Dr. Gloria Brame is best known for her books Different Loving and The Truth About Sex trilogy, which promote evidence-based, pro-diversity perspectives on human sexuality. A clinical sex therapist and much sought-after expert on the biopsychology of sex, Gloria has been a leader in radical sex theory and education since 1987, when she founded the world’s first online BDSM support group. Gloria’s previous memoir was Naked Memory: Confessions of a Sexual Revolutionary.
This is an excerpt from her latest autobiographical book, A Fetish for Men. It deals with a range of deeply personal topics: the Holocaust, toxic parents, sexuality, and so much more.
We are all fated to die. It could happen in the blink of an eye. The Nazis could knock down your door tomorrow. Nazis and people like them – ignorant, hateful, backwards – were the inescapable vermin of life. They were everywhere, waiting to crawl out from the scum-packed sewers of human society and shit all over your life.
There was no hell except on earth, and there was no heaven anywhere. Life was about surviving and surviving until you died, and until then, you were on your own. At least I was. I felt, to loosely translate a Yiddish saying, as alone as a finger separated from its hand.
Adulthood was my chance at redemption, a day when I’d be a better person, when I’d be more lovable, and when no one could hurt me anymore. Everyone who wanted to be redeemed could be redeemed. Hadn’t that very miracle happened to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis? There was a stocky little Jewish guy my parents knew who was rumored to have been a kapo in a prison camp. Whatever happened during the war years, he now fit invisibly into the world of Jewish Survivors. He didn’t dare criticize the man out loud but privately, my father said he would have died before helping the Nazis. I knew it was bluster. He was never in a camp. Who knows what a person will do to stay alive when the moment comes? Maybe I would have been a kapo if that’s what it took to survive.
I had a vision of my life. Not a vision where I saw things floating around or heard unseen voices or anything spiritualistic. It was a knowledge deep within that could not be defeated nor argued against, and I can’t remember not feeling that I was fated for another life. I didn’t belong where I was. The life I would have, someday, would be as far away from my childhood as Darfur was from L.A. That life involved men, in the sense that I couldn’t imagine life without men in it; but it had nothing to do with men because they were neither the journey nor the point of the journey, just travel companions along the way.
The first step, though, was moving out of the house. I was working every part-time job I could find in hopes of saving up enough for a rent deposit. It would take me another year, but by sophomore year, I’d be able to find something in Queens, where rent was cheap. Meanwhile, I had to find some solitude in my head. The multiplicity of part-time jobs had led to a multiplicity of affairs in rapid-fire succession.
At one musty office in a former factory building in Chelsea, I got a job selling office supplies by phone two evenings a week. Oliver, the man running the operation was the most uptight asshole I’d ever met, and his constant pucker of disapproval only reinforced the sphincterian atmosphere in the place. For him, selling discount pencils was either the meaning of life itself or a paranoid delusion he had cultivated into a business model. I slogged on, since the money was decent. Then one day, after I hit some kind of record by making three successful sales calls in a row, he called me into his office. I was expecting a nice commission on the sales. Instead, I got his life story.
Oliver was a former hippie freak who spent the 1960s tripping his ass off while driving Ken Kesey’s infamous prankster bus. He claimed he was totally straight now. His hair was painfully short and he dressed more like Mr. Disco than Mr. Natural, but he had only traded up on his vices. Instead of pot and LSD, he did coke and Quaaludes all day long. He’d dropped so much acid that he talked like he was still tripping. I’d nod sympathetically, an old hand at pretending to be listening when I was really thinking about cock or a poem or anything that wasn’t whatever the boring person was saying.
He was too twitchy to notice anything about me. He took my ability to sit still during his speeches as rapt fascination. It was what his narcissistic soul had been pining for. I’d barely get through the door at work before he was waving and summoning me into his office for lengthy conversations I cannot remember because I wasn’t listening in the first place.
Soon it was impossible to make sales calls because he took up most of my time rambling on about his LSD escapades in disconnected sentences, stopping only to make the other salespeople feel like shit for not living up to the standard I never meant to set. The more I tried to deflect him, the harder he wooed me. One day, he gave me a small bag of ludes, which I gave to a friend who had given me lots of free pot over the years. The next week, it was a dressy purse which I quickly regifted to a friend going on vacation. The week after, a fancy suede pantsuit, the kind that sold at uptown stores. It was exactly my size, so I didn’t know who I could give it to. Then there was a fancy gold cigarette lighter from a 5th Avenue store that cost more than I’d earn in three months working for him.
After that, I knew the job would never last. Whatever Oliver wanted to give me next time, I would not accept it. I could not. His gifts were off the hook. He had entered the transactional zone now and sooner or later, he’d want pussy as payback.
I went to work with a sense of dread and tried harder than ever to make sales, but I never could reproduce the magic of my trifecta. I was, in fact, having less success now than some of my co-workers. Oliver wasn’t as anxious to talk to me either. I was almost regaining hope that I misinterpreted his interest in me when I arrived at the office one late afternoon to find a booze and drug-filled office party underway. He said it was his birthday, and had brought a case of champagne and bags of pills to the party. Then he announced we could have the rest of the shift off with pay, and insisted on driving the girls home, leaving me for last, since I was the furthest. We drank some more, and he sped around town until it was just the two of us.
“My place is just a few minutes away,” he said. “I want you to see it.”
With that, he hit the pedal and sped up the FDR, finally coming to a halt in front of a luxury tower.
“It’s got a gorgeous view. Come on, you’ll love it. Just a few minutes.”
It seemed like the least I could do after accepting all those luxury items I’d never felt comfortable accepting. His place was like a fantasy bachelor pad. The bed took up almost the whole studio space and faced onto floor-to-ceiling windows and a gorgeous view of Manhattan. Thick, white down blankets cushioned his lush bed, and a bottle of champagne waited on the end table, like he’d planned this all out in advance.
There was no place else to sit but the bed, so I sighed and surrendered to the inevitable, sitting down and then laying back to enjoy its surreal softness.
He immediately disrobed. He was even skinnier without his clothes, and his stick legs were adorned by thin black socks. He was rambling a mile a minute while I was having second thoughts. Now that the buzz was fading, I had no idea why I came home with him. I knew what would happen if I came up to his place, didn’t I? I glanced at the ceiling and saw myself staring grimly back in a huge mirror. I poured myself a full glass of champagne.
He got into bed still in his shorts and we kissed awkwardly. An energy suck-hole formed between us. He couldn’t get it up and I was relieved. Saved by the soddy penis!
Before I had time to assure him that it was okay, he was dialing a car service to carry me away. When I got back to the office the following week, I was no longer the official favorite, but just another incompetent employee, subject to his wrath. No more presents and, a week later, no more job either. He fired the whole office without warning and I never saw him again.
*****
I couldn’t shake that Holocaust feeling. Everything was impermanent. The whole world was impermanence, illusions, delusions, and change. Nothing mattered today because it could all be gone tomorrow.
No matter what I did, no matter who I was with, no matter where I went, I wasn’t going to stay with anyone. I wasn’t made that way.
There was no ecstasy beyond that moment of nakedness. The most divine experiences were the moments leading up to nakedness. Everything else, EVERYTHING else that flowed from them, was either script or deception: either they were following somebody else’s script for how life was supposed to work, or they were lying to me to get me to sleep with them. The only true joy I felt with them was during conquest.
A Fetish for Men is available anywhere books are sold. Learn more about Gloria at her website: gloriabrame.com.
