A frank story of a former homosexual, describing the daily life of the average “gay” - endless enemas, promiscuity and associated infections, clubs, drugs, problems with the lower intestine, depression and a gnawing, insatiable feeling of dissatisfaction and loneliness, from which debauchery and Datura provides only a temporary respite. This narrative contains disgusting details of homosexual practices and their consequences, leaving a nauseating fecal residue that will undoubtedly be difficult for the casual reader. At the same time, they accurately convey all scatological the ugliness of a homosexual lifestyle masquerading as a cheerful pseudo-rainbow coloring. It shows the bitter reality of male homosexuality as it really is - scabbysenseless and merciless. “Being gay” ultimately means suffering and pain dipped in excrement and blood, rather than holding on to the hands of the kawaii big-eyed boys from yoyoynyh fan fiction.

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In 1989, I arrived at the world-famous Castro district in San Francisco as a deprived young man of almost 19 years old. I grew up hunted and lonely and wanted to finally become part of something. Almost from the very beginning of adolescence, other boys at school instinctively rejected me. While under the influence of testosterone they made a decisive leap to more masculine activities, such as aggressive games and sports, I remained timid and indecisive. As their voices grew lower and more confident, my voice remained subtle and strangely muffled. As they grew and grew stronger, I became more and more lanky and angular. Young alpha males, as a rule, were the best in football and inevitably turned out to be leaders in breaks and physical education lessons. They always readily ridiculed my lack of sports ability and loudly pointed to my complete worthlessness. Nobody wanted to take me to their team. I always remained the last by default, even after girls smaller than me were selected.

There were other unsportsmanlike boys in my class - overweight or very short, who were treated the same way. But they could turn denial into an advantage through comic self-abasement or make fun of me or someone else. I could not do that. I was inclined to take everything to heart and worried from any trifle. The generally cruel and thoughtless banter of the boys seemed intentionally malicious to me. At the same time, the more they rejected and mocked me, the more I wanted to find a place among them. My childhood fantasies began to revolve around a kind superhero who takes me as his partner. After school, I rushed home to watch Batman and introduce myself as Robin. It is noteworthy that to this day, homoerotic fantasies about Batman and Robin are widespread in gay culture.

When I arrived in San Francisco, I was still lanky, thin and awkward, but I quickly discovered that men wanted to be with me. Here a boyish physique was a clear advantage. The boy, whom no one wanted on his team, became a favorite. There was no need for dexterity, it required only promising vigor, endurance and unquestioning readiness. Unlike our lost childhood, there were people here who were ready to train and guide us. Almost each of us had a first lover older, more experienced and more confident. In our view, they accompanied us into the world of men, from which we always felt alienated. And as it turned out, they accomplished this feat with the help of sex.

That first night when I sneaked into my first gay bar, I was still the same insecure and desperately shy child. I did not know what to do. My only experience with the sexual world of men was limited to watching gay porn, and I was fascinated by these images. There was a fundamental order and ritual for everything that was shown there - old with young, big with small, experienced with the naive. Mature and highly courageous people have always been dedicated to masculinity by inexperienced and physically less impressive young recruits.

From porn, I roughly knew what to expect. I saw films with such equally ominous names as: “Dad, it hurts”, “Enough, it hurts” and “It will hurt”. I imagined my transition to masculinity as a rite of initiation, and in the midst of AIDS crisis, like the men in tribal cultures who have to endure various physical torments and trials in order to join the community of men, I was ready to endure anything in this process, even die.

The denouement in gay porn is always anal intercourse. Anal sex gives male homosexuality a certain intimacy. The meeting, which does not include at least the possibility of anal copulation, looks inconsequential and fleeting. The possibility of such a merger was incredibly tempting, but I was constrained by the constant probability of getting AIDS and refused to risk my life, although I knew that I would not be whole until I found the courage to obey.

I thought a lot about this and one day went to a local pharmacy next door to the Castro gay mecca, filled with various over-the-counter laxatives and cleansing enemas. Over the next hours, I ate very little and drank a laxative with plenty of water. The next morning, when I took the enema out of the package, I had doubts. With her long, pre-oiled tip, she looked almost like a torture instrument.

For several minutes, I leaned on the sink in the toilet, squeezing all the muscles of my body until it became unbearable. Looking back, this seems to me to be a ritual of purification before the ceremony in some kind of pagan temple. I probed my body in order to begin rebirth, but no matter how much I pumped myself to the brim with salt water, I only became like the Dead Sea in Sodom. For a while I swam on the surface, but there was nothing that could support me. It existed only for its own sake.

I felt terrible for the rest of the day. As for sex, in contrast to porn, it did not take twenty to thirty minutes, everything was much faster. Despite the mythology of a powerful passive, this dedication required pain, endurance, and submission. The sensation arising from a deliberate attempt to relax the sphincter muscles, since their proper functioning depends on their constant autonomous tension, was incredibly strange. I could not do that. At the height of the attempt, my lover put a bong under my nose. I hesitantly dragged on, and my heart began to break out of my chest.

The level of proximity was either intense or coldly distant, depending on posture and eye contact. I buried my face in the blanket, and then dared to look into the face of a man above me. There was nothing mutual. In fact, it was a caricature of a family act, but I was not a woman, and I did not have a vagina. In my physiology there was nothing adapted to accepting the penis; there was no natural lubrication, and it hurt until I stopped feeling anything. At times, the experience was burning and fecal. In our desire to find a path to courage, we find ourselves in a cruel return to infancy and diapers. Almost two decades after the cessation of such behavior, the most evil joke is that I sometimes have to wear diapers. The boy who wanted to be a man was stuck at the infancy stage.

Practice hasn't improved this activity, and it doesn't seem natural in any way. It didn't get any easier. The relentless preliminaries and flushes made sex seem clinical and almost experimental. For a while, I was adamantly bisexual and marveled at the hormonal flow of female sexuality, their need for romance and foreplay - something that gay men tried to do away with. This is confirmed by hundreds of impromptu "holes of glory" drilled in the partitions of public toilets in San Francisco, for ultimately nameless and impersonal sex that happens wherever an open mouth waits. Erotization of the process preceding sex in women prepares their bodies for possible penetration. No such mechanism is involved in the male anus.

Once I was too zealous in my cleansing procedures and burned myself with saline. Friends recommended various home-made enemas, with water and baking soda. Another recommended water and aloe, and the strangest recipe consisted of water and instant coffee. A friend a little older than me, whom I unconditionally trusted, took me aside, and we had a rather peculiar inversion of the conversation between father and son. He recommended a good proctologist and described his own torment with ineffective remedies and various ointments. He described in detail the pain caused by vaseline falling on anal fissures.

Laxatives and enemas even once a week dried the already thin membrane of the rectum. One by one, I picked up a number of sexually transmitted diseases - first rectal gonorrhea, and then rectal chlamydia. I had a rash, which at first didn’t really bother me, since my sensitive skin did not always respond well to the lubricants used. Special over-the-counter ointments were useless, and painful ulcers and blisters began to spread inside. For some time I still continued to have anal sex. No one seemed to notice my slightly pockmarked butt in the darkened corridors of San Francisco sex clubs, only the pain became unbearable, and I turned to the local clinic. I was prescribed strong antibiotics. My stomach did not cope well with them, and for several days I suffered from pain and endless diarrhea.

For a while, I almost got over the whole practice of receptive anal sex, but my skin problems went away and I returned to her. For some reason I could not stop. It was strange how another man entering me would only cause a feeling of fullness so that the body instinctively rejected him. It was almost like taking Ecstasy before a night of rave and sex. I felt the drug spread throughout my being. In these euphoric hours, I was one with my inner self, my body and the universe. Then, imitating sexual intercourse with men, I crashed when I discovered that I was still locked in the old trap of my anatomy. Immediately my heart melancholy returned, and I followed the call to supplement myself with something from the outside, even if it did not fit.

By the end of the 1990s, I was no longer young and slender, and the new boys arriving in San Francisco were different from those who came before. They were more fearless. For the surviving members of my generation, the thin layer of rubber that separated them from their lovers was as thick as a brick wall. The condom came to represent the final barrier between homosexual men and their goal of unrefined masculinity. I noticed how many guys abandoned the once sacred unwritten canons of safe sex almost overnight. In those days, literally everyone seemed to be having unprotected sex. I was mesmerized by the deliberate renaissance of 70s hedonism. Gay bars and clubs played all the classic songs of the disco era again. It was a return to the golden age of sexual freedom.

However, the treasured golden ship of our dreams was another empty promise. Suddenly, everyone around me began to get sick. The virus most strongly affected those who were still young enough for sexual searches. They experienced many difficulties in the process only in order to get infected with HIV and all sorts of opportunistic pathogens, into disappointment and despair. To this day, a large number of “gays” infected with the AIDS virus are age group 25 – 34 years.

The expected harmonic rapprochement, which was supposed to happen through skin-skin contact, did not materialize. Many elderly men who lost their husbands and lovers due to AIDS in 80 and already knew the gay saunas culture, which inevitably led to mass death, partially turned their backs on decadence and settled in half exile on the outskirts of Castro. To a large extent, they formed a faction that would later insist on same-sex marriage. For a while I was one of them and lived half-satisfied with one lover. But male homosexuality has never been a monotheistic religion. The gay community is a pantheon of various shrines located inside bars, saunas, and now in geosocial network applications, where thousands of photos of headless torsos begin to look like marble fragments of ancient Greek and Roman demigods. But gay gods are the polyphony of numerous false deities, each of which melodiously promises bliss to worshipers.

My live-in lover was an altar at which I knelt several times, but each time I wanted to get up and leave because my prayers for inner fulfillment remained unanswered. Sodomy, with its untidiness, has become an overly labor-intensive and tedious task, often requiring vigorous manual labor to complete the task. When gay gods incarnate in the body of another person, a false communion of blood occurs, which does not bring deliverance. The ups and downs of expectations require an endless pilgrimage to the land without the Holy Sepulchre. Worship quickly becomes sluggish and stagnant under the weight of disappointing everyday life. The absence of the sought-after soul mate is painfully painful. As a result, physical intimacy often comes down to mutual masturbation and oral sex. I'm tired of pulling my pubic hair out of my mouth every night. Our special moment of mutual release took place separately, with one's face buried in the other's crotch. This is quite common among so-called “monogamous gay couples,” which previously gave rise to the concept of “f*ck buddies,” describing sexual partners where the couple agrees to an open relationship while remaining emotionally exclusive to each other. Sometimes one partner has no idea when the other goes to the sauna or opens a profile on Grindr. I will never forget a close friend who endlessly worried about my reckless behavior, who later died after changing just a few lovers, having contracted HIV from an unfaithful partner.

The mystery of AIDS has always fascinated me and continues to this day. It was as if the sperm had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and in their frustration they turned against those who misused them, causing them illness and death.

After so many years of intermittent liabilities, I suffered from bleeding and protruding hemorrhoids. I tried to treat it with store-bought drugs and suppositories. One day I met with friends for dinner, when suddenly a huge oily spot spread on the back of my trousers, imperceptibly for me. Everyone understood what was happening and did not say anything, but it was humiliating. Later, the proctologist recommended surgery. I refused.

The constant problems with this area of ​​my body made me even more sophisticated, and this exacerbated the problem. I treated the rectum as a female genital organ, and in a sense, it began to behave as such. For example, smell was always a problem during anal sex, and someone suggested using a vaginal deodorant spray like Summer's Eve. This worked for a while, but then the pain became excruciating. The acid-base balance of my rectum was the same as in an abandoned Arizona pool with green water full of algae and mosquito larvae. Another constant concern was the possibility of the so-called "miss" during sex. I have heard stories invariably recounted in a semi-comic manner, about a lazy liability that does not take the necessary precautions. Once, during sex without a condom with my boyfriend, I suddenly felt a terrible burning sensation. I took out a member and found that it is covered in feces. That night it was all over for me.

I have suffered from a series of anal yeast infections on several occasions. I always hoped it was something else and only sought medical attention when it was almost too late. The pain was unbearable. The incessant itching and itching made my skin red and sore. My body constantly exuded a burning discharge, which further irritated the surrounding tissues. Often, when the antibiotics hadn't taken effect yet, I wore women's maxi pads on the inside of my underwear. At first I was ashamed until a friend told me about his lover - a man whom I considered the embodiment of brutal masculinity. Although he was currently exclusively an asset, he, as a serious bodybuilder, had to wear adult diapers in the gym because of the exertion, he involuntarily defecated.

However, I remained largely unafraid, unless constant body cleansing with diet and enemas irritated the lower part of my digestive tract even more, causing what the proctologist called spastic colitis. I was always torn between severe constipation and painful cramps leading to almost unbearable dysentery. To aggravate the situation, periodic shaving of the anal area made the skin irritated and susceptible to infections.

There was a continuous battle between the structure of my body and what I wanted to do with it. It seems to me that I understood that I was losing, but nonetheless, I always found solace in friends who had the same problems and in the collective fun of a gay community dancing through all calamities and illnesses. We continued to get punches, but each time we got to our feet. In one of the last songs I heard at a gay club, I sang:

My loneliness is killing me
but I confess I still believe ...

I still believed that somehow things would turn out differently. Although I didn’t really believe in the afterlife, remembering my long-dead friends, I imagined that they were resting in an eternal embrace that tragically slipped away from them during life. Sometimes I thought that this eternal embrace represents overcoming death. It was starting to like me.

Before leaving the house in the evening, I started the cleaning procedure, and then sat down on the toilet and pressed for at least a few minutes. My hemorrhoids got worse. He began to protrude, and my rectum began to fall out. As a result, I was bleeding with every bowel movement. I realized that having an open wound in my body made me very susceptible to HIV infection. Then I could not understand that the other, almost invisible wound that had tormented me since childhood was responsible for the difficult situation in which I found myself. By that time, I was sick so often that I was sure that I was already infected.

Then I joined the ranks of the fearless, young and inexperienced, lonely and intoxicated, presumably HIV-negative.”bagchasers” and those who have already been infected. In these groups, the pretense of safe sex was either completely absent, or the atmosphere was too excited and intense for anyone to stop and open a condom package. For the most part, the inhabitants of this world took their sexual fantasies seriously. Most, like me, were men who would readily turn off the yellow brick road onto any side path. We did not get a portion of courageous courage from the wizard of the Emerald City, because we were born to be “women” and “weaklings”. We couldn't go home, so we rebelled against our brokenness and sought healing within ourselves.

The most fanatical followers were those who dreamed of contracting the virus from an HIV-positive donor. The complete impossibility of conception through same-sex sex left a subconscious sense of lifelessness in all those involved. The reimbursement consisted of introducing a charged particle into the semen, which could potentially cross the membrane of each cell, permanently changing the receiver. This was the grotesque result of a less favorable version, through which, as a young man, I tried to achieve integrity through sex with other men. That never happened. In disappointment, the long-suffering search for a deeper meaning of gay sex begins, with further investigation of extreme possibilities.

The importance of using a condom during anal intercourse was easily forgotten in the euphoria of sex. The same thing happened with the recommended use of lubricant. Depending on the place and situation, many homosexual men resort to own saliva to facilitate penetration. With friction, saliva becomes dry and sticky, and its digestive enzymes feel as if they are corroding a thin layer of skin in the anus. In addition, preliminary anilingus practice can predispose homosexual men to certain parasitic infections and a chronic diarrheal disease called shigellosis.

For some time, without knowing it, I was infected with a chlamydial throat infection. My only symptoms were a slight fever and sore throat, which I took for a protracted cold. After that i got terrible candidal stomatitisand the pain became serious. It was as if my tonsils were constantly baked in the back of my neck.

At the beginning of the AIDS crisis, a prominent gay journalist Randy Shields predicted a kind of rampant greenhouse effect in the gay world, caused by the lack of a deterrent effect of women and an excessive abundance of testosterone, which creates the conditions for rampant profligacy, leading to the incineration of all those involved:

“There is nothing in the gay subculture that could moderate the purely masculine values, realized as drunkenly as any heterosexual macho had never dreamed of. Promiscuity is widespread, because in a subculture consisting of only men, there is no one to say no. No one has any moderating role similar to that of a woman in a heterosexual environment. Some heterosexual men admitted that they would be delighted with the idea of ​​immediate, accessible, even anonymous sex offered by gay saunas if they could only find women willing to do so. Gays, of course, agree quite often. ”

One cold winter night I was sitting alone in my room and could not relax. I looked out the window at the Castro Theater and could see a huge rainbow flag waving in the wind. I remembered how 10 years ago I first rounded the hill at Divisidero and caught the first glances of numerous gay men walking around shirtless, confident and proud. This day was warm and unusually beautiful. The bright colors of the flag stood out like a prism against the cloudless, crystal blue sky. It shocked me, because in the midst of the AIDS crisis, I almost expected to be in a black and white horror movie with HIV-positive zombies waiting for me to hunt me down and devour my flesh. ... But I had few options. I either had to risk it, putting my life on the line for a moment of love, or be left alone forever. The latter was inconceivable. Death was preferable to denying my feelings. Pressing my forehead against the cold glass of the window, I realized that after years, I had come full circle. Without thinking, I went into the bathroom and crawled under the sink where my supply of enemas was. That day I had the last one. I sat on the toilet and cried. I didn't know what I was doing, but whatever it was, I didn't want to do it. At that moment, I felt compelled and almost unable to determine my own actions. I heard a voice in my head saying, "You don't have to do this," but my body was remotely controlled.

I went outside, turned a corner and headed for my favorite sex club. When I was new to San Francisco, I only talked to other men in the lobby of gay bars and discos. Finding no satisfaction, I wanted to pray in the Holy of Holies. I chose a sex club, which I passed hundreds of times, but did not dare to go. At the entrance behind a bulletproof glass sat a bald tattooed guard with a stone face. I hoped that he was a harbinger of masculinity within. As soon as I paid the admission and went through the door, in the darkness a feminine assistant appeared out of nowhere. He was chubby and fleshy like a girl. Its softness was a disgusting and undesirable reminder of baby fat and premenstrual bloating. In a strange way, he reminded me of the inability of gays to produce offspring. He was a symbol of chaos. We liked men who looked like men. There were strict rules in male gay culture, and even drag quins were considered delightfully successful if they only looked like the opposite sex [but did not look exactly like women]. He handed me a condom and a ketchup-like bag of grease. I threw my backpack into the locker room and continued to walk around the room, fully dressed. How could I? All the rest were either naked or wore only a white towel at the waist. A formless assistant ran up to me and reprimanded me for my ignorance. “You cannot walk here in clothes,” he instructed. I returned to the locker room and took off everything.

The layout of the club consisted of a number of strangely located zones, which became darker as they moved deeper. The decor included all men's cliches: polished chrome, black vinyl pillows and murals with bodybuilders. The front areas were the most comprehensive, behind which were almost empty rooms painted black. At first I stayed in the bar area, which opened into a rather original designed shower room and sauna. These were theatrical stages, on which, as in separate rooms, gays subconsciously replayed the childhood trauma, where merciless teasing after physical education lessons was somehow rehabilitated in this form of group therapy. Here, at least for one night, the confusion of childhood almost disappeared, but at the same time the same hierarchy of the schoolyard was preserved, where the physically impressive remained the main ones. The rejection existed, but it was subtle, and everyone, even sagging and elderly, could find a mate. In an extreme case, in the back rooms loomed men who needed only a male body with blood flowing through its veins. Only nothing went deep enough. Like the ridiculously long dildos sold in every gay sex shop, nothing could get inside and touch on what really hurt. I remembered a friend who had incredible abilities for fisting. He dreamed that the day would come when he could accept the man above the elbow. It was almost a strange reconstruction of the Aztec human sacrifice, in which the priest penetrated the body and pulled out the still beating heart of the unfortunate victim.

Gay sex was a mixture of pleasure and torture. A form of self-flagellation in which freshly inflicted wounds never heal, and older ones tend to be forgotten. Desperate, everything becomes a kind of tragic melodrama: men are bound and tortured, as in a pornographic role-playing game depicting the martyrdom of early Christianity. The only difference is that liberation does not occur through atoning suffering, so everyone goes a little further.

I left the shower room and went to the large section reserved for weights and various training benches. The gunmetal gray color of the walls resembled a machine shop or a garage. The place was half-abandoned, but there was a special smell, consisting of a combination of sticky, moist air from the shower room and musk coming from the deeper corners of the club. This was both confusing and intoxicating, bringing to the forefront the long-buried memories of all the places for men from where I had been forever banished. Being a chronically insecure boy, I was both looking forward and afraid of the men's locker room in the swimming club, where my family often visited in the summer. My goal was never just to stare at a naked man; the pleasure was simply in being among men. This was more than enough to justify the price of entering a gay sauna or disco. In fact, we were ready to pay anything.

I took a deep breath and, driven by a collective rush of adrenaline and a desire to belong, I joined the solemn procession of men walking somewhere. This “somewhere” was hidden in complete darkness. I could only make out vague outlines similar to human forms. Ahead I could barely make out a dimly lit rectangular bench, which, like the floor, was covered with a dark material. Leaning over the bench, several naked men were kneeling. I couldn't see their heads or faces, just their raised butts. I stood motionless for several seconds. Here it is. I had reached the culmination of my deepest desires. The literal end for every gay man is to be on his knees, spreading his buttocks, hoping that some man will appear. Only this imaginary meeting with the transcendent, with the Almighty, ends like male sexual intercourse - with a devastating drop in androgens to a level bordering on depression. It makes everyone think. As a result, gays unknowingly try to sanctify gay sex, and in their desperation it becomes something of a black mass. Queer theorist and historian Michael Bronski recalled how San Francisco's gay sex clubs before the AIDS era became "church" and, for him, "amazing and sacred, even holy."

In 2013, gay advocate and provocateur Dan Savage, raised as a Catholic, speaking on Bill Maher's program, said: “To those who say that two men cannot give birth to a child, I always answer that for God there is nothing impossible. Therefore, I will continue to inseminate my husband and keep my fingers crossed ”. Despite the incredible rudeness and vulgarity, for the first time since Randy Shields left this world, something so deeply revealing was said by a gay man about male homosexuality. Savage inadvertently revealed a huge flaw in a homosexual experiment: his soul-devastating lifelessness. Instead of accepting this truth, there is a dramatic reversal to what was once considered "heterocentric norms." Even before the Stonewall riots, pioneer of the struggle for gay rights, Karl Wittmann, in his revolutionary "Gay manifest"Issued the following warning:

“Gays should stop evaluating their self-esteem by how well they mimic heterosexual marriages. Same-sex marriages will have the same problems as heterosexual ones, with the only difference being that they will be a parody. The liberation of gays is that we ourselves will determine how and with whom we live, instead of evaluating our relationship with respect to the straight people and their values. ”

Under the imperative of male biology, freed from the objections of wives and girlfriends, homosexual men are prone to numerous partnerships and restlessness, hence relatively low number same-sex marriage (9,6%), which after the decision of Obergefell increased only by 1,7%, as well as preservation of HIV infection among men in supposedly stable relationships. What Wittmann recommended is, in fact, the reality of partnerships between homosexual men, who are predominantly not monogamous, but negotiated open relationships. However, an appearance is created that equates male homosexuality with heterosexuality or even lesbianism. It is no coincidence that the original activists of same-sex marriage were either aged and almost asexual men or homosexual women. Their post-male menopausal status and intense exclusivity of lesbianism (albeit gravitating to emotional instability) effectively neutralized the images of ardent male sexuality, which in the 70s were correctly presented imitating the working class castro clones and the Village People group. So, thoroughly laundered and extremely oily modern gay icons appeared, such as Nate Berkus and Neil Patrick Harris.

The uncouth and oozing bloat of gay sexuality survived only in hardcore unreserved porn. Until the end of the 1990's, anal intercourse without a condom was almost unthinkable in gay porn. Then a San Francisco-based pornographer named Paul Morris revived the decadent world of the AIDS era. Since then, the percentage of homosexual men who have regular anal sex without a condom, continues to grow.

The open celebration of unprotected sex, as well as the opposite conservative reaction, culminating in the legalization of same-sex marriage, were triggered by memories of the atrocities of AIDS. This was the answer of those who wanted to return to 70, to the specific image of a homosexual man created by the media that had dominated the previous two decades - the image of an exhausted and noble martyr. But recently, a new paradigm has been developed, along with an incomprehensible forced merger of homosexual men into an absurd LGBT community, with an androgynous woman as his indisputable ideal - Ellen DeGeneres.

My life and the lives of gays who survived this period of time reflected the hopes, anxieties, and final collapse of that era and the entire gay experiment. After all, we arrived in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles or somewhere else with the same set of expectations: to find someone to love, and that he loved us in return. At first, the initially strict recommendations, which included the use of condoms, nonoxynol-9, and even dental dams, seemed a small price after the painful and turbulent early years, during which we struggled with our identity. Bathing in a newfound bliss, a light sensation of male breath on our neck was enough to send us into ecstasy. Then everything changes. Awe becomes fleeting and less intense. Going to a bar or a disco becomes like looking at the same old porn magazine that you stole from a local store as a child. Once cherished property becomes torment, and you throw it away. This misfortune is currently unfolding among all men, gays and heterosexuals, who are constantly delving into the increasingly unhealthy Internet pornography.

Fearing that happiness is seemingly slipping away, most men become anxious and their activities become increasingly reckless and promiscuous. By the late 1990s, the once frightened eighteen-year-old boy was capable of almost anything. For a while, exhibitionism was the new all-encompassing entertainment. Before the advent of social networking apps, I exhibited myself at amateur evenings at a local gay strip club. In the ultimatum fail, I slipped and fell on stage, stepping into a puddle of semen and grease that had leaked from the previous performer. I started having sex in local parks, in parked cars, in portable toilets during gay pride parades. On the night that would be my last as a gay, I was ready to risk everything one last time. My search for recognition, love, and masculinity remained completely and hopelessly incomplete. I ended up almost where I started, standing almost at the same point in space as ten years ago. But I was still scared. As for the boy, he never left me. Gay life and having sex with men did not turn him into a man. He was still on the lookout for which he took me with him. Only my body was falling apart.

Early in the morning, being half-conscious after a sex club, I tripped and crashed into a ditch. I was vomiting blood, and abrupt contractions of the stomach made my colon empty its contents. I reached for my underwear - I was bleeding from the inside. My life flowed from both ends. Where, in my opinion, there was a door to exaltation, I knocked out a gaping passage to death. This was my last humiliation. If heaven meant some kind of afterlife, and hell would be the immediate and eternal end of this torture, I would choose a curse.

I entered San Francisco on my feet, but left it on a stretcher. The man who picked me up on that dark day was unlike anyone I had ever met. He took my lifeless body home - to my parents' house. There, I woke up in my old bedroom, surrounded by several random childhood memories. The very bed that I once pleased with my first wet sleep, I now stained with blood.

The following months were occupied with a series of meetings with various doctors, specialists and surgeons. The embarrassment and pain that I had been running away from for so long was now inevitable. Before the operation, I was forced to almost mockingly relive the very same purification procedure that I endlessly practiced.

During the procedure, part of my rectum was removed due to the presence of severe internal scars. Like the imprisoned victim of the Marquis de Sade, my sphincters were sewn up with a thick thread. I was prescribed a long list of emollients and laxatives, which I had to drink plenty of to make possible bowel movement through an incredibly narrow hole. The precautions did not work, and I tore off the seams. To stop the bleeding, I put a towel in my shorts and headed for the emergency room. While I was leaning against the wall of the waiting room, among coughing children and elderly patients with dizziness, blood began to seep through the shorts.

For the next few hours, I lay on a solid hospital gurney. I called the nurse, but there was just a bustle. A couple of teenagers were lying next to me behind a thin curtain: one suffered from an overdose of prescription pills, and the other from a severe infection of the pelvic organs due to advanced STDs. It was purgatory.

I had to go to the toilet, and I shuffled to the restroom through the freshly cleaned floor. Returning to my bed, I left a trail of small red dots behind me. This was not an intermediate state between heaven and earth - it was hell. I died and was sent to eternal torment as a character in a bawdy tale - a boy with a broken backside. To the great horror of the attending physician and nurses, I discharged myself from the hospital and went home.

Over the next few days, I ate nothing but a granular, powdered fiber mixed with water and plum juice. Standing in the shower, I defecated on my feet. I could neither sit nor strain. Several times I did not have time to get from my bed to the toilet. Just a meter from the toilet, I slipped and fell on the tiled floor, which became slippery from the slurry.

My body slowly healed, but nonetheless, I continued to get dirty. Another operation will follow, then another. Years later, I continue to suffer from partial incontinence. Despite the inconvenience, periodic pain and embarrassment, I consider myself blessed because I managed to escape from homosexuality relatively unscathed compared to many of my friends. Some scars will stay with me while I'm alive, but I can live with them. In a way, they are a constant reminder of who I was and from which God saved me. Others carry indelible marks of the human immunodeficiency virus hiding in every part of their body. But over the years, my health problems have worsened. I feel old. Those few friends who survived our former existence are in the same trouble. We accompany each other to the doctor’s appointments, constantly send postcards with wishes for recovery and arrange prayers for healing for each other. Our quest for love ended in unfulfilled dreams, corrupted bodies and graves of the dead.

In our irresistible desire to understand the world and ourselves, we were ready to go against Nature and God himself. We neglected the basics of physiology, and for this violation we paid dearly, collectively and individually. In this process, we threw our bodies and the surrounding culture into chaos. In a miserable attempt to correct ourselves, we demanded that society acknowledge our rebellion. But the law instituted by people could not change our physical structure.

Source: Joseph Sciambra. Surviving Gay ... Barely. Abbreviated.

Extra charges:

Problems of the “gay” community through the eyes of insiders