SEXIS WRONG

The Truth About Sex
Bill Brent
The TRUTH?
You want THE TRUTH?
Fuck you. But here’s one version, anyway:
My parents were the first people to radicalize me about sex.
They would not like to read this (one reason I changed my
last name at age 25 is because I was starting to sound off in
public, and I knew it would embarrass them less), but I used
to sneak into their room when I was twelve, thirteen, and
read all their stashed porn. Some of it was kinky; some of it
was educational (The Joy of Sex was the sex-ed book that
classrooms should have had); and some was ragingly sexist
and grotesquely homophobic.
The first man I ever felt an erotic crush on was my father. He
always walked around in nothing but those revealing, white
BVD briefs; he always smelled like a man. How could I not?
No one else was within close range. The junior-high locker
room was too harsh and threatening, so I took advantage of
an alarmist quack’s diagnosis of my heart’s
condition to escape the horrors of P.E. at the
first possible leap.
My parents kept a large, smelly, greasy dildo
under their bed. I liked that. Their sheets always smelled of
sex, rank sex. I liked that, too.
I have always liked that which offends nice people, because
it is usually honest.
My parents were not nice people, which is why I loved them
so much. They were petty, bitchy, loud, secretive, drunk,
dramatic, stingy, generous, friendly, aloof, stoned, obvious,
inscrutable, insufferable, and absent all at once.
To this day, I still like myself better when I look ugly than
when I look nice.
The nice-looking kids at school snatched my lunch bag from
under my desk and tossed it around the classroom while the
school’s least competent, most out-of-touch teacher was
writing equations on the blackboard. Then they stopped their
little circus and acted nice when he turned back to us, and
later resumed their game until my lunch lay in trashed, tattered
pieces across the floor, and I ran screaming from the
room—they’re the ones I still want to disembowel and carve
up into ragged, little finger-sandwich pieces. Yeah. Let’s see
how nice they’d look as empanadas de cojones.
Oh, and I like my balls more when I scratch them and my fingertips
come up smelling like vinegar. It’s more human.
Even though my parents hid their porno stash and their sex
toys, I never felt guilty enough about checking them out to
stop, because I figured that if they really meant to keep us
kids out, they would have locked their bedroom door, right?
(They only did that when they smoked pot, which all of us
I have always liked that which
offends nice people, because it is
usually honest.
could smell anyway.) But that glimpse into the patchy world
of fucked-up adults warped me with the notion that sex was
best when it was edgy and predatory and fraught with the
peril of getting caught.
Kind of like art.
My parents never abused me, though, unlike the cretins
I went to school with, who seemed to have an eerie sixth
sense about my impending queerness. I wish they’d let me
in on their secret. Or maybe they were just vicious that way
to anyone who was “too” fat, “too” brainy, “too” shy, “too”
THE TRUTH ABOUT SEX 27