day and night

Walking around town yesterday in what proved to be mainly a way of wasting time, attempting to get errands done that never got done, I thought about Barack Obama, his face on the front of every newspaper I passed. Newspaper stands, there he was. People on the corner selling The New York Post and Daily News, there also. On subways and buses, the papers people were flipping through, his face on the front of it. The repetition of this image and why it was everywhere really set me off into an emotional state, thinking about this country's history of race, so messy, and this man with the big smile, this black man, running for president of a major party. It is such an amazing feat that a few years ago I would have laughed off as impossible and now there are so many of us, happy about this man his message of change and his reasoned stances, and it all seems very likely. There is hope yet; the promises of this land's founding may still be realized.

Last night, uptown, on the edge of Harlem, 116th or so, I saw some black man for sex work, pictures of skinny white models all over his apartment. The juxtaposition seemed a bit jarring but would soon make sense. He told me what he wanted and I played the part. While he was sucking my dick, I would call him nigger, verbally abuse him with this word that I am not supposed to say, and at first it felt awkward, like cussing as a child with your friends, words you weren't supposed to say said, trangressing strict boundaries of language, but after the first few times saying it and feeling it haltingly come off my tongue, nervously, it came out easier and with more force, me getting really into playing this role as I saw how much it turned this guy on, that his fantasy, what turns him on, is to have a young white boy making him suck their dick while berating him as a nigger.

He was pouring sweat as this went on, trembling with the pleasure of transgression, and making such pleasurable noises. I could fault him for the politics of his fantasy, could fault myself for participating in it, but knew the pleasure myself that he was feeling, the pleasure of abuse. There have definitely been a couple of times in which I have hooked up with a dom dude, encouraging him to call me faggot and to force me, pathetic faggot, to do things, to service him. That trembling he was undergoing recalled to me how I shook also in those moments, the line between pain and pleasure so blurred, the abuse being actual abuse and yet something you are so lucky to receive, language having a mystical import in these settings, words which said in other contexts would upset, said in the context of the bedroom have some incantatory power. When my abusive talk would slow for stretches, he would beg for it to start again, a whispered "talk" moaned. The ways in which language conjures power becomes clearly evident in these role-playing scenarios, that I don't tend a whip to dominate a person, that I could utter this word or that one and the effect would be the same, a slap you asked for, begged for, delivered.