmental collapse, nuclear resource wars, religious and fascist responses to crisis. The scientists are gloomier than John the Revelator.

We live in apocalyptic times, and it's in our mortal nature to seek a savior from what looks to be certain destruction. At the same time (when we're honest), we suspect our dire straights are the result of some unfathomable moral failure, and that alien invasion might be what we really deserve, and it would sure put a quick end to what otherwise appears to be a very long, ugly, painful die-off.

Marc Morford at the SF Chronicle writes:

"We are overdue. Long overdue. For some sort of great breakthrough, some sort of unfathomable shift, a great cosmological ideagasm that rearranges our perspectives and bitch-slaps our dogma and makes the church wince and recoil and scream out its denial even as it slowly melts away, leaving only a black hat and a broom and a puddle of slimy green goo."

The resurgence of Sci-Fi saviors and demons reflect our desperate straits. Saviors include aliens like those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and super heroes like Superman, X-Men, The Incredibles. Threats also include aliens (Independence Day, The Borg of Star Trek, Martians in War of the Worlds, aliens in... Alien), sentient machines (Battlestar Galactica, Terminator), comets and asteroids (Armageddon), alien spores (The Andromeda Strain, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Morford is right, we are ripe for a transformational event - one way or another.

Queer Sci-Fi

There is a particular genre of gay erotic fiction called "muscle growth" or "morph". They're stories written about the transformation of average men into massively muscled, horse-dicked fuck machines. These stories are all written with one hand on the keyboard, the other around the author's dick. These most carnal of stories, written simply to "get you off", have the same mythic themes flowing through them as do sci-fi, fantasy, and yes... the bible.

The transformations are brought about by injections of serum, lab accidents, a space-born virus, alien abduction or invasion, computer programs, ancient gods, magic, angels, demons, witchcraft, voodoo, you name it. Any and all myths are put to the noble task of changing mere men into sex-crazed beasts! Of course, men don't have so far to go in becoming sex-crazed beasts, urban legends notwithstanding.

Sex does seem to be all we think about, or it WOULD be, if we didn't have things like scrounging up food and shelter to distract us. The muscle growth stories simply give men the bodies, cocks and libido to get the job done as it really should be!

I've been a fan of muscle growth stories for years (go figure). But over the past year, I've begun to see some interesting themes running through them... biblical, sci-fi, apocalyptic themes. It's interesting to me how often the queer stories cast the invading aliens/demons/spores as "savior", where everyone else would see "threat". For instance, Invading alien spoors that transform a man into a massively hung sex machine with a libido that never quites and a desire only to mate with more men, creating more men like himself... that would kinda be "bad" in the eyes of the world, wouldn't it? Not for our intrepid gay erotic writers!

My friend Dan once told me that gay men are like the children of aliens. The aliens come to earth, plant their seeds within human women, and then depart to let the humans raise us as their own. But the alien children have a sort of inner "homing beacon" that goes off inside, and we're eventually compelled to go seek others of our own kind. Woah!

Art: Unknown

Making the Male Female

Jorge Grossao at Nifty is one of my favorite authors/characters. Grossao (Portuguese for "huge and thick") is a horse hung black Brazilian who really gets around. Ipanema lifeguard, soccer star, porn star, the toast of Europe, his big cock opens a lot of doors - Not bad for a boy from a Rio de Janeiro favela.

One story line has Grossao running an exclusive soccer camp for teenage boys that doubles as an even more exclusive boy brothel. Though Jorge is the "daddy", it's the boys who do the seducing, driven crazy with lust at the sight of his monster trouser snake. Grossao fucks everyone; the teenage boys, their hunky fathers, visiting English soccer stars; he makes them all into his grateful whores. Grossao loves nothing more than a male ass. He goes on rapturously and devoutly about "the male cunt"; a man's fuck hole; his pussy. You can tell that for him, fucking a man is a religious experience.

It's interesting to me how a man can be all male and yet his ass be all female; a total slut in heat. The biology that makes this possible, and oh so pleasurable, is something I marvel at. Asses are plainly designed for fucking - perfect little holes of pleasure - a hollow shaft made for a solid one.

Genesis 1:27 says: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

A basic attribute of God is his maleness and femaleness. Here we are at the beginning of the bible, and it's saying, "before we get into all the other attributes of God like alpha and omega, etc., lets start with the basic plumbing." So God is fundamentally a shaft within a tube? A screw in a nut? A piston within a cylinder? Apparently. And then he thought, "how cool would it be to make my basic architecture a totally ecstatic, hot and sexy thing?"

I gotta admit, I like the way he thinks...

I always wondered how God the Father - the male God - can make human beings male and female, and both be made in his image, but thinking about Grossao and his worship of male cunts, and how all the angels are male, and how Paul said that we will be like the angels, it's beginning to make some sense.

Another clue in the Gospel of Thomas:

when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female... then you will enter the (Father's) domain.

Wouldn't it just be hilarious if the true "Devine Feminine" was found inside a man's butthole?

Unlikely Bedfellows

Sci-fi, the bible and gay porn. Now there's some genres not often seen together, but I'm gonna try. Why? Because by reading them, and interpreting the underlying symbols, helps me get a grip on things way down deep -- at a level that I mostly just feel -- but that I still need to somehow understand intellectually (admittedly feeble as that intellect is).

The bible is of course, the bible. It's ground zero of Western symbols and myth, interpreted in thousands of ways by thousands of people over thousands of years. Biblical myth holds great power over me. Maybe it's just my upbringing, but that collection of books (and other apocryphal books) can make me cry tears of joy and repentance, and sometimes just look up to the night sky in awe.

The symbolic themes presented in sci-fi such as Star Trek are ancient in origin - the intrepid crew occasionally encountered the literal ancient gods, but more often the plots cloak the old myths in futuristic garb - the ancient races become aliens, the gods become entities of at best capricious omnipotence, at worst unfathomable destruction (the Q Continuum, the Crystalline Entity). Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, these movies have mythic symbolic power, and I think that's the underlying reason for their immense popularity.

The interesting thing to me is that gay erotic writing and drawing (as found on the internet) also explore the myths; biblical, sci-fi, pagan/magickal. The really amazing thing to me is how some authors appear to be channeling myths unconsciously as they write, and I suspect that writing or drawing while stroking is the thing that causes it. I intend to analyze the underlying myths I find in *some* gay porn writing, and to compare them to biblical, pagan and sci-fi.

True Freedom

Back in the 80's, during the depths of the AIDS crisis in America, Some men and I were standing in a circle praying. We were praying for our sick gay brothers, and for the lovers and families of those brothers who had recently died. It was a frequent prayer. I wasn't exactly a devout Christian, but I had friends who were, and that evening I found myself in that prayer circle. One of us, Simon, who's lover was very sick, said "I don't know how, but I think that God has a purpose in this, and that we have a role to play in the future."

At the time I just forgot it. But this year, I remembered it.

Something is happening, and it's happening in the most unexpected of places - the erotic fantasies of gay men. Artists and writers are uploading what's in their hearts, and the nature of the web allows them to say things... bare things, that they otherwise maybe wouldn't share. There is a yearning in these works of art, a passionate desire for a better world. They imagine places of sexual freedom, of masculine power and beauty, of amazing love and hot, hot, hot fucking. They dare to imagine what it would be like to be a man who has totally overcome shame. I think they're visualizing heaven on earth.

In the Book of Genesis, the first result of Adam and Eve eating of the Tree of Knowledge, was shame.

"and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons." -- Genesis 3:7

I have to ask, what the fuck is that all about? Adam just disobeyed God, and suddenly he's overcome by a need to cover his "privates"? A man who until that moment was very publicly and comfortably naked, and then suddenly, he's ashamed of his own body. Why are the sexual organs part of this? Why is a normal body part such a source of intense love/fascination and fear/loathing? Why is it that I can bare my arm or thigh, but not my cock in public, and why do I risk arrest if I do? What's so offensive about it? Why did Janet Jackson's Superbowl "costume failure" cause such idiotic outrage?

It's a question I ask, but deep down I know the answer. It's because of shame. Sometimes, deep, deep down, I can feel it, and I feel just like the first Adam, way back in the day. Genital shame isn't something we're conscious of most of the time, it's so prevalent we don't even notice. It's like a uniform shame field that is always buzzing, crackling and modulating imperceptibly in the background, unless something pricks it (like Janet Jackson) and then the power of the field becomes visible. It has many aspects, from being pee-shy to rabid homophobia.

Of all men, gay men have been particularly subjected to shame. We get it from all sides; from the disappointed family when they learn we aren't gonna be spreading the sacred family seed; from religions that tell us if only we believe, we'll be saved from our hell-bent perversion; from health care workers who tell us to control our lust; from politicians who tell us not to flaunt it so much at the gay pride parade, and even from ourselves, because most of us don't measure up to the studs we lust after.

But it's not all bad, because like most of God's gifts, the scourging we get from society is a blessing in disguise. If gay men feel the shame more strongly than other men, then we also struggle against it more. Coming out to family, friends, church and state is an individual act of courage that maybe only other gay men can really appreciate. The feeling of profound peace after surrendering to the truth about what I am is something I'll never forget.

The truth is, when I choose to define myself by my sexual "preference", It's like nothing in this world is more important than that. Nothing. Every other label; race, religion, class, they all pale before the gay thing. I wonder why that is? What's so shameful about wanting to have sex with another guy? I wonder if gay men, just by BEING openly gay, aren't pushing everyone else's buttons because we're not giving in to shame, but everyone else is and on some level they resent it. They say that closeted homosexuals make the most vicious homophobes.

I think God is intensely interested in all that. He's "looking for a few good men". A few like Him - sexy studs who deep down, really just wanna fuck and get fucked. All the rest is just gravy. The gay porn we make is a collective cry to heaven, a petition to officially release the bonds of shame that enslave us, that keep us from being the sex gods we really are.

Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome." -- Genesis 32:28

To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. -- Revelation 2:7

Art: "Saint Sebastian" by Tom Jones