DownWithTyranny!: There's Something About Channing Tatum I Like

This post isn't going to be about Channing Tatum; sorry. But I was inspired to write it by a quote of his, as he talked about his new film Magic Mike, vaguely based on his own life as a 19 year old stripper in Tampa: "I was definitely looking for something to take me into the dark side. You learn something about yourself, you learn something about men, women, you see a lot of depressing shit, people that are lost. But at the same time, the dark side can be exciting. It can feel like you're cheating death every night." OK, that's the end of the Channing Tatum part of the post. Like I said... sorry. The rest is about me. Say bye-bye, Tatum; hello, Howie:

I imagine I was born gay. When I was pretty young I felt some insistent stirrings for other guys but once I figured out just how disapproving society was of that sort of thing, I repressed it. "It" popped out a few times until sometime during my early twenties-- and living in Amsterdam-- I went to a shrink and he persuaded me to give myself a break and just be who I was. That was a relief. And my family was very supportive and so were my friends and it never held me back in my professional life. So what's the complaint? You know it's comin'.

That stuff Tatum was saying about the dark side... that was really what attracted me to the gay lifestyle. If you wanted gay reference points when I was a kid you read Jean Genet and John Rechy. I did. And did I ever get inspired! Even just purchasing and reading The Thief's Journal, Querelle, Numbers and The City of Night (the first two by Genet and the second two by Rechy) were taking a step into the dark side. A gateway drug. If I were growing up today and my cultural touchstones were Will & Grace, Queer Eye, Glee and Queer As Folk I probably would have looked for something else to identify with instead of homosexuality. Hard to imagine going for it with Glee in your mind... instead of Kenneth Anger.

Two things I never wanted anything to do with in the universe were going in the army and getting married. And that's what the great gay strides of my lifetime boil down to! Look, I was in NYC last week. I went for a wedding on my very dear old friends Ellen and Paula. Everything about it was fantastic. God bless lesbians and everyone who supports their right to marry and join the army (and fight on the front lines) and play golf at the Augusta National Golf Club. But... well, not "but"... AND I visited an old haunt when I was there, a place I learned about from a contemporaneous Ramones song, 53rd Street between Second and Third Avenues. I once, briefly, supported myself on those blocks. As Tatum said, "I was definitely looking for something to take me into the dark side. You learn something about yourself, you learn something about men, ~~women~~, you see a lot of depressing shit, people that are lost. But at the same time, the dark side can be exciting. It can feel like you're cheating death every night."

I wasn't expecting anything there. I wouldn't have even gone by, really, if I wasn't on my way to meet a friend for lunch at Marcus Samuelsson's Aquavit, which had moved east since I was last there. I knew that long ago people had given up that kind of dark, anti-social lifestyle for fun nights of getting together at someone's place to watch Shahs of Sunset, American Idol or Modern Family. The first time I drove to L.A., I used Rechy's Numbers as a guide book. Go get married or drop bombs on some poor Afghani family. By all means assimilate into the Borg, order some takeout from Applebee's and turn on Bravo for a night of Real Housewives of New Jersey. Don't worry about Hubert Selby's Georgette; stick to RuPaul's Drag Race. But if you know someone who's a little rebellious-minded and thinks he might be gay... there's always Thief's Journal:

Flowers bedeck the fragility of the convict and I garlanded myself, lovingly pursuing a journey through sweat, sperm and blood that led to prison. Without what people call my evil, I am castrated. Un petit-bourgeois rien. There was a moral vigour in the acceptance of my destiny. I was hot for crime.

I give the name violence to a noble boldness that hankers for danger, and I have seen it in many of the pimps and thieves I have worked with, men whose authority and beatific treachery bent me to their will. Rene, Stilitano, Guy ... I could describe them, but I won't. I am too much of a literary outlaw for that. Instead, let me take you back to the Barrios in 1932, where I used to jerk myself off into a sperm-spotted handkerchief, while thinking of my mother.

Oui. I am my own Dieu, I fashion my vanity, delighting in the vicarious transgression that has fashionable artists like those fools Cocteau and Picasso, who have never dared to have oral sex with a leprotic geriatric vagabond.

Is any of this true? Who cares? It is if I say it is, for I define my existential self. Je suis what I say je suis, I beat up queers and stole from churches; burglary became a religious rite, elevating me to poet of the underworld even as I willingly debased myself in pissoirs
Rene jerked himself off in a café full of whores to calm himself down, before stabbing the Gypsy boy through the heart for a few sous. In that moment of love and death, I caught sight of Stilitano looking on and knew I must drink in the beautiful odour of his never-washed body. He was the Sacred Black Stone to which Heliogabalus offered up his wealth and I prostrated myself to his treachery and indifference.

I was born in Paris in 1910. My mother was a whore and I have my roots in the parched bones of the children who were massacred by Gilles de Rais. There was no precise time I became a thief, just a metempsychosis of Uranus that saw me graduate from the Reformatory to the Foreign Legion and thence to the piss and shit of the sewers.

Stilitano and I travelled through Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy and Germany, becoming spies and finding a purity of evil idealism in the SS. I longed to play with the cellulose grapes that hung from his member while he pushed me away like the bitch I was. I wanted him to beat me. I became his noble valet, reduced to even greater humiliations, and even now I am reduced to verbal automatism in thrall to his deity.

Can you feel the degradation? Allow your hands to wander inside your uptight bourgeois pants and feel the excitement of my squalor. But don't stop there! I can give you so much more if only you will open your flies to me. Lose your suburban values and embrace the negative hell of the poet of the woebegone.

I dressed as a woman and went to Tangiers with Maurice and Robert, occasionally allowing myself to commit an act the gravity of which gave me consciousness. Oui, I was ennuyé. It is no boast to say I was a clever thief, but still I went to prison where I found security in a world that had rejected me, offering up my mobile buttocks to anyone who showed interest. Michaelis wanted me to love him, yet I taunted him with abstinence when I met Java, a muscle-bound Stilitano. Java still liked to go with whores, but occasionally he would let me thread myself inside him when he was asleep, crying out in anger when I made him come. I then met * - I cannot mention his name because he is still alive, though maybe only in the Sartrean sense in which je suis - and we pleasured one another as an SS guard told us of the joy he got when he could see tears in the eyes of the victims he was about to kill.

My work as writer is mere pleonasm. It passes the time as I pursue the rehabilitation of the purulent, the dark thrills of the interdit. I left Nazi Germany because it no longer interested me; there, stealing did not differentiate me from authority. Where was the liberation in that? My aesthetics of crime were self-creation and I went back to shack up with Stilitano. Carrying packages of opium for him gave me a sense of CAPITAL LETTERS, MY SUBSERVIENCE A PURPOSE.

This is the life I lived and these are the people with whom I was preoccupied between 1931 and 1942. Bof! But I can sense your erection fading. So let me tell you more about the pleasure of treachery, how I bit Lucien until he bled while he opened up like an anemone, how I sucked off Bernardini, the head of the Marseilles secret police. Was I guilty? Who knows? I just became that of which I was accused.

Voilà. Vous are encore dur. What more can I say? This book is my ascesis. I wanted to rob cripples and queers, I wanted to reclaim the joy of tragedy. But most of all I wanted to glorify myself. Being a thief is banal but writing about it is magnificent and with this exhibitionist act of tedious subversion, I have recreated myself once more as gullible, European radicals reclaim me for their own.