So why did I speak out? Why do I still speak out? Because I owed so much to the army of men who loved and supported me over the years and no longer have a voice, and because gay men were dying. It was no time to be squeamish about sex. It still isn't.
CT: Do you have any regrets? -- and, concurrently, what are you most proud of? Did the making of the film Sex Positive bring any regret or pride to the surface for you?
RB: I have a few regrets about Sex Positive, but they pale next to what I've gained. I've been to more cities with this movie in one year than I've been to in my entire life. Young people have been extraordinarily supportive and kind, and it helps me to let go of the past. I've been stuck in the past for so long -- it's deadening, but I finally feel that this movie is breaking me free, to finally let go and move on to write about other things. For that, I'm forever indebted to Daryl Wein, the documentary’s director.
What I'm most proud of is how much work I did on safe sex that no one even knows about. I'm putting it all on the Internet as a free archive, as soon as I can find or pay someone to help me with the technical stuff. I'm from the age of typewriters.
CT: Is there anything you'd like to add? Please feel free to also respond directly to points I made when I talked about Sex Positive on my blog.
RB: I loved S&M hustling before AIDS so much -- sometimes, when I talk about it, I become the part of me that tied people up and dominated them; it's like a mental erection. I get lost in the reverie of being an erotic, arrogant Top. I begged director Daryl Wein to delete me saying that clients would tell me that I could do whatever I wanted to them except fuck them, and then I would proceed to do just that. I said that when I was lost in a persona, and it makes me sound like a rapist!
The truth is, my most valued expertise as a hustler was teaching men who were afraid of getting fucked how to relax, how to douche, how to open up, how to explore the intense pleasures of receptive anal intercourse and anal orgasm without any pain. I would never rape or violate anyone's consent -- and certainly not customers I wanted to come back! I had tremendous empathy for how difficult it can be to learn how to get anally fucked because I was never able -- or had the desire -- to do it without being high on drugs. (You have to remember how pervasive recreational drug use was during the sexual revolution. There were articles in the gay press saying how cocaine was good for you. We didn't understand addiction then as we do now. And we paid a heavy price for that innocence and ignorance.)
When I began hustling in NYC, the lesbian and gay liberation movement was ten years old -- and about that mature. We grew up in such an intensely erotophobic and homophobic culture -- there was no way to escape it, even after we accepted that we were gay. We didn't always treat each other well, and it permeated our sexual expression whether it was vanilla or S&M.
You mention in your blog post that you are wary of how I talk about BDSM as arising from "self-loathing" and "insecurity" and negative cultural pressures on the gay community. Yes -- in S&M and in vanilla sex -- I saw how we brought a lot of the culture's contempt to what we did. But, as I say in Sex Positive, many of us came to
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