Praise for Jeff Mann’s A History of Barbed Wire
Winner of the 2006 Lambda Literary Award
for Excellence in Gay Erotica
“A History of Barbed Wire is a collection of ten short stories that crackle with subcutaneous sexual energy and a novella that delves straight into dark obsession on its opening pages… [A] satisfying combination of both brain and brawn whose Southern drawl is so seductive that readers will find it hard to resist and even harder to put down.”
—Christian Wright, Velvet Mafia
“Jeff Mann’s stories are snapshots of dark desire caught at the blurry intersection of fantasy and reality. A heady combination of literary introspection and sweat-drenched lust, they celebrate the achingly beautiful power of domination and submission.”
—Michael Thomas Ford, author, Full Circle
“Many of these stories…are brutal, absolutely dripping with masculine power, raw with scent and ferociously wild, almost beyond the point of comfort, and yet they’re too compelling to turn away from.”
—Kathleen Bradean, Erotica Revealed
“Mann’s novella ‘The Quality of Mercy’ is the most affecting, and closes out the collection with 22 chapters of raw, unadulterated, masculine sexuality. Not for the soft-hearted.”
—Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter
“The range of Mann’s prose (like his poetry) is exceptional: by turns a tender, attentive lover, or a hot, quick trick.”
—Thomas Lawrence Long, Editor-in-chief, HGMLQ
“An unfettered beast stalks through these stories—shameless, irresistible, alive.”
—Paul Lisicky, author, Lawnboy
A History of Barbed Wire
Jeff Mann
Published by Bear Bones Books, an imprint of Lethe Press, at Smashwords
Copyright © 2006, 2011 Jeff Mann. Introduction copyright © 2006, 2011 Patrick Califia.
all rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First edition published in 2006 by Suspect Thoughts Press.
This edition published in 2011 by
Bear Bones Books,
an imprint of Lethe Press, Inc.
118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018
www.lethepressbooks.com • lethepress@aol.com
www.BearBonesBooks.com • bearsoup@gmail.com
isbn: 1-59021-234-7
isbn-13: 978-1-59021-234-9
Cover design: Alex Jeffers.
Cover images: Bobby Nelson.
This book, in whole and in part, is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, clubs or organizations, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to a slew of writers and editors who have supported my work and/or have been fine company: Ian Philips and Greg Wharton, Patrick Califia, Sean Meriwether, Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky, Dan Jaffe, Jameson Currier, Andrew Beierle, John Trumbo, Patricia Nell Warren, Jewelle Gomez, Michael Huxley, M. Christian and Sage Vivant, Ron Mohring, Paul Willis and Greg Herren, Amie Evans, Wayne Courtois and Ralph Seligman, Jim Elledge, Maureen Seaton, Robert Giron and Ken Schellenberg, Rob Stephenson, Robert Taylor, Jay Quinn, Michael Thomas Ford, Dorothy Allison, Jim Gladstone, Sven Davisson and Nate Bamford, Jess Wells, Kathleen Bradean, Bryan Borland, Dale Chase, William Holden, Jerry Wheeler, Fay Jacobs, Amos Lassen, Trebor Healey, Simon Sheppard, ’Nathan Burgoine, Peter Dubé, Radclyffe, Felice Picano, Kelly McQuain, Charles Flowers, Max Pierce, Jim Tushinski, Richard Labonté, Lawrence Schimel, Kirk Read, Michael Rowe, Thomas Keith, Tom Mendicino, Thomas Long, Christopher Pierce, Shane Allison, Kilian Melloy, Christian Wright, Dan Vera, Jory Mickelson, Frankie Finley, Katie Fallon, and Tiffany Trent. It’s an honor knowing you all.
Extra thanks to Steve Berman, Ron Suresha, and Toby Johnson for republishing this book.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following print and online publications in which these stories originally appeared in slightly different forms:
“Balsam Poplar Buds,” Bear Lust, R. Jackson, ed. (Bear Bones Books, 2011).
“Everett’s Boy,” Kink: Tales of the Sexual Adventurer, P. J. Willis and R. Jackson, eds. (STARbooks Press, 2003).
“Captive,” Velvet Mafia (www.velvetmafia.com) Issue 16, 2005, Sean Meriwether, ed.; and Secret Slaves: Erotic Stories of Bondage, Rachel Kramer Bussel and Christopher Pierce, eds. (Alyson Books, 2006).
“Daddy Dave,” Best S/M Erotica Volume 2, M. Christian, ed. (Venus Book Club, 2004).
“Dionysus Redux,” The Wildest Ones: Hot Biker Tales, M. Christian, ed. (STARbooks Press, 2005).
“Fireflies,” The Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories, Greg Wharton, ed. (Venus Book Club, 2004 and Blue Moon Books, 2005).
“A History of Barbed Wire,” Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Volume 4, Number 3 (2002); Best Gay Erotica 2004, Richard Labonté, ed. (Cleis Press, 2004); and Best of Best Gay Erotica, Volume 2, Richard Labonté, ed. (Cleis Press, 2005).
“Not for Long,” Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 1 (2001); and Best Gay Erotica 2003, Richard Labonté, ed. (Cleis Press, 2003).
“Raspberry Moonshine,” Out of Control: Hot, Trashy, Man-on-Man Erotica, Greg Wharton, ed. (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005).
For John Ross,
whose patience, kindness, and understanding continue to amaze me.
For Ken, Darius, JW, Kent, Bobby, Donnie,
and all the other furry friends and distant beauties who have inspired me.
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life… While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. —Walter Pater
Contents
Bouncing Off Barbed Wire: Introduction by Patrick Califia
Bouncing Off Barbed Wire
An introduction to Jeff Mann’s
A History of Barbed Wire
Patrick Califia
Poets. They’ll break your heart every time. But until then, the sex is amazing. It seems worth the inevitable pain, at least until the sheets grow cold and you’re out of bourbon. Are you ready to turn your darkest erotic fantasies and secret romantic cravings over to the influence of this particular poet, the hairy and handsome Jeff Mann? I wouldn’t advise it unless you prefer well-written sexually explicit fiction. If you get distracted by original metaphors or turned off by a particularly apt turn of phrase, there’s always…well, you know. The work those other companies publish.
I loved this book. A History of Barbed Wire isn’t the leatherboys-frolicking-in-the-city porn we’ve all come to expect. Until I read these stories, I didn’t realize what a cliché it’s become for S/M sex to be associated with the dirty and dangerous parts of a big, big city. Instead, Mann is speaking from the point of view of a gay man who doesn’t live in a gay Mecca (read: ghetto). Many of these characters, like the author, have straight friends and are out of the closet in a world full of rednecks, some of whom secretly want to suck their dicks; others would probably like to cut them off.
A born-and-bred southerner who teaches English in Virginia, Mann remains true to his roots. He has an inherited and cultivated love for the landscape of the south and the wild places that were once our only home. Don’t drop this book like a hot potato, imagining you will be bored or won’t be able to identify with Mann’s men. There’s enough testosterone in this book to grow hair on the palms of your hands. Mann is one of a handful of very talented writers who choose to publish sexually explicit fiction as well as more mainstream stuff. What you’ve got here is an extremely dirty collection of kinky man-to-man fantasies that are so well described, you will feel like you are literally there, with someone’s hands around your throat or tweaking your nipples. Because Mann keeps the heat turned all the way up, you barely notice that you are being seduced and informed by his skill with the English language. There is as much beauty in Mann’s words as there is in his achingly horny characters.
Who knows how many queer people don’t emigrate to big cities in search of community? How many of us come out a little closer to home? I’m not sure; nobody is. But I know from my own travels and from e-mail that leathermen reside all over this country, and country boys often have a way with ropes and chains. Not to mention floggers.
“I want to become the sort of man I desire,” Mann writes, perhaps about his own coming-out process. “I want somehow to absorb the apparently effortless masculinity of country boys. Boots, beards, chest hair. Denim jackets, pickup trucks. Tattoos.” (page 18) This is the double-edged sword of American masculinity, a world full of men who smell so good you want to lick their armpits, except that only a handful of them would welcome the experience. The trick is to figure out which ones can be had. I bet some of you will recognize your own experience in “Balsam Poplar Buds,” where a young gay man strives to fit into a class of forestry students, tortured by his conflicting needs to hide his attraction to another student and yet somehow seduce him.
All of these stories and the novella are told in first person, which makes them sound autobiographical. The reader winds up wondering if the short stories are pieces of Mann’s life. Or does the point of view change to a new man’s as we turn the page and get lost in a new story? Some of these pieces do seem to be connected because certain events and ex-lovers pop up in more than one narrator’s past. Whether Mann has had identical experiences with identical men or made it all up, I like the feeling of authenticity that resounds from these pages. The author is genuinely involved with and grounded in rough sex, bondage, Master/slave dynamics, and above all else—gags! It’s nice to have the author make you comfortable with his level of knowledge and interest in S/M well before the action becomes difficult for the fictional bottom. There’s a sense of timing or pacing that draws you in the way a good top can take you into his own world by using his voice and his hands. And his belt.
The gay men in these pages emerge seamlessly out of the hard-used land and endangered wilderness that have witnessed their lives. Mann’s characters are forces of nature or just mere mortals bewitched by the poignant burgeoning and inevitable fading of beauty. One of the things that upset me the most as a 17-year-old getting painfully unrequited crushes on members of my own sex was the charge that same-sex activity was unnatural. Literally. I heard or read, over and over again, that you never saw animals doing these disgusting things. Clearly, then, man-to-man homosexuality was a deliberate act of perversion, a conscious choice to commit a terrible sin, and doomed to produce nothing but dissatisfaction. Dr. David Reuben, author of the wildly popular All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, is not the only person who said, in effect, “God and Mother Nature made the penis to fit into a vagina. Two penises or two vaginas just don’t work.”
The body of one man, I was told, could never really fit into the body of another man. So I could never experience the sort of love that was blessed by both preachers and psychiatrists. It’s a shame I never got to ask how these self-appointed experts on sexuality felt about anal sex and fellatio when these acts were performed by straight couples. How many of them had found so-called “sodomy” so unsatisfactory that they would never do those acts again? I just didn’t see a whole lot of straight men shaking their heads and turning down blowjobs because God had not designed their penises to fit into somebody else’s mouth. Every female sex worker I know gets tons of requests for “Greek.” Why were straight guys looking for a romp along the hard-packed dirt of a girl’s back road? Was there something about a heterosexual woman’s anus that made her orifice an acceptable receptacle for the born-again phallus, while a gay man’s bum was somehow deficient? I’d looked at a lot of men’s assholes, and if there were any manufacturing defects, I couldn’t spot ’em.
The psychologists back then also had brand new studies about male and female hormones, which they’d just been able to synthesize. When they gave male rats estrogen, they allowed other males to mount them. What more needed to be said about why gay sex was pathological? The whole body had to be thrown out of whack to make a male desire penetration. (The fact that some gay sex acts like kissing, making out, holding one another, and using our hands to give one another release don’t involve any penetration was left out of this debate. So was the fact that trying to cure homosexuality by giving gay men more testosterone was an abject failure. It just made them more horny for, you guessed it, each other.) I also thought it was odd that the only rat who was seen as queer in that interaction was the one who apparently wanted to get fucked, not the one who was climbing on top of him. He hadn’t had any estrogen. What was his excuse?
Possibly because my complex desires and gender identity were hard-wired and not mean-spirited high jinks performed to make Baby Jesus cry, I persisted in being a fucking queer (pause to spit) anyway. I got more information from other gay and bisexual people, from sex researchers, from porn, and from my own body. How happy was I when I found a used copy of the 1950s Kinsey study on sexuality in the human male? There’s a whole section in that book devoted to describing same-sex activity in the animal kingdom! But it wasn’t until 1999 when Bruce Bagemihl’s book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity came out (London, England: Plume Books, Ltd.) that we had a more complete and truly astonishing look at the data that biologists and zoologists have refused to publish. I finally got to feel a kinship with other warm-blooded homosexual members of the animal kingdom. I was a beast, but not beastly.
When I have trouble falling asleep, I sometimes picture two male giraffes twining their necks together, literally necking, gently blowing air-kisses on one another while their erections bob in the warm African night. I can take a grinning satisfaction in the male pairs of geese who actually do a better job of raising their offspring because they are both big and strong, able to defend their nest and hunt for food for the hatchling. So what if the egg was filched from somebody else’s nest or found abandoned on the ground? I even forgive them for being monogamous.
The gay men that Mann writes about are also rooted in the natural world, and their desire is of a piece with the vigor and lustiness of its cycles. The narrator in “Balsam Poplar Buds” finds the bewitching scent of another man in the crushed nubbins of a green, sappy tree while he stares longingly at an infatuation whose sexuality is a mystery. “When I take a pointy amber bud between my fingers and rub,” Mann says, “it feels like it’s been dipped in molasses. When I hold my sticky fingers beneath my nose, they smell like musk. They smell like luck, like I’ve just been rubbing a man’s cock or fingering his ass or sweaty armpit.” (p. 54)
In “Not for Long,” the urgent pleasure of a fleeting extramarital affair is made more intense by the melancholy of autumn. The opening of this story sweeps the reader into this personal and yet universal tragedy. “Summer has left before you. A few weeks of drought, a few cold nights, and between one lovemaking and the next the heat has receded, the leaves have started to brown. This morning I notice these deaths as I drive to work. And as I study the mountains, I ask myself why my love for the land—the comfortable earth that outlives and receives us—can be so diffuse, so serene, while my love for men—ephemera of body hair, beard stubble, biceps and nipple—must be so sharp and maddening. …[G]olden leaves are congregating along the limbs of sycamore and box elder. Signs of age, like this early silver on my temples. The sunflowers edging garden plots seem exhausted, bending their weary necks to earth. I recognize despair. …For adulterers, every touch is furtive, hasty. If only I’d met you first. A few afternoon rendezvous stippled across one summer is what our timing has allowed. And now all the green we shared degenerates.” (pp. 83-84)
And in the novella “The Quality of Mercy,” an obsessed kidnapper has created a wilderness-guarded, snug and cozy prison for his beloved. High up in the mountains, in a sanctuary kept secret from the outside world, it is as if he hopes that the beauty all around them will help his captive to see the beauty of the love in his long-suffering heart. I don’t know if Mann intended for this story to be a queer and kinky retelling of two popular fairy tales—but surely you can cudgel your memory of childhood and dredge up the pre-Walt Disney version of these fragments of ancient folklore.
There’s no region of America where religion plays a larger part in people’s lives than the south. Being the scrupulous observer of human nature that he is, Mann gently shares some of the conflict that this can create for pervy gay men. No matter how good it can feel to have another man’s cock inside of you and give in to the strength of his arms and his ropes, we can remain convinced that this desire makes us into something monstrous. Guilt jousts with lust in many of these stories. Mann rides roughshod over these inhibitions and doesn’t scruple to use the mythology of Christianity as an inspiration. “I’m guessing it’s a religious thing for both of us,” he says about a man who is begging to be tied up. “All those pictures of a long-haired, bearded Christ secured to the cross, his holy muscles swelling with the strain. Plus when you’re brought up in the Bible Belt and led to believe that your kind of lust is sinful, it’s a moral release to be tied down…as if free will were a falsehood and fatalism could free you of fault. You can take it up the ass or down the throat and tell yourself you’re helpless, it’s not your doing, it’s not your choice.” (p. 65)
Mann hearkens back to an earlier era of pagan spirituality and celebrates his Celtic ancestors who saw nothing odd or dishonorable in love between warriors/comrades. He sees sadomasochism as a series of rites or ordeals that express his troubled and painful desire for other men and also prove his worthiness to love them. One such heathen ceremony, receiving a tattoo, he describes as, “[a] small proud pain, almost a pleasure: nails, honeybees, wild rose thorns. A minor test of strength, sweat rolling down my sides like spring thaw. …[A] little over an hour later, I’m sorry that it’s over.” (p. 20) A more prolonged experience produces more profound results. “Everett’s brought the lash across my shoulders only a couple of times before I realize that this is just a more extreme form of the catharsis I find every time I’m bound and topped. …I can let my smothered violence loose without damage or legal consequence. Tonight I’m a Roman slave, a Confederate prisoner of war, a hairy Highlander held captive… Tonight my body’s a barbarian’s. My flesh is bound, but my long-constricted, long-stifled Shadow’s free. I can struggle and thrash all I want, and no one’s getting hurt. I can shout, roar, or sob as loudly as the bit-gag allows, and no one’s peace is shattered… It’s a release I never thought I could achieve in this life.” (p. 48)
In a world where the sort of pleasure that they want is rarely found, Mann’s characters have large appetites for all good things. There were times when I wasn’t sure if I was reading sex-fiction or a cookbook. Such meals these boys cook up for one another! Such scary quantities of liquor are consumed—another cure for guilt or reluctance. These bearish appetites become a masculine form of nurturance, almost a form of foreplay. In “Snowed in with Sam,” a gag is taken out of the happy slave’s mouth only when he is to be offered a delicious meal or a swig of whiskey. What a way to spend a winter night, with howling winds kicking up snow outside the house and concealing the howls that are kicked up inside. Here’s a preview of this story’s complex pleasures. “For me, his hairy chest possesses the power of a religious icon, so of course in my world he’s perpetually bare-chested. And tied. A man as beautiful as he is, according to my peculiar leather aesthetic, should be bound almost constantly, and very frequently gagged. Don’t ask me why I feel this way. It’s as much of a mystery as the constellations’ silent revolutions… Some of you, I know, understand. To use the vernacular I share with my mountaineer brethren, I cain’t hep it.” (p. 4)
One of the themes that frequently emerges in these pages is the conflict between having a lover who is a good, reliable person—but not kinky—and the way your dick gets so hard it hurts when you think about being tied up and taken to your physical limits. Many of us, especially the leathermen who live in areas where it’s quite an achievement to find a trick for vanilla sex, let alone a lover, know what this feels like. “Why can’t the fierce and the kind come in one package, I wonder, remembering Ken, who used to keep me tied up all night; or Everett, who used to fuck me in his basement sling. How I relished their roughness, but with neither of them could I find the emotional connection that might lead to more. Now, settled down with the sort of husband I’d always dreamed about, the thoughtful kind of mate I’d always hoped I’d one day find, here I am dreaming of leather intensities past, wishing Will could be a little less sweet and a lot more brutal.” (p. 89)
Almost all of the men in this book are looking for love, even in situations where they know it won’t be offered. It’s good to see an author of plainspoken sex add this realistic wrinkle to his plots. Those predictable stories where everybody looks perfect, all the cocks are huge, and sex comes off without a hitch leave me feeling more skeptical than aroused. If I’m going to identify with a sexual icon, I want him to have some human frailty, some haunting deprivation or fear in his life. The romantic experience may be more about the hunt or unrequited love than it is about enjoying the fruits of successful courtship.
S/M is a sexual orientation. The instinct to seek it out goes that deep. But we live in a world where sadomasochism appears as a fashion statement or a spanking joke, not recognized as a rich erotic language that evokes solemnity and awe. People who don’t fantasize about dominance and submission or restraint have no idea what the kinky folks are talking about, which is why we hardly ever do talk to them about our sexual style. What would they make of this?
———
They float to the surface of my skin like shadowy fish that hard rain has roused from sleep. Rorschach blots, as if my chest were smudged with ink, as if I were a pale parchment upon which solicitous violence might write. Blinded as I am, still I can feel them spread, beneath two warm sets of hands caressing and soothing me. I can feel their ache darken and rise, drift across the landscape of my torso like storm clouds. Gently my lovers’ fingers ponder them, as if, like haphazard shapes in a teacup or soil cast by a geomancer, bruises could reveal the future. (p. 87)
———
This division cuts through the gay community too. So it’s no wonder that the big brown eyes of a man you love who doesn’t want to hurt you, ever, in any way, are uncomprehending when you tell him that you can’t be satisfied within the confines of that relationship. Leathermen should know better, but we can fall for the idea that S/M is a condiment. We think, when we get into vanilla relationships, that rough sex, long-term bondage, whipping, or Daddy/boy scenes are something we can do without or settle for getting once a year, if we have permission, when we go out of town to the International Mr. Leather Contest or the Folsom Street Fair.
Again and again, Mann’s fiction tells us why that is not a workable plan for one’s life. In “A History of Barbed Wire,” “Dionysus Redux,” and “Not for Long,” Mann examines the various facets of forbidden man-to-man love and longing, whether that longing is made taboo by the larger society or by a monogamous vanilla boyfriend. Despite the consequences, he urges us to step off the beaten path and run the other way from a safe and predictable life. Happiness may be a brief experience, but life is unbearable without those exceptional moments of connection, when a man can face someone he wants and see that he is wanted in return. He isn’t talking about jaded tricking at the tubs. This is sex that matters, even if it is between strangers.
You have to really believe in yourself and cut away a lot of self-hatred and fear to do it, but there are better ways to manage being a gay man who also loves leathersex. You can hold out for that one special man (or perhaps more) who shares your interests. Or, if you must fall in love with a vanilla boy, you can insist on an open relationship and not take any shit about confronting the Shadow. I loved stories like “Everett’s Boy” and “Daddy Dave” where steady lovers make space in their relationship for those vital, kinky experiences. Everybody’s a winner when Master Everett’s somewhat un-kinky lover can come home from work and take a well-bound slave boy to bed, to be fucked when he awakens, or when the narrator’s non-S/M lover, Will, can witness his boyfriend being well-topped by Daddy Dave and perhaps discover a few kinky desires of his own.
There are so many kinds of safe, sane, and consensual S/M in these stories that I hardly know how to list them. There’s long-term slavery and bondage, especially the kind that has historical roots in the War of Northern Aggression (the Civil War to us Yankees); gags; shaving; bikers; daddies; blindfolds; spit and piss and cum; whipping; and tattoos and scars. You’ll probably find a lot more fetishes as you savor this collection. I’m just giving you the highlights. But Mann doesn’t shy away from edge play or situations in which bondage is necessary because the victim in no way consents to being restrained. I am still haunted by the unknown but probably savage fate of the overeager, rash students in “Raspberry Moonshine” who got too close to real Appalachian culture. I empathize with the fatalism of the exhausted, dispirited main character in “Fireflies,” who dedicates the end of his life to retrieving the history of a Civil War hero who was disgraced for being caught fucking an officer. Because of prejudice against “morphodites,” locals have tried to erase this valiant warrior’s memory, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, they turned him into a shadow of himself. A ghost. A vengeful and hungry ghost. This is an ideal story to read on a rainy night when you are home all alone. Just get out the tit clamps and hot wax first. Maybe even some alcohol pads and a scalpel.
The novella that concludes this book is probably one of the more disturbing things I’ve read that borrows BDSM techniques for nonconsensual purposes. It is aptly named “The Quality of Mercy,” but I can’t tell you why without giving up too much of the plot. Mann refuses to take any of the easy paths in this frightening and poignant tale of a crazed fan who kidnaps his favorite country-and-western star. The kidnapper is gay; the singer is straight. But the jailer nevertheless hopes his tenderness—and the lack of any other choice—will bring “Tim” to love him.
Mann may lose some readers who want a simpler (and less believable) resolution between these two characters, the abductor and his hostage. The spectacle of a once-homophobic (or merely indifferent) man being suborned into cock-hungry slavery has universal appeal for us. But this would be no easy feat. It takes more than one taste of cum to cure heteronormativity, I suspect. Knowing this, Mann’s top alter ego settles in for the long haul. We are invited to participate vicariously in his conquest of Tim’s body and of his mind—made accessories after the fact to this crime.
The loss of a few impatient readers is well worth it. This is a piece of literature on the same level as Carson McCullers or William Faulkner. We are watching a drama unfold between two men who seem utterly real. Their sexual conflict is only one part of their struggle. Both of them know what it is like to be betrayed or in the grip of love for someone whose attention is drawn elsewhere. No one is free here. The leather top is as controlled by his compulsion to own Tim as Tim is confined with rope, metal shackles, or duct tape. Tim’s initial inability to take down the erotic barriers between himself and other men keeps him in subjection—cut off from a wealth of care and devotion. The whip comes down when Tim tries to escape, but the master’s soul has been clawed apart and picked clean by the vultures of society’s scorn. He hates himself as much as Tim hates him. This adventure is the end of the line for him, regardless of success or failure. So Tim is not the only one who feels as if his life is over.
The urgency of the story and the melancholy, matter-of-fact way that it is told draw us further and further into the center of a character who seems at first glance unworthy of empathy. But one of the higher purposes of fiction is to make us familiar with aspects of the human experience that we don’t like to acknowledge. When we look away, it is because we have seen our own face, from another, harsher lifetime, returning that gaze. The legal system has drawn lines to protect the public peace and private property. But how much pushing does it take to send a man over that line if he is already on the edge? Especially if he’s already been told he is crazy because of what makes his heart sing and his dick swell? As the master is repeatedly rejected, his prisoner starts to seem like the ungrateful and unkind one. Anyone who has experienced the injustice of a serious heartbreak ought to be able to see their own experience reflected in this work, despite the extreme nature of the sex and restraint that’s depicted. Mann is making the point that none of us can escape the human dilemma, regardless of sexual orientation or the contents of our closets.
The erotic icons of the leather community are so masculine they’re sometimes brutal—big guys with hard muscles and steely eyes who can take an unbelievable amount of pain, or inflict it. But isn’t there something inherently romantic about S/M? I’m not talking about the predigested greeting card Valentine’s Day version of love, the kind that is dumbed down and safe. I’m talking about the loneliness that is great enough to crack you in half, the vision of male beauty that slaps you to your knees and brings tears to your eyes, and the desire to be possessed by that virility, to live inside of it, to be forever understood and consoled and tested by it. The self-named “Caliban” in this novella is as much a prisoner of these archetypes as the man he has chosen for the object of his obsession. What happens to them? You must go live on the mountaintop with them in order to find out. Be afraid—and go anyway.
I’m proud to put A History of Barbed Wire up on my shelf. I hope it will grace yours, and that you’ll be moved and turned on enough to pass a high opinion of it on to your friends. There’s a glut of books about BDSM on the market these days, but few that are this intelligent, rigorous, and humane. Our sexual style isn’t for stupid people. It sometimes seems to me the leather community is overpopulated with people too smart for their own good. We manage to think ourselves into some tragic corners. It takes a writer like Mann to understand how we get stuck, how we get free, and why we sometimes need to be nailed to one point in time and forced to give in to whatever is happening to us. That may be the only real freedom that we have. In the end, this is a book about courage, by a writer who understands how brave you have had to be in order to find your place in a pair of boots, or on the ground in front of them.
Patrick Califia wrote the pioneering S/M erotic classic Macho Sluts, and has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about Eros and sexual politics ever since. His publishing credits include editing Advocate Men for a year and writing the sex advice column for the Advocate for more than a decade. He lives in San Francisco with his collared boy Jakob and a cat who bosses them both around. His new passion is a posse of vampires who have sex in every conceivable position and gender. In other words, he is working on Immortal Empress, the sequel to Mortal Companion. His hobbies are flagellation and doing his fifth step.
———
A History of Barbed Wire
~~~
Snowed in with Sam
Late January 2005, dusk in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I park my pickup and stride through deepening white toward the house, a ramshackle old place isolated among oaks. Against the stairs, I stomp my boots to dislodge snow from the treads, and I know Sam must hear the pounding. Because this is my world, the world I’ve made, what he feels is not dread but delight in knowing I’m home.
Inside, I shoulder off my leather jacket, toss my backpack in the front hall, and head for the kitchen to pour us both a drink. Sam’s where I left him, where I’ve dreamed him to be. He looks up at me. He grins around the rubber ball strapped in his mouth. I take off his cowboy hat—Resistol, black straw, bad-boy signifier—kiss his bald spot, tousle his thinning brown hair, replace the hat, and pour out a tumbler of Bushmills Irish whiskey. The chair creaks as I sit in it heavily, as I lean back and take that first welcome sip.
His name isn’t really Sam, but, for the sake of avoiding lawsuits, let’s call him that. Not that, outside of my head, he would ever read this story, this book. The guy’s married to a beautiful, talented woman, they have several beautiful children. In my heart I’m a criminal, God knows, but my sociopathy isn’t translated into action, simply because the legal repercussions would be too great. (And who knows? Like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, I might not be able to bear up under the weight of guilt). And so, outside of this tale, Sam would never find himself here, bucked and gagged on my kitchen floor. But today that’s not his choice, that’s mine. I create what I can. In fantasy, at least, at last, the laws of probability have no power.
Today he’s here, and he’s happy to be here, happy to be my hopelessly helpless boy. Along with the signature cowboy hat, he’s got on faded jeans and black cowboy boots. And a slave collar: a short length of chain padlocked around his neck. He’s shirtless, needless to say. For me, his hairy chest possesses the power of a religious icon, so of course in my world he’s perpetually bare-chested. And tied. A man as beautiful as he is, according to my peculiar leather aesthetic, should be bound almost constantly, and very frequently gagged. Don’t ask me why I feel this way. It’s as much of a mystery as the constellations’ silent revolutions, the sticky bud scales splitting in the spring. Some of you, I know, understand. To use the vernacular I share with my mountaineer brethren, I cain’t hep it.
Bucked and gagged? For the vanilla boys out there, it used to be a Civil War torture/punishment. Sam’s sitting on the floor. His hands are tied together in front of him. His booted feet are tied together. He’s folded up in a hot and hairy little package—early Valentine’s Day gift to myself—his arms wrapped around his legs and held in place by a wooden dowel roped between the crooks of his elbows and the crooks of his knees. If this weren’t fiction, I never would have left Sam tied that way all day, while I taught, sent out poems to magazines, called my partner, attended a committee meeting, and gathered material for my second-year tenure review. Much too uncomfortable a position to endure for long. Once my buddy Everett tied me this way, and I made it to three hours. I was whimpering by then, I who pride myself on how much pain I can take. He kindly ass-fucked me before he untied me.
Outside, the snow is gray with nightfall, a hue I’ve seen on surf-smoothed shells at Daytona Beach, where my partner John and I occasionally visit his parents. Somewhere, out in all that cold, a mourning dove musters its sad coo-coo-coo, sound made over the grave of some Celtic warrior—Diarmuid, maybe, or Tristan—who’s died for love. The whiskey feels like rolling oak embers around my tongue. I look down at Sam looking up in me in the last of the light and know that if anything will redeem my petty rages and flaws, it’s how deeply I love beauty.
We sit together in the dark’s deepening for a while. It’s very quiet, the sort of blessed silence snow brings, erasing the world I do not want, which is to say everything outside this room. Sam sighs, as content as I. He rocks a little in his bonds, bites down on the ball in his mouth, and looks up at me, eyes as dark as mine—and isn’t this what I’ve always wanted, to adore a man this beautiful and talented, to control and protect him and see in his eyes that adoration returned? He settles his chin on his chest, the brim of his hat cocked over his eyes. I take another swallow of whiskey, then reach down to stroke his goatee.
His chin’s wet with drool. After only a short time, a man with a ball-gag in his mouth starts to drool. Any of you who have read other erotica I’ve written know what a fetish this is for me. (I cain’t hep it.) It certainly is arousing now, with the man I find most desirable on the planet stripped to the waist and roped up at my feet. I rub his goatee, get my fingers good and wet, scrawl my initials on his cheek with his spit. When I bend to kiss him, I bump my forehead on the brim of his hat, so off it comes—placed carefully on the kitchen table at my elbow—and now my beard’s brushing his lips, his moist-furred chin, my tongue’s running over the ball, over his moustache. Nothing much hotter than kissing a gagged man, especially Sam, feeling him press his mouth against mine, listening to him groan with frustration as he tries without success to work his tongue around the ball—it’s buckled in too tight—as he tries to push the gag out. What he wants is his mouth filled not with rubber but my tongue’s meat. Soon enough. I lick the tip of his nose, then straighten up and take another sip of whiskey. Smiling, I sit back and nod, and Sam takes his cue. He bares his teeth around the ball and chews on it. He growls and shakes his head from side to side, works up another mouthful of slave-slobber that brims over the corners of his mouth and drips onto his belly. He tugs hard at the ropes holding him in place and growls some more.
Sweet boy: he knows I like to see him struggle. He obliges me, grunting and writhing at my feet. He takes a short break, panting around the ball, breathing heavily through his nose, then starts fighting again, the muscles in his bare shoulders and arms straining with the effort. I watch in silence, and the windows fill with lavender twilight.
After a good ten minutes, Sam’s armpits are musky-moist—damn, he smells good, like spices and forest loam. His chin, chest, belly, and crotch are wet with sweat and drool, and both his cock and mine are thick in our jeans. Exhausted, he surrenders, hangs limply in his bonds. I reach over, place my hand over his hairy chest, and feel the racing of his heart.
Time for his reward. I pat him on the head, kiss him on his sweat-streaked brow, and then gently unbuckle the gag and pull it out.
“Thanks!” Sam gasps. I wait while he works the stiffness out of his jaw. Tipping the tumbler of Bushmills to his lips, I let him take a sip. Sam slurps greedily at the liquid gold, and a little spills over, joining the saliva in his chest hair. I wipe up the whiskey with a forefinger, run my finger around a nipple, then push my finger into Sam’s mouth. He sucks on it for a second, then I pull his head back by his hair and press my mouth to his.
Sam groans and opens his mouth to me. This time our kiss is untrammeled. Tongue to tongue, beard to beard. It goes on for a while, the kind of passion I thought I could no longer feel or find. Pretty soon my face is smeared with his saliva, and we’re both grinning and nibbling moustaches and lips. Every now and then I take a sip more Bushmills, give him another nip, and then we’re off again, filling one another, probing mouths scented with whiskey. What bliss he brings me. In this word-world, what bliss I bring him.
We’re both a little buzzed. The snow has thickened considerably during our tongue-fest, lining the limbs of the maple outside the kitchen window. Time to get dinner on, or we’ll never eat. I swig the last of the whiskey, hold it in my mouth, then kiss Sam a final time, pushing the liquor between his lips. He sips the burning from my tongue, swallows hard, and closes his eyes.
I reach for the gag on the kitchen table and am about to buckle it back in when he opens his eyes and says, “Wait. Wait, please.”
“Yep?” I kiss his shoulder, the gag hanging from my hand.
“Why am I here?” He opens his eyes and looks up at me, yearning, confused, as if he’s just forgotten something momentous.
“Because I’m imagining this.” Between his goatee and his sideburns, a few days’ worth of beard-stubble darkens his cheeks, and I brush it softly with the back of my hand.
Sam licks his lips. He kisses my hand, then turns his head and stares out into the snow. “Go on,” he says quietly.
“Because this is the only way I can have you. Because, if I had the power of a god, this is what I would most want, out of all the world’s erotic permutations and possibilities. Because you’re my Muse.”
Sam nods. “I understand.” He gazes out into the snow a moment longer, then looks at me solemnly and says, “Please, would you gag me again?”
Tenderly I push the ball against his lips. He smiles—wistful, I think, is the word for that expression—and opens his mouth, takes the black ball between his teeth. As I buckle it behind his head, Sam mumbles “Thank you.” I sit there beside him in the dark for a while. Sam leans his head against my knee, and we listen to the wind come up, splintering the snow-silence that’s prevailed until now, thundering the tin roof, lashing the windowpanes with snow.
———
We’re both Southern boys, country boys—Louisiana, Virginia—that’s part of the attraction. So I know without asking—delicious how he’s in no position to speak, delicious the muffled replies he’d manage if I did ask—what kind of meal he’d relish on a cold night like tonight. I like to cook for my roped-up boy. First, some music: I slide A Celtic Tale into the CD player. Then a little more whiskey. What a combination of the perverse and the domestic: a drink in hand, a handsome, goateed slave, snow making parlous the roads, and a big down-home meal of barbequed ribs, cole slaw, kale, and cornbread. Hell, I’m the architect of my own paradise.
You’re missing a fine time if you haven’t been in Sam’s boots, if you haven’t been tied up and cooked for by a man like me. The sauce I simmered yesterday, the greens I cleaned this morning, and pretty soon the ribs are in the oven, the slaw’s shredded, and the kale is simmering with fatback. I sit at the kitchen table by a reading lamp and read a little of Seven Viking Romances. Every now and then I pull the gag out long enough to give Sam another sip of whiskey. Every now and then I run my fingers through the hair on his chest, flicking and tugging his nipples till they harden and the front of his jeans swells, till he closes his eyes, throws back his head, nods with pleasure, and groans gratitude into his gag. The furnace cuts on with increasing regularity—I have the heat up so Sam will be comfortable shirtless—which tells me the temperature’s continuing to drop. Tonight, Sam and I will have one another, flannel sheets, and my great-aunt’s homemade quilts to keep us warm.
We’re both really drunk now, and my intoxication is quadrupled by his bare torso, his handsome face, the smell of his armpits, his quiet submission. This fiction is what I’ve been waiting for, an excuse to have Sam, not a substitute, not a surrogate. And this is the miracle this little story allows: he’s both willing and eager. He’s not some distant, famous Nashville star who doesn’t know I exist. This, I think, rolling one nipple between thumb and forefinger till Sam groans, must be the sweet comfort the full-fledged psychopath enjoys. What good is the present state of virtual-reality technology if it can’t give me this, a weekend snowed in with Sam?
Every fantasy is a monologue, and since Sam and I are both happy with him gagged, it’s a monologue he gets now, as I sit here, lights off again, a few candles lit, wind hammering the house and tossing the line of pines against the horizon back of the house. Sam leans his head against my thigh, I stroke his chest and his brow, I talk and he listens.
I tell him about attending his Charleston concert last fall, standing in that packed civic center with thousands of sex-crazed women, young and old, whose screaming shenanigans made my passion for him seem moderate in contrast. I saw him pull off his sweat-drenched shirt after the last song, when he was halfway down the corridor leading backstage. I watched his smooth, broad, bare shoulders recede into the distance and disappear around the corner and I wanted so badly to follow him, to make love to him in whatever Kanawha Valley hotel he was staying in that night.
I tell him about The Quality of Mercy, the novella I wrote last spring, in which my protagonist, an obsessed ex-convict named Sean, fictionalized version of Jeff, kidnaps West Virginia country singer Tim, fictionalized version of Sam.
I tell him about the little Sam-Shrine I have in my office: the baseball cap with his name stitched into it, the little ceramic tile with that hot picture that graced the cover of his last CD. Sam in black cowboy hat, black coat, black shirt open to his solar plexus, revealing the meaty curve of his left pec matted with dark hair, a maddening glimpse of nipple if you look closely enough.
I point out the photos of him stuck to my refrigerator, tell him about the Sam calendar on the wall by my bed, where he and I will be sleeping together later. In my closet, there are T-shirts with his name on them, “Sam-wear” I bought at the on-line fan store. There’s a black cowboy hat a lot like his that I wear with my drover when the weather warms up. Sometimes I see it on the table in the front hall and can pretend that Sam just took it off, that he’s around the house somewhere, that we live together, that he’s my lover. There’s a Sam sticker on the rear window of my pickup truck. And, of course, I own all his CD’s and even play some of his songs on the piano and guitar.
I get a little worked up, explaining my ardor. “Nothing better than driving mountain roads in my pickup, listening to your CD’s! The way you say ‘cain’t’ and ‘thang,’ just like me, makes me feel at home. Some of those songs, hell, I get so excited I start letting loose with Rebel Yell yee-haws of delight! Your voice, it’s like you’re there, you know? Like we’re travel buddies. I listen to your music and look at your photos, and think, ‘Shit, this is crazy, his voice is right here with me, so why cain’t his body be? Why cain’t I touch his body the way his voice touches me?! Y’know?!”
Sam sits through this mumbled worship, grinning moistly around his gag, occasionally rolling his eyes but clearly impressed with, flattered by, my fanaticism. I can tell by the serenity in his gaze that he realizes that I’m no threat. He’s no more in danger than a god in the presence of his priest. What this confession, these relics, indicate is not insanity but passion. I’m in love. I’m just like all those hysterical women in the Charleston Civic Center last October, dreaming of a passionate, deeper, more fulfilling life, craving what they can never have, longing for what they find most beautiful. It’s the common lot of humanity. Some of us are just more honest than others about what we want. Some of us are just more enamored of the inaccessible and the perverse.
The timer goes off; the ribs are done. I pull them out to cool, mix up cornbread batter and pour it into a heated cast-iron skillet, and in half an hour we’re ready to eat. More music, the soundtrack to Rob Roy. Don’t want to embarrass Sam by playing his CD’s all evening, and besides, we both have Irish blood, so I figure we’re predisposed to like Celtic music. The wind’s still rattling the roof, and now there’s the weary scrape of a snowplow on the road down the hill. I like the sound. It emphasizes the cozy isolation Sam and I share.
Great advantage to being a bondage top in fiction: no awkward fumbling with knots, no tying and untying. Simple shift of a paragraph, and now Sam’s bound in an entirely different manner. (What is good kink but working some variety into the demandingly tight constrictions of fetish?) He’s sitting beside me on a kitchen chair, within arm’s reach so I can feed him easier. He’s barefoot now, still shirtless, in a pair of black jeans with ragged rips in the knees and thighs, revealing the brown hair on his legs. His wrists are crossed behind his back and knotted together. There’s a good bit of cotton rope wrapped around his torso, securing his arms to his sides, cinching his elbows together. The white cords make his chest-pelt look even thicker and darker, his pecs even meatier. The gag’s different too: his mouth’s bisected by a thick bit—nothing much prettier than the juxtaposition of that goatee, the tender bow of those full lips, and that rubber rod between his teeth.
Around the kitchen I light more candles. I reach over, gently tug the slave chain around his neck. “Time to eat,” I say, unbuckling the bit.
I feed Sam with my fingers, just as my protagonist did the man he kidnapped, in the novella my yearnings for Sam inspired. Good to be doing it myself, rather than through a fictional persona. He’s as hungry as I am, eagerly taking from my fingers the rich bits of barbequed country-style ribs and buttered cornbread. I lift spoonfuls of kale to his lips; he slurps the pot liquor. We’re drinking Bud Light, his favorite beer, and, as much of a beer snob as I am, I have to admit that the clean taste works well with spicy barbeque sauce.
“Damn, this is good,” he sighs. “Kinda food I grew up on. Fighting your ropes really worked up my appetite. Gimme another swig of that beer.”
It’s a messy meal, and soon I’ve got a barbeque stain on my white T-shirt. At Sam’s request, I shuck it off. Now we’re both bare-chested in this warm space, grinning drunkenly, happy to be together, while the blizzard rattles the windowpanes and the silhouettes of trees waver in and out of white. When Sam gets sauce on his furry chin, I laugh and lick it off. When my moustache gets buttery, he leans forward grinning—“C’mere”—and licks me clean.
“Pretty awkward,” Sam says at one point, as he angles his head to tug meat off a bone I proffer him.
“You want me to untie you?”
“Hell, no!” He flexes his chest and arms in their web of rope. “This feels great. Keep me this way as long as you want.”
“You really are my creature,” I say, tugging the meat off for him and slipping it in his open mouth. Pygmalion must have felt like this.
“Guess so!” Sam laughs. “Jeff, dribble a little of that honey on my cornbread, okay? And how ’bout a shot of hot sauce on those greens?”
We’re too busy eating to talk much, and by the time we’re done, it’s late. There’s a pile of cleaned bones on our plates, half the cornbread is gone, we’re belching softly, and I’ve unbuckled both his belt and mine. The snow shows no sign of slowing.
I lift Sam to his feet, wipe his mouth with a paper towel, and wrap my arms around him. His bare chest against mine is warm, moist, and soft with hair. We’re just about the same height, and I rest my chin on his shoulder, clasp his roped wrists between my fingers. “So, if such an idyll were real, if you and I together could ever come to be, what do you think we’d talk about?”
He grins. “Hell, you’re the author. You tell me!”
“Country living, country music?”
“Yeah.”
“Fathers. How they hurt.”
“Yeah…”
“Pickup trucks, motorcycles…”
“Yeah!”
“What would we do together? Maybe drink some beer, eat some chips and dip, watch some football?”
“Sounding good!”
“I could play the guitar while you sang?”
“Yep, whatever you want. That’d be fun.”
“Hmmm, guess I don’t know you well enough to put convincing words in your mouth,” I say, unzipping his jeans and tugging them to his ankles. “Think I’ll skip the dialogue and fill my mouth instead.”
His nipples are soft and hard at once, anointed with leftover sauce. Tonight, in this snowstorm, in this sentence, at last I lick them, softly at first, then, at his urging, harder. He’s made to like it rough. I take his pecs in my hands and massage their meatiness hard, just this side of being brutal. I suck his areolas, bite the very tips of his nipples till he’s groaning, wincing, hissing with pain and with rapture. I range a little, my beard-fur mingling with the wet hairiness between his tits, with the crest of fur along his belly, then I’m back to his nipples, brushing them with my cheek-stubble, lapping and teeth-tugging them raw, like some hungry god taking his turn at a bowl of ambrosia.
When Sam starts to make little sobbing sounds, I finally desist. I take a long pull of beer, give the same to him, and drop to my knees for the next course. I’ve been wanting to suck his cock for years now. Last fall, standing in that crowded civic center as Sam sang, I watched him lift his shirt every now and then to give us teasing flashes of bare belly, and I knew that his chest, his cock, his ass were the ones, of all men’s on earth, that I most wanted to devour.
I tease us both by chewing and licking the swell in his boxer briefs for a minute or two before peeling them down and letting the heft of his cock pop free. His dick’s long and thick, the kind that lean, rangy men like him tend to have. I drip honey on the rosy tip, delicately lap it off, then slide the whole length in—sword sliding into the scabbard meant for it—till I choke. I back off a bit, chew on the head a little, then start a regular rhythm along the shaft, with occasional tongue-swirls over the head and into the piss-slit. A man like me’s well-practiced, and in no time at all Sam’s getting close, fucking the back of my throat hard and fast. He’s making a lot of moaning music, good excuse for me to grab bondage tape and a bandana off the sideboard.