Diary of an Innocent

by Tony Duvert

  There are certain minute faults of flesh or word I cannot deal with. Others, it’s true, don’t bother me, whereas boys who are more wholesome than me abhor such things. A lot of worthy fags flee partners who are laughers, jokers, sarcastic, boisterous, brusque or selfish—qualities I venerate. I myself flee those who are sentimental, altruistic, virtuous, speakers of fine words, demanding. Body hair, especially on the buttocks, thighs and stomach, disgusts me. But I had very lustful sex with, for example, a poor panhandler whose hand had been cut off, and who was far from attractive and very dirty, at the back of a vacant lot where we trod on shit. I’m no fan of either shit or filth or infirmities; my cock, however, doesn’t care. On the other hand, I sometimes go soft with interesting, adorable, well-brought-up young people, whose only failing is a verbal stink, whether petit bourgeois or not, that asphyxiates me like a Turkish toilet into which my brain has been dumped just like Ubu’s conscience in its nightshirt. Therefore, chance has constructed me all wrong; the loftiest signs of masculine, intellectual, civic, conjugal, bourgeois and revolutionary value dispirit me, and atrocious imperfections are my delight. I made a commitment to that helplessness that can’t be cured, to that pathological vulnerability (which explains, if not justifies, the flaws in my private life), and I try to couple only with headless monsters. But you’re never very sure about it, and there are mental riches that only reveal themselves between the sheets. As for my current cause of unhappiness, I don’t dare have the spitefulness to talk to him about those anal pearls, or about his amusing prattle. Having strung that alliance, even when I was anesthetized, seems like heroism that I won’t be able to accomplish again. And when he suggests we hook up once more, I say that I’m an unrepentant cruiser—which isn’t true these days since I’ve been copulating faithfully with the same three or four boys month after month, without looking for new adventures and while accepting only a very few who solicit my reluctance.

  In addition to Diego’s friends, I got visitors that no one was sending. They don’t lock their doors here; going into the homes of strangers, having them over, is as simple as being approached outside. Everybody needs everybody, so it’s no big deal for two humans to speak to each other without having to put an ad in the personals section of the left-wing papers.

  Someone knocks, asks if X is there, I answer that X doesn’t live here, our expressions show only mild surprise; if the boy’s looks appeal to me, I invite him in, and if mine are OK by him, he accepts. If not, since X isn’t there, you can get out of it without a fuss.

  To figure out where to go, the boys simply head for the addresses of the furnished places, where they know that there are a lot of foreign transients; among the inhabitants of the city, homosexuality adopts clandestine styles; whereas with foreigners, all of whom are thought to be queens, you take care of business outspokenly.

  I got very little from this door-to-door marketing. I had too many boyfriends, and the apartment was almost always occupied. And if it wasn’t, not only did I prefer to go out and hunt then to be cruised at home, I also had available hardly any more sperm for these spontaneous partners. Lovely faces, decent youths, shy schoolboys appeared right under my nose in that way.

  There was a student of eighteen or twenty who was more like a satyr than a sales rep. He fucked anybody who had a rear, but he preferred boys. Francesco, to whom I pointed him out in the street, said he was a bastard and a notorious nut that everybody avoided. He was a bit thin, of average height, had a tough, pleasant-enough face, and his method for finding tail was ideally simple. One day, there’s a knock at my door, I open it, it’s him (I don’t know a thing about him, and, obviously, I got my information afterwards). He asks if he can speak to me. I can guess what kind of conversation interests him, and I don’t feel very talkative; I answer coldly and shut the door. A moment goes by and there’s knocking again. I open the door. It’s him. He asks outright if I’d like to have sex; he’s standing a little back from the threshold, and his fly is open. Hanging out of it is a large, pink member, as thick and long as a forearm, really enormous and as visually appealing as can be. I tell him I don’t like that. And I’ll say no three times like that to this well-endowed god, meaning: I’d like to a lot, but I can’t imagine what to do with a cock like that, belonging to a man who doesn’t seem that manageable. I close the door. Another knock. The boy is standing close to me now. To tempt me more, he quotes a price—very low. I deny a second time that such a thing interests me; but my hungry look denies nothing at all. Door closed, a knock, door opened. And since he never stops exhibiting his masterpiece, I find it cunning to hand him the money he wants; he takes it and, shaking his cock, murmurs, “So, that’s a yes?”

  Third rejection. The cock isn’t crowing; he’s too perplexed by this customer who pays without consuming, buys some masses and pushes away the priests and the deity. But I react the same way with certain children in the street who offer postcards, chewing gum. I don’t need any, but I give them the amount they asked for. They’re happy, since if they sell what they have, the benefit is insignificant, and doubtlessly for the profit of an adult. This money will be for them alone. But my door-to-door salesman is more interested in unloading his merchandise than in getting a good price for it. At least he stops insisting once he’s paid. I’m alone now; I take a few moments to jerk off while thinking about all of it.

  I’ll find out later that he’s discovered a place for his enormous rod; it’s a man who lives below me; round, bald, big-butted, grandpa-like, with an ostrich-egg head. This sexagenarian’s abilities amaze me. I always feel like a mediocre kid playing doctor when I think of what a homosexual worthy of his forbears is capable of taking. But between now and sixty, I won’t lose hope in imitating such far-reaching examples, and of using ten-or twelve-inch cocks in ways other than in my imagination. I have several degenerate objectives of this kind that add discipline to my life.

  There’s a happy age when (just like other old folks who no longer wake up except to eat, talk about unappetizing food, and drool on their bedroom slippers for the ten thousandth roast or ragout or even just the boiled lump they’ve caught a whiff of) you remain attached only to small, ravenous cores of pleasure that are dense, concrete, well-worn and sturdy. In fact, indifferent to the beauty or personality of a boy, you’re content with appreciating his strong cock and powerful erections; you wolf it down like the aged gobble up eclairs, coffee cake, cream puffs, and having experienced the easy release that such stimulation favors, sit back and wait for it to be time for dinner. Boys like my door-to-door salesman are perfect partners for the old; I know a lot of young people whom I wouldn’t go near today, and whose look-alikes will be my lovers tomorrow.

  Francesco was willingly imagining his old age and mimicking it. He pretended to be skinny, dried up and stiff, with a cane. He saw himself as married, a patriarch. He says that on his deathbed, he’d summon his oldest son and tell him, “I’m going to die, go get me a boy. A very pretty one!”

  The son obeys, the very pretty boy is there, and Francesco demands, “Fuck me.”

  He shows him his buttocks. The boy takes out his member, looks at that old tail and shouts, “How am I supposed to screw you? You don’t even have any more meat on your ass!”

  “Fuck me!” orders Francesco. The boy does it. And, says Francesco, my hole is so big, so wide that it’s as if he’s screwing the wind. After that, Francesco as an old man turns around and fucks the respectful boy. Then he dies, surrounded by his sons.

  Such a nice way of imagining old age coincides with mine. Aging doesn’t cause me any apprehension, and I’m shocked, in France, to meet so many adolescents, young people, for whom being twenty-five or thirty means falling into a decline to the extent that some of them, when they think about such a future, simply say, I’ll knife myself.

  But they won’t kill themselves. Their scorn for other ages will have only prepared them for becoming anything at all when their turn comes. To submit to everything, to make do with any intellectua
l, religious or social servility, any kind of conformism at all, to endure any kind of defeat; and this is how they’ll become exactly what they hate today in those who are older. Knife themselves? They’ll be dead people, yes, but the kind that smell bad.

  I have the inclination and the need to connect to all the ages of my life, past or future. From my childhood until today, I don’t see those sections, those famous stages, that all normal men go through, each time denying and forgetting the age that came before. I slip inside myself as if along a river that you can travel up-or downstream; I rediscover and am in harmony with myself wherever I am. As for old age, I was very unhappy at the beginning of adolescence because two-thirds of life seemed to be spent in withering and dying (real death was nothing but an insignificant corporal formality at the end of another interminable death). I’d send feelers, images, in the direction of these future years. And it is only when I was able to live, to feel, for example, like an old queer sucking off brats (and had foreseen, worked out what I would be in that situation, as well as an infinite number of others) that I finally began to live what was left of my youth without too much apprehension. Such fancies certainly have little to do with what I’ll experience; but they take in hand the difficulties of the future, sketch out the tactics I’ll use to survive there as I do elsewhere.

  My movements toward childhood are favored by my having chosen everything I like, everything I do, everything I will continue to do from the beginning. My first literary scribbling (which wasn’t obscene) dates to when I was seven. Then a lot of plagiarisms, then nothing at all; then, around the age of thirteen, this began to increase. I was very secretive, and anything others found out about filled me with shame. As for boys, my first butt-fucking sessions date to age nine or ten. First of all, I got raped by a kid who was at least a year younger than me. We would jerk off together often. One time, he suggests I put mine in his hole. I angrily refuse, reel off all the objections. But a few moments later, I was lying on top of him blissfully and was deep inside. He gave it back to me right away. My immoderate taste for music, the kind that annoys, is even older; but the start of practicing it actively also dates from the age of nine or ten. As do a multitude of other pleasures, curiosities, behaviors, sensibilities, reactions, fascinations, follies. Let evil tongues decide whether I developed too early, or if I’ve remained undeveloped to this day. The two are similar, because a life that is constructed early on includes those things that children don’t want to eliminate from their lives but that must be renounced, apparently, in order to mature in a true sense. How I envy genuine adults, who polish their vestigial stumps every Sunday.

  I took to music like bread, played it ceaselessly. In the past I even pretended to write it (especially some pathetic twelve-tone scores), like a kid plays at being a doctor, a grocer, a Picasso; I know that people are musicians by profession even if they don’t do any more of it, but this doesn’t console me very much.

  The majority of our contemporaries feel glum and foggy, stunned into silence, when they endure that obscure art. Then there’s the blathering, stupid, clammy and smug superstitions of the competent music lovers and other discophiles. When all is taken into account, I prefer the company of the deaf to that of lovers of sounds, just as I never dislike an illiterate, whereas my threshold for enduring literary types is low. But it’s useless for me to get worked up over subjects as depressing as this. Once, in Paris, I found a mass by Palestrina that I didn’t know, because it was so infrequently recorded; I forget that such music is aggressively exotic for the average buyer of industrial noise, and when I met a friendly apprentice baker an hour later and brought him home, I could neither put off listening to the work nor having sex with the kid. He was kind of tall and robust, excited about men’s cocks. He was shy and wanted the light turned off. I didn’t. He came up with a compromise: light those candles, over there. We fucked, the boy relaxed with me beside him, the candles burning, the mass playing.

  “It’s like a funeral,” murmurs the kid. But it amuses him, he dozes off, doesn’t ask for any other record, he enjoys being dead. The two of us, naked and unmoving, lying on this bed like two recumbent statues. Polyphonic music is no longer associated with pleasure. When I was aware of the situation that had been created, it wasn’t its funereal aspect that shocked me but its aestheticism. Getting off with masses while doing it with a baker’s boy in an apartment with veiled light, jeez, how degenerate. (A German choir of young boys to boot, boobless sopranos.) Doing it on purpose would already be ridiculous, but, involuntarily, it really takes the cake.

  First wrinkles and hair loss; wizening; the crumpled, veiny pudginess of my declining cock, beginning of my first infirmities (severe rheumatism in my ribs): I’ve already been carrying around these stigmata of aging for a long time, have been forming them inside me. But I’m still ahead of the worst, don’t get to any age without having arranged my place in it. That’s why I feel OK about it and don’t make pronouncements about the years depriving me of whatever it may be. I like life too much to refuse an hour of it, no matter how sad it may feel. I’m oversensitive to every annoyance, but if they can’t be avoided, I soon grow comfortable with them and am struck by impressions and feelings that are stronger than they were in the state before, I explore them the way others “take a trip” with a hit of drugs (except that the drugs are used to escape the very places where I put down roots). That’s also the way I adapt to illness, inhabiting my fevers and leaving them regretfully to regain the platitudes of health.

  The boys here who are accepting of queers often have peculiarities like those of the kid with anal warts. Subjected as they are to a rigid system of popular values, they need to have been made to feel inferior before becoming resigned as well to the social censure awaiting recognized homosexuals—something a person like Diego, who finds great prestige in the code, refuses to do, despite the fact that he’s capable of becoming the most genuine of queers; he just has too much to lose.

  I find a boy who’s beautiful, very warm, very civil, extremely attracted to men, whose large cock, unfortunately, suffers from hypospadias (meaning that the opening of the urethra, instead of being positioned in the center of the head of the penis, is located on its underside). Another, whom I fuck on a dark street, has phimosis. He didn’t even lower his underpants as far as the stomach; he wouldn’t let me jerk him off and left without coming. Another couldn’t shoot during the three or four hours in bed we spent together. Another had only one testicle. Another, a handsome, strapping little fellow, gets fucked by anyone; he can’t get a hard-on. And so on. I understand why there was a medical legend going around that claimed that homosexuals “lapse” into such a lifestyle as the result of a physical defect. It actually could be that such was the case in the past, when the social context had burdens, pressures, drainage systems, lines of flight that were different from today’s. Nowadays it’s easier to hide sexual infirmities if you’re straight, by marrying a virgin, by adopting rigid principles. Among queers, on the other hand, ways of doing things are so crude that the slightest defect in an organ exposes you to horrendous humiliations. And the wholesomeness of flies and backsides that subscribe to a conscious homosexuality in French places where cruising goes on is a sign of the insane intransigence of the reigning values. Those in a sorry state will only be able to take cover in Catholic, Arcadian, right-of-center homosexuality, or on the side of the vicious heteros of the patriarchy. Meanwhile, working-class homosexuality over here remains a refuge.

  One evening, I come back from having a lewd time. A long, lovely walk to my place—the old city now. A bicyclist keeps following me. He passes me, looks at me, keeps going, comes back, passes me. Its annoying, I Anally come up to him and, in a harsh tone, ask him what he’s looking for. He was already smiling. If I hadn’t had sex before, I would have been more polite, because he isn’t unattractive. He’s terribly taken aback by my aggressive question (something boys who don’t like boys never do). He disappears, murmuring an excuse.

&n
bsp; Another night, another cyclist, same circumstances. He’s probably about twenty. I’m even more worn out than the time before. But I’d like to get fucked good, it’s missing from my evening. I figure this follower is one of those monstrous perverts who hangs out in the streets at night, and brings down weak men with his dangerous, pestering glances. After almost a mile, I slip into a perpendicular street and wait. The bicycle joins me in the shadows. The boy is relatively appetizing. But for the only fantasy that’s tempting me, I want some low-down information. So I explain to the boy that when a man’s cock is larger than mine, he’s the one who does the fucking; and if his cock is smaller, I fuck him. Such insane talk doesn’t surprise the boy. But he makes me repeat myself two or three times. So, he stresses, with a dejected expression, if the other person’s cock is smaller than yours, you fuck him? And is yours big? I say that it is—but we don’t show each other anything. He hesitates, fiddles with his brakes, his handlebars, then, with a sheepish voice, suggests, “So … you do it to me?”

  Horribly disappointed, eyeing his fly to figure out, despite everything, whether it might be redeemable, I tell the boy that I was explaining my principles; but as for their application, I’m too tired, it’s late.

  These situations always bother me. I’m bad at getting out of them. I’d enjoyed the cyclist’s naive behavior; but the image that I’ve gradually created of the young homosexuals in the city make me sick.

  In a park in the afternoon, I’d chatted with a teenager who was completely different than my nighttime cruiser. We were standing, cocks exposed to the air, and his member was cute and brown. He took hold of mine politely (he doesn’t like boys), and with a thrilled smile and widened eyes, declared, “Ours is so big! You people, yours is so small!”