Taming Gregory

Most of us are tamed in childhood. That’s when all of our animal urges and appetites emerge, and are bent and conditioned and sublimated into more acceptable directions. Only the wildest ones escape being socialized and trained into acceptable manageable little human creatures. Those few become rock stars, or criminals, or bounty hunters.

But you can't just train to be, for instance, a Green Beret – you have to have an exceptional life force, a fierce fiery energy in you to begin with. The sort of thing that drives you to climb into the rafters of a building and hang upside down while other people are just walking in the conventional way, or that moves you to vaporize a watermelon with a Winchester Model 70 just to see what will happen. And you don’t become a devoted hedonist just because it’s the “in” thing to do. Or if you do, you don’t do it particularly well. The future bounty hunter has to be watched even in childhood to keep him from casually, accidentally, assassinating his sister. The future sexual omnivore starts out polymorphous perverse and never gets it beaten out of them, never learns not to touch the family’s sleek Siamese cat to see if she can come like a girl, never learns to hide their sexuality away and hide from it the way most people do.

Gregory came to me with the fear that he might be a sexual addict and, depending on how you see it, either I fed into his addiction or I set him free.

I came to him with my own outrageous fantasies, like the ones in which I have sex with tentacled aliens, or with an entire jungle, writhing vines twisting and gathering me up, binding and penetrating me. I craved a setting in which I would not have to hold back, where I could give and take as much as I wanted without fear of destroying or being destroyed.

“Rough sex,” he called it, but that barely describes our ferocity. I opened to his cock in every way possible, I inserted random objects into him and dripped hot wax onto him. He bit me and scratched me at my request. We did minor violence to each other, but these too were superficial acts.

What matters is deeper. There is a cavern within us, and I take him there. In that darkness there are pulsating lights, where time stands still, where everything that separates two people, two creatures, two human animals falls away.

I do not make him feel, I let him feel. In a world where you are told not to feel, or told what and how and when to feel, I open the floodgates and let his feeling sweep us both away, his bright nerve-sparkling ability to feel more than most people. Like an ant stroking an aphid to release sweet nectar I encourage him and feed on him, with every empathic mirror neuron I follow him into sensation.

Sometimes we go there with very little movement, no outward frenzy of activity, nothing that a bystander could observe unless they are particularly attuned to that style of ecstasy. Once we made love in a tree, the branches supporting us, lifting us, making us feel weightless. When I took him over the edge, he said he felt the tree was holding him too and wanting him to come.

Each time he fills me, each time we draw down this overflowing energy and let it flow through us, we heal some wound, repair some torn vessel, capture joy. Always with me holding him, stroking his softness and his long silky hair. I feel special, lucky, filled with awe - the way you feel when a wild animal feels safe with you, lies down, puts their head in your lap, and lets you pet them.

Oh, it is good to be the one he turns to for this! We kiss on the street and people stare, partly because of his beauty and his long hair that makes us look like two women together, and partly because of the energy between us. They know that we know something they don’t. We are initiates of a secret, ancient club. This is the sexual power people have built ceremonies and rituals around; the Eleusinian mysteries, Tantra, the Kama Sutra, modern rites of power exchange.

This is why men destroyed temples and veiled women’s bodies; the fear of this kind of sexual power. In the wrong hands, or given the wrong impulses, people kill and die and rob banks to experience this. This goes far beyond really intense sex or just being “good in bed.” This is the Great Rite, a transcendent religious experience. And I’m not vain enough to think I am the only one who can take him there, but I do know I am the first to take him this far.

You can get there in other ways. Meditation, fasting, prayer, if you're patient. Music gets me there and it's more fun - singing, chanting, dancing, drumming. Playing my bass. Drugs will do it too, but there's a price to pay. I learned that the hard way.

Pain can take you there, and I know that’s why Gregory seeks it out, but sex is the one way almost everyone can get there, beyond ego, beyond self. Take that outlet away from people, make them fuck through a hole in a sheet, or re-wire their brains in childhood to make the search for ecstasy shameful, and you have a whole population of bliss-starved lonely prisoners who you can manipulate with promises of God’s love and the fear of excommunication. Most religion is crowd control masquerading as morality.

It's probably why so many people are just God-awful in bed, and it's appalling. In a survey of celebrities asked to describe their first sexual experience, only one famously bisexual rock star recalled having had a good time. I can only conclude that most people are just doing it wrong, in a way that goes beyond only trying one position or not knowing how to locate erogenous zones. They don’t know how to reach inside each other, into a spiritual world that is beyond bodies, beyond what Hollywood and pornography defines as sex. They have lost access to the sanctified place of communion that sexual connection only points the way to - and is only the first step towards - oneness, our birthright, our joyful covenant with the infinite beyond.

I find this tragic, that something our bodies were designed and programmed to do, and do lovingly, instinctually, passionately, has been warped and repressed and removed from us. But the urge to hunt and kill has been sublimated as well, and I don’t feel the same level of outrage over that, although that too has been harnessed and redirected by people far more power-hungry than I am.

There is so much power here, energy that hums like a cranked-up amp, like the generators of a power station you pass on the highway at night, far away from where people live. I feel it like a current passing through his veins, I see the glowing field around him. I have always wanted to measure it with a galvanometer or some other device that might detect this tingling electrical flow over his skin. This is alchemy, this is magic, this is all that there is. If you could harness this much power, I believe you could turn lead into gold. It would be fun to try.

His electricity is magnetic. I assume I can’t hold on to him indefinitely. Someone else will be drawn to him, will fall into him the way I did. I think I knew that when I signed up to play the part of mother; someday he will leave the nest. I unkinked his kinks, reparented him, gave him permission. I sent him forth without sexual guilt; I set free a hungry predator.

Our housecat leaves an offering on our doorstep in the morning, a small mouse, neck broken, still warm. Gregory brings home Laney.