ALEXANDER CHEVES: Notes on a catastrophe
from
Recon News
03 April 2020
Alexander Cheves – sweetbeastly on Recon - is a sex and relationships writer, editor, and artist. In this article Alex pays tribute to his various encounters within the fetish scene.
If this is it, I'd like to say some things. First off, there is a man in Atlanta with the biggest dick I've ever taken, and unlike many super-hung guys, he knows how to use it. Sir, if you're reading this (I know you're not; you're "not into the scene"), you're the only man who's ever made me cum hands-free twice while getting fucked. My hands were tied behind my back. Wherever you are, I hope you're safe. I wish we were quarantined together — my hole would never be the same.
To the guy who first fisted me: thank you. I hope you get your life together very soon.
To the handsome leatherman in San Francisco (I won't say names) who I met at Folsom some years ago, you are my best fist. We passed each other on the stairs at a fisting party and you said you wanted to play in my butt. I looked at your hands, laughed, and said, "Sorry, I'm not that skilled." You said there was no pressure, no goal — you just wanted to play. You had a gentle, comforting presence, so I climbed in the sling. I can't describe how it felt when you did get it in. I'm a sex writer for numerous publications, yet here, words fail. The lights overhead were red. A small crowd of men gathered around the sling and I remember their voices and your eyes, locked onto mine. I went to that other place, the one fisters live for. How long did it last — minutes? Hours? I return to that memory when I weigh life's bizarre highs and lows. Thank you.
To all the fisters I've met since my first one — the sex radicals and faeries and rubber dogs and nonbinary Marxists and sex workers and composers and doctors (so many of you are doctors!) — I want to say, bless you. I love our network, our history. This niche, extreme, stigmatized art has blossomed in the digital age. We roll our eyes and say, "Everyone's into fisting." It's true. Until we meet again, may we all ride our home dildos in quarantine till they set us free.
I want to thank the anonymous leather saint I met six years ago — a face in the dark, blue eyes and brown beard, not long after I tested positive for HIV. You said, "I don't give a shit about your status, bend over." You don't know this, but I felt untouchable and ugly. I love you.
There's not enough space to thank all the guides — the kinky men who gave me places to stay and sat down with me to discuss money, who had lunch with me and encouraged me to do what I want to do, who believed in me and my work more than I did. There are days when I wonder if I'm any good and then I remember your encouragement. Who rewards the ones like you? I, a lousy communicator, forget to tell you, I get stuck in my life, but you are the ones I hold up as rarities, the ones who need to survive. Many of you are older; please, for the love of god, stay indoors.
Some of you are strange. You said "I love you" after one brief conversation, and it shocked me. In this way, you taught me how to love — freely, recklessly. Honestly given, complicitous, sincere. What a lesson. You are the mad ones who will be needed if systems fail — if society collapses and chaos ensues. You are the anarcho-queers who understand what it means to take care of each other, and you will be ready with Molotov cocktails and rubber suits to lead us into the new age.
I want to thank the ex-boyfriends who were not especially kinky or inclined to non-monogamy: thanks for opening the gate when you knew I needed it. I hope you know by now that it was never about you. I loved you, but I also love getting hate-fucked by strangers in basements stinking of sweat and shit. I needed that as badly as I needed you.
I'll be accused of only thanking guys with big dicks — there are some massive ones on this list — but now I must thank J., my first Sir. We had a complicated relationship. You were my gateway into kink. Things ended badly between us, yet I think ours was my longest relationship so far. Our friendship recovered but our sex did not. I still remember being scared of you and feeling unsafe; there is no worse feeling in the world as a sub who has put total trust in someone else.
Your dick, for what it's worth, is ridiculous. I could never look away when we went swimming together, long after sex was off the table. I wonder what we would be like now — now that I'm so much better at this and you're no longer teaching me. In fact, sometimes I'm teaching you, showing you new things, answering your questions. Would we fuck as equals? I think it would probably be incredible. Now that we're going extinct, I hope it happens.
That about covers it. When I set out to write this, I was going to include admonitions for the many idiots I've met (if you've never fisted someone, don't tell hookups you're an expert — you could severely injure them and destroy their sex lives forever). But, in the end, the bad encounters — even the dangerous ones — are outweighed by the wonder of it all. There are many kinks and fetishes I haven't tried yet and never even confessed to having (forced tattooing — how about that!). Everyone, in the end, wants more.
When we rise out of the dark — in two weeks? two months? six months? a year? — we will be changed. We will have losses. Some of our spaces will not recover. This will likely be the end of some of our greatest events. Many of us will be scared of going out and social gatherings. This may be a poor salve, but when you measure a life — when you look at the whole of it, a tawdry, stubborn thing — it is those moments of fire and breath that give it meaning, that are awesome only because they are shared. I wish you all more of them. Wash your fucking hands.
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