Also re-reading Sam d'Allessandro's Wild Creatures--prose so spare it almost disappears. And the best exposition both of gay male sexuality and of gay masochism (about which I know nothing) I've ever read. From 'Electrical Type of Thing':

We are drawn to each other. We are each the free electron the other's unbalanced nucleus needs. It's an electrical type of thing. A charge.

...I told Scott and Jeff about the way Chris and I are together. I wanted to hear someone else accept the relationship just as it is, the way I have. Instead they gently tried to tell me about the way loving relationships are supposed to be, always sharing and sensitive, etc. Chris and I are sensitive, only in a different way. Chris and I share some needs and the means to satisfy them. Together we're self-contained. Scott and Jeff tell me that there are other needs to consider, that a relationship can't be based on sexual intensity alone. I say if sexual intensity's there the relationship has already been based.

I don't think we can always be sure what it is we need; that seems to be different for me than it is for Scott and Jeff. Or is it? Maybe Scott and Jeff have forgotten how good pure intensity can feel. Maybe they've never experienced the vulnerability of being spanked during sex by someone they really want. Or known the relief you can feel when someone gets you to forget yourself totally. Someone who helps you to find a subhuman state--no language, no questions, no problems--just a pulsing, quivering slab of sensation. People would pay a guru or a Rolfer to do that. Or Werner Erhard. It's not an unusual desire. It's not an unusual need, letting someone else take the reins for a while. I'd rather be physically fucked by Chris than verbally fucked by Werner Erhard. I never wanted my parents to spank me, but when I can pick who's doing it I enjoy a good spanking. Skin craves sensation. It's those nerve endings. It's the way we're made.

Not of course that I agree (Pain hurts!), but I think I see what he means. And it sounds for all the world like Ethan Mordden's notion of Real All-Consuming Love, as expressed in his marvelous short story 'The Shredding of Peter Hawkins,' which I have read, at a conservative estimate, twenty times. But one more story, the same as the first, only a little diffferently stated, "Walking to the Ocean This Morning:"

The truth of the matter is I like to be beaten and then fucked like a dog. I don't mean on my hands and knees, I mean hard and carelessly. I want someone relentless. When I was with Tom, before, saying no in the morning could easily be followed by a slap in the face and a spanking so hard it would send me crawling from room to room looking for escape in fear of even being touched on my now-burning ass, until he would decide to catch me and fuck me roughly on the floor. I'd start out whimpering and end up moaning within minutes. Once he had me in that place, he like to threaten to stop just to hear me beg him not to. Tom loved to create situations that would totally turn what I thought I wanted at that moment to the opposite, from saying I didn't want to have sex that morning to begging him not to stop fucking my spanked ass. He didn't force me to do anything, he just created situations in which I wanted what he was going to give me anyway. Sometimes he'd fuck me real hard and then pull out, holding my legs straight up in the air in a flying V, looking at my enlarged asshole sucking air to fill the vacancy, begging for his cock to return. I loved being so vulnerable. I loved it when my tits or my cock or my asshole would destroy my own ego with their needs. If your body wants something bad enough, you can't say no no matter how humiliating. He could say anything, call me anything, make me do anything, after which I would immediately start begging for his cock. At those moments I didn't matter, only my ass did.