Well, which is it—blow or suck? (Old joke: “No, darling. Suck it. ‘Blow’ is a mere figure of speech.” Imagine the stress that gave rise to that gag.) Moreover, why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act? My friend David Aaronovitch, a columnist in London, wrote of his embarrassment at being in the same room as his young daughter when the TV blared the news that the president of the United States had received oral sex in an Oval Office vestibule. He felt crucially better, but still shy, when the little girl asked him, “Daddy, what’s a vestibule?”
Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men.
—From “Cocksucker Blues,” Part 4 of Underworld, by Don DeLillo
I admire the capitalization there, don’t you? But I think Acey (who in the novel is also somewhat Deecey) furnishes a clue. For a considerable time, the humble blowjob was considered something rather abject, especially as regards the donor but also as regards the recipient. Too passive, each way. Too grungy—especially in the time before dental and other kinds of hygiene. Too risky—what about the reminder of the dreaded vagina dentata (fully materialized by the rending bite-off scene in The World According to Garp)? And also too queer. Ancient Greeks and Romans knew what was going on, all right, but they are reported to have avoided the over-keen fellators for fear of their breath alone. And a man in search of this consolation might be suspected of being … unmanly. The crucial word “blowjob” doesn’t come into the American idiom until the 1940s, when it was (a) part of the gay underworld and (b) possibly derived from the jazz scene and its oral instrumentation. But it has never lost its supposed Victorian origin, which was “below-job” (cognate, if you like, with the now archaic “going down”). This term from London’s whoredom still has a faint whiff of contempt. On the other hand, it did have its advocates as the prototype of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck”: at least in the sense of a quickie that need only involve the undoing of a few buttons. And then there’s that nagging word, “job,” which seems to hint at a play-for-pay task rather than a toothsome treat for all concerned.
Stay with me. I’ve been doing the hard thinking for you. The three-letter “job,” with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American. Perhaps forgotten as the London of Jack the Ripper receded into the past, the idea of an oral swiftie was re-exported to Europe and far beyond by a massive arrival of American soldiers. For these hearty guys, as many a French and English and German and Italian madam has testified, the blowjob was the beau ideal. It was a good and simple idea in itself. It was valued—not always correctly—as an insurance against the pox. And—this is my speculation—it put the occupied and the allied populations in their place. “You do some work for a change, sister. I’ve had a hard time getting here.” Certainly by the time of the war in Vietnam, the war-correspondent David Leitch recorded reporters swapping notes: “When you get to Da Nang ask for Mickey Mouth—she does the best blow job in South-East Asia.”
At some point, though, there must have been a crossover in which a largely forbidden act of slightly gay character was imported into the heterosexual mainstream. If I have been correct up until now, this is not too difficult to explain (and it fits with the dates, as well). The queer monopoly on blowjobs was the result of male anatomy, obviously, and also of the wish of many gays to have sex with heterosexual men. It was widely believed that only men really knew how to get the “job” done, since they were tormented hostages of the very same organ on a round-the-clock basis. (W. H. Auden’s New York underground poem titled “The Platonic Blow”—even though there is absolutely nothing platonic about it, and it lovingly deploys the word “job”—is the classic example here.) This was therefore an inducement the gay man could offer to the straight, who could in turn accept it without feeling that he had done anything too faggoty. For many a straight man, life’s long tragedy is first disclosed in early youth, when he discovers that he cannot perform this simple suction on himself. (In his stand-up routines, Bill Hicks used to speak often and movingly of this dilemma.) Cursing god, the boy then falls to the hectic abuse of any viscous surface within reach. One day, he dreams, someone else will be on hand to help take care of this. When drafted into the army and sent overseas, according to numberless witnesses from Gore Vidal to Kingsley Amis, he may even find that oral sex is available in the next hammock. And then the word is out. There might come a day, he slowly but inexorably reasons, when even women might be induced to do this.
Through the 1950s, then, the burgeoning secret of the blowjob was still contained, like a spark of Promethean fire, inside a secret reed. (In France and Greece, to my certain knowledge, the slang term used to involve “pipe smoking” or “cigar action.” I don’t mind the association with incandescence, but for Christ’s sake, sweetie, don’t be smoking it. I would even rather that you just blew.) If you got hold of Henry Miller’s Sexus or Pauline Reage’s Story of O (both published by Maurice Girodias, the same Parisian daredevil who printed Lolita), you could read about oral and other engagements, but that was France for you.
The comics of R. Crumb used to have fellatio in many graphic frames, but then, this was the counterculture. No, the big breakthrough occurs in the great year of nineteen soixante-neuf, when Mario Puzo publishes The Godfather and Philip Roth brings out Portnoy’s Complaint. Puzo’s book was a smash not just because of the horse’s head and the Sicilian fish-wrap technique and the offer that couldn’t be refused. It achieved a huge word-of-mouth success because of a famous scene about vagina-enhancing plastic surgery that became widely known as “the Godfather tuck” (sorry to stray from my subject) and because of passages like this, featuring the Mobbed-up crooner “Johnny Fontane”:
And the other guys were always talking about blow jobs, this and other variations, and he really didn’t enjoy that stuff so much. He never liked a girl that much after they tried it that way, it just didn’t satisfy him right. He and his second wife had finally not got along, because she preferred the old sixty-nine too much to a point where she didn’t want anything else and he had to fight to stick it in. She began making fun of him and calling him a square and the word got around that he made love like a kid.
Earthquake! Sensation! Telephones trilled all over the English-speaking world. Never mind if Johnny Fontane likes it or not, what is that? And why on earth is it called a “blow job”? (The words were for some reason separate in those days: I like the way in which they have since eased more cozily together.) Most of all, notice that it is regular sex that has become obvious and childish, while oral sex is suddenly for real men. And here’s Puzo again, describing the scene where the lady in need of a newly refreshed and elastic interior isn’t quite ready to sleep with her persuasive doctor, and isn’t quite inclined to gratify him any other way, either:
“Oh that” she said.
“Oh that” he mimicked her. “Nice girls don’t do that, manly men don’t do that. Even in the year 1948. Well, baby, I can take you to the house of a little old lady right here in Las Vegas who was the youngest madam of the most popular whorehouse in the wild west days. You know what she told me? That those gunslingers, those manly, virile, straight-shooting cowboys would always ask the girls for a ‘French,’ what we doctors call fellatio, what you call ‘oh that.’ ”
Notice the date. Note also the cowboys, likewise deprived of female company for long stretches. Now that we know about Blowjob Mountain, or whatever the hell it’s called, I think I can score one for my original theory.
Philip Roth took the same ball and ran with it, though he served up his guilt and angst with different seasonings. Imperishably associated with handjobs as his name will always be, his Alexander Portnoy fights like a wounded puma, throughout his boyhood, to find a girl, however hideous, who will get her laughing-tackle around his thing. When he finally persuades the wom
an he calls “The Monkey” (“a girl with a passion for The Banana”) to do it right, his whole system explodes into a symphony of praise. “What cock know-how!” he yells to himself (thus rather confirming the nature and essence of the word “job”). On the other hand, his blonde WASP chick won’t do it at any price, partly from disgust but also from a lively fear of asphyxiation. Portnoy resentfully ponders the social unfairness of this: She kills ducks in rustic settings but she won’t fellate him. “To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her.” He also visualizes the awful headline if he presses things too far: JEW STRANGLES DEB WITH COCK … MOCKY LAWYER HELD.
Thus the sixties—the sixties!—ended with the blowjob still partly hyphenated and the whole subject still wreathed and muffled in husky whispers. The cast of Hair sang of “fellatio” under the list of things like “sodomy” that “sound so nasty,” and oral sex was legally defined as sodomy by many states of the union until the Supreme Court struck down those laws only three years ago—Clarence Thomas dissenting. The colloquial expression in those intermediate days was in my opinion the crudest of all: “giving head.” You can hear it in Leonard Cohen’s droning paean to Janis Joplin in “Chelsea Hotel #2,” and also in the lyrics of Lou Reed and David Bowie. It was a “knowing” and smirking term, but it managed somehow to fuse the mindless with the joyless. This state of affairs obviously could not last long, and the entire lid blew off in 1972, when some amateurs pulled together $25,000 for a movie that eventually posted grosses of $600 million. Is this a great country or what? This film, with performances by Harry Reems and Linda Lovelace, was one of the tawdriest and most unsatisfying screen gems ever made, but it changed the world and the culture for good, or at any rate forever. Interesting, too, that Deep Throat was financed and distributed by members of New York’s Colombo crime family, who kept the exorbitant bulk of the dough. Mario Puzo, then, had been prescient after all, and without his deep insight the Sopranos might still be sucking only their own thumbs.
The recent and highly amusing documentary Inside Deep Throat shows—by re-creating the paradoxically Nixonian times that re-baptized Deep Throat to mean source rather than donor—how America grabbed the Olympic scepter of the blowjob and held on tight. In the film, there is the preserved figure of Helen Gurley Brown, den mother of Cosmo-style journalism for young ladies and author of Sex and the Single Girl, demonstrating her application technique as she tells us how she evolved from knowing nothing about oral sex to the realization that semen could be a terrific facial cream. (“It’s full of babies,” she squeals, unclear on the concept to the very last.) In closing, Dick Cavett declares that we have gone from looking at a marquee that read DEEP THROAT, and hoping it didn’t mean what we thought it did, to “kids who don’t even consider it sex.” This would leave us with only one problem. Why do we still say, of something boring or obnoxious, that “it sucks”? Ought that not be a compliment?
There is another thinkable reason why this ancient form of lovemaking lost its association with the dubious and the low and became an American handshake and ideal. The United States is par excellence the country of beautiful dentistry. As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British “National Health” practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire “braces,” its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue. Good grief! What else was there to think about? In order to stay respectable here, I shall just say that it’s not always so enticing when the young ladies of Albania (say) shoot you a cheeky grin that puts you in mind of Deliverance.
The illusion of the tonsilized clitoris will probably never die (and gay men like to keep their tonsils for a reason that I would not dream of mentioning), but while the G-spot and other fantasies have dissipated, the iconic U.S. Prime blowjob is still on a throne, and is also kneeling at the foot of that throne. It has become, in the words of a book on its technique, The Ultimate Kiss. And such a kiss on the first date is not now considered all that “fast.” America was not the land of birth for this lavish caress, but it is (if I may mix my anthems) white with foam from sea to shining sea. In other cultures, a girl will do “that” only when she gets to know and like you. In this one, she will offer it as a baiser as she is making up her mind. While this persists, and while America’s gay manhood is still sucking away as if for oxygen itself, who dares to say that true global leadership is not still within our grasp?
(Vanity Fair, July 2006)
So Many Men’s Rooms, So Little Time
I KNEW IT WAS all over for Senator Larry Craig when he appeared with his long-suffering wife to say that he wasn’t gay. Such moments are now steppingstones on the way to apology, counseling, and rehab, and a case could be made for cutting out the spousal stage of the ritual altogether. Along with a string of votes to establish “don’t ask, don’t tell” and to prohibit homosexual marriage, Craig leaves as his political legacy the telling phrase “wide stance,” which may or may not join “big tent” and “broad church” as an attempt to make the Republican Party seem more “inclusive” than it really is.
But there’s actually a chance—a 38 percent chance, to be more precise—that the senator can cop a plea on the charge of hypocrisy. In his study of men who frequent public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys discovered that 54 percent were married and living with their wives, 38 percent did not consider themselves homosexual or bisexual, and only 14 percent identified themselves as openly gay. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Personal Places, a doctoral thesis which was published in 1970, detailed exactly the pattern—of foot-tapping in code, hand-gestures, and other tactics—which has lately been garishly publicized at a Minneapolis–St. Paul airport men’s room. The word tearoom seems to have become archaic, but in all other respects the fidelity to tradition is impressive.
The men interviewed by Humphreys wanted what many men want: a sexual encounter that was quick and easy and didn’t involve any wining and dining. Some of the heterosexuals among them had also evolved a tactic for dealing with the cognitive dissonance that was involved. They compensated for their conduct by adopting extreme conservative postures in public. Humphreys, a former Episcopalian priest, came up with the phrase “breastplate of righteousness” to describe this mixture of repression and denial. So, it is quite thinkable that when Senator Craig claims not to be gay, he is telling what he honestly believes to be the truth.
However, this still leaves a slight mystery. In the 1960s, homosexuality was illegal in general, and gay men were forced to cruise in places where (if I can phrase it like this) every man and boy in the world has to come sometime. Today, anyone wanting a swift male caress can book it online or go to a discreet resort. Yet people still persist in haunting the tearoom, where they risk arrest not for their sexuality but for “disorderly conduct.” Why should this be?
In my youth, I was a friend of a man named Tom Driberg, a British politician who set the bar very high in these matters. In his memoir, Ruling Passions, he described his “chronic, lifelong, love-hate relationship with lavatories.” He could talk by the hour about the variety and marvel of these “public conveniences,” as Victorian euphemism had dubbed them. In Britain, they were called “cottages” in gay argot, instead of “tearooms,” and an experienced “cottager” knew all the ins and outs, if you will pardon the expression. There was the commodious underground loo in Leicester Square that specialized in those whose passion was for members of the armed forces. There was the one at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, much favored by aesthetes, where on the very foot of the partition, above the six-inch space, someone had scribbled “beware of limbo dancers.” (The graffiti in cottages was all part of the fun: On the toilet wall at Paddington Station was w
ritten: “I am 9 inches long and two inches thick. Interested?” Underneath, in different handwriting: “Fascinated, dear, but how big is your dick?”) On Clapham Common, the men’s toilet had acquired such a lavish reputation for the variety of lurid actions performed within its precincts that, as I once heard it said: “If someone comes in there for a good honest shit, it’s like a breath of fresh air.”
Perhaps I digress. What Driberg told me was this. The thrills were twofold. First came the exhilaration of danger: the permanent risk of being caught and exposed. Second was the sense of superiority that a double life could give. What bliss it was to enter the House of Commons, bow to the speaker, and take your seat amid the trappings of lawmaking, having five minutes earlier fellated a guardsman (and on one unforgettable occasion, a policeman) in the crapper in St. James’ Park. Assuming the story about the men’s room in Union Station to be true, Senator Craig could have gone straight from that encounter to the Senate floor in about the same amount of time.
Driberg was a public campaigner for gay rights and carried on as such even after being elevated to the House of Lords (where I am pretty sure he told me there was more going on in the lavatory than most people would guess). But it was with a distinct hint of melancholy that he voted for the successful repeal of the laws criminalizing homosexuality. “I rather miss the old days,” he would say wistfully. Well, the law legalized homosexual behavior only “in private,” so he could (and did) continue to court danger in public places. The House of Lords actually debated the question of whether a stall in a public lavatory constituted “privacy,” the reason being that in Britain you have to put money in a slot in order to enter such a place, and this could be held to constitute rent. Private Eye printed a poem about the learned exchange on this between two elderly peers of the realm: “Said Lord Arran to Lord Dilhorne, a penny / should entitle me to any / thing I may choose privately to do. Except you.”