Anyway, this doctor wrote about people seeking an obliteration of self. He was into the idea of people with fetishes because he thought that they might be able to achieve ecstasy through the obliteration of self, like a man who’s so into shoes that he will completely lose himself. I think in normal heterosexual coupling, you can have perhaps obliteration of self. Let’s say you’re going down on a woman and you completely lose yourself in it and just the carnality and just how beautiful she is and how sexy, you’re down there. I don’t know, you lose yourself. You’re, like, on another planet. I think fetishes or perversions sometimes, maybe you get there faster or maybe just going down on women is the same thing as licking a shoe. I don’t know.
I think that’s what I’ve sought out, the obliteration of self. I had to get away from myself. These things are like Alice in Wonderland things. The things that might be outside the norm of human sexuality.
JIM NORTON—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, RADIO HOST
I’ve never had a problem with talking about myself and my own sexual shortcomings, or my own addictive behavior sexually, because anybody truly questioning it is going to be fraudulent. Even if a man doesn’t cheat or get hookers, any man that acts like he doesn’t comprehend how another man could pay for a blow job is a liar. I know he’s a liar, and he knows he’s a liar.
Any type of criticism like that, you have to meet, I think, with complete belligerence. When people are apologetic about themselves, that’s when they run into trouble. People smell blood and they pounce. I’ve never been apologetic about the things I talk about. I’m not ashamed of it, or if I’m ashamed of it, I say, “I’m ashamed of it.”
MARGARET CHO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I was seeing this guy who was really, really wild and crazy. He was turned on by me going and fucking people and telling him about it. He was the most emotionally unavailable person. He only wanted to have a relationship with me so that I could be sort of like his avatar and go and do these crazy things that he was not physically capable of doing. He would jerk off and listen. I never touched him or anything.
JIM NORTON
For me, sex and sexual behavior are isolating. It’s very, very dark and alone. I don’t want to cruise prostitutes with friends. It’s me alone being ritualistic. I would only let a hooker in the car if she approached from the right and leaned in the right side of my window. It was this weird seduction game I would play with myself.
Marc
They had to honor a fantasy before you even exchanged money.
Jim
Yeah. To me, it’s too easy. They just get in and suck my dick with money and there’s no seduction. Again, there’s no push and pull. There’s no tension. I like to have a little bit of tension, a little buildup to it. The more little pieces of the ritual you put in, the longer the ritual can go on. Once you cum, it’s over.
If a girl tells me she loves me while I’m fucking her, my dick, it wilts like somebody threw fucking hot water on it. I can’t keep a hard-on through that. It does nothing for me unless she’s a prostitute. If a prostitute says “I love you,” I’ll cum immediately.
It’s embarrassing to be so trapped in the Madonna-whore thing, but it’s very hard for me to love the same person who I want to smell their armpits.
I don’t talk about this to be shocking. I’m annoyed when people are shocked by it. I want them to enjoy the honesty of it and laugh at it. I never want them to be shocked because, to me, it’s stuff that a lot of them do anyway. Come on. We’re not really breaking ground here. I’m not a kid fucker.
ALI WONG—COMEDIAN, WRITER
I’m, obviously, like a perverted, gross, freaky person. Sticking my fingers up a man’s butt hole, a straight man’s ass, is so exciting to me. I went to Disneyland recently and I got this special hookup where I got to skip all the lines, got to go on these awesome roller coasters. None of that was more exciting to me than sticking my fingers up a straight man’s butt hole.
When you’re the first to do it, it’s so exciting because at my age and at this point in my life, sex is 99 percent mental shit anyways. For me to get aroused, doggy-style or spanking don’t cut it no more. I have to wage psychological warfare on a man in order for me to cum.
MARGARET CHO
I’ve always been pretty bisexual. Sometimes it depends on the girl. I usually like really butch women and also women who are very dominant, and also women who are transitioning to male bodies.
When I go through kind of a gay phase, when I’m really into women or there’s this one girl that I’m just crazy about, but she doesn’t live here. When we’re together, I feel so powerful, like I don’t need men. We don’t need men at all. It feels really good. When you can go into a universe where you just need women, that’s just unbelievable. That sort of proves that I’m not gay, because I have so much invested in patriarchy. Being with a woman is a beautiful vacation from patriarchy.
Then this one girl that I really like, it just gets really complicated because she has a lot of male energy even though she looks very female. It’s like she’s a man in a woman’s body in a female. It’s hard to explain. She’s super mean. I like that.
DAN SAVAGE—JOURNALIST, WRITER, ACTIVIST
Bisexuality definitely exists. I think people are a little flexible around the edges. Every once in a while, I see a woman that I am like, “Yeah, zing. I kind of feel something.” It is almost invariably a lesbian firefighter. A lesbian who looks like a guy: muscles, and looks like Rolfe from The Sound of Music, but is a woman.
Every once in a while, I see a lesbian who blings onto my sex-dar. When that happens, I do not think, “Oh my God, I must really be straight.” I do not have this panic attack. Straight guys, when they see the one dude who pings onto their sex-dar, suddenly have this panic attack about what it must mean. “Maybe I am not really straight; it does not matter how much pussy I have eaten, it does not matter how much pussy I have pounded.” Those guys write me every day, having just flat-out panic attacks that they must be gay.
I feel sorry for you straight guys, I really do. You are less free sexually than everybody else. I am a gay dude. I could leave here and go have sex with a woman, and nobody is going to think I am straight now. Everyone will think, “Oh, that must have been crazy. That fag Savage fucked a woman. I wonder what that was about.” No one is going to say, “Damn, Savage is not a fag! He fucked a woman!”
Women can do whatever they want—they eat pussy in college, and then they can be straight-identified, and nobody says, “Not straight.”
Straight guys, you are trapped. It’s not a prison of your own construction solely, because straight women, when they find out that their husbands or boyfriends had one same-sex encounter, write me, panicked that it must mean he is gay. Gay guys, if we found out that some hot movie star had had one same-sex relationship or encounter, we would all insist that he had to be gay. He could not do that if he were not gay.