(DISCLAIMER: The following article contains words and refers to practices that some people might find offensive. But keep reading. You might learn something.)
The moral crusaders are right - the Internet is positively crawling with perverts. I should know. I'm one of them.
We're all perverts, we Gimps. We think about sex all the time - how to do it, who to do it with, and what to cover and uncover while doing it. On the street, we steal lustful glances at total strangers. At school, at work, in the hospital, in the nursing home, we lie back and daydream about doing it with the next person who walks through the door. The lucky ones among us do it regularly with a partner. Those without a partner do it with themselves.
In the last few years some of us have found our way onto the net, where we've connected with others who have similar interests. We write out our wildest fantasies and post them to newsgroups like alt.sex.stories. We fire up our web browsers and, with sweaty fingers, go pointing-and-clicking in search of the online porn that the tabloid TV shows have been warning us about. We sign onto IRC channels or MUDs and wait for someone to come along and ask us the all-important question, "R U NEKKID?????"
In other words, we're sexual creatures. Just like every other human being on the planet. Our sexuality isn't the only part of our being - or even the most important part, necessarily - but it is a part.
So how does this makes us a bunch of perverts?
It doesn't, really. But to an AB society prone to viewing disabled people as asexual, we're strange, and anything "strange" about human sexuality gets labeled as sick or abnormal - even by people who have been similarly labeled in the past, and still are in many quarters. In this climate, it's hard for a disabled person to express or explore his or her sexuality without being treated as either a circus freak or a charity case.
In other words, the struggle by Gimps to get laid as often and as well as ABs do is one of the last unfought battles of the Sexual Revolution. And this article will show why the online world is the perfect battleground for it.
So let the fighting begin. Praise the Lord and pass the Astroglide.
The Other Side of the Mountin'
"I know what they're all thinking. My dick doesn't work. The truth? My dick works sometimes. My dick works without fail. I have two dicks. I have totally accepted my sexuality. I have massive problems with my sexuality. Actually, there is no problem with sexuality. It's just not a problem. I think we can just drop this subject of sexuality because it's not an issue. Not at all. The truth? I had a little problem there in the beginning, then I learned how to compensate. Now everything is fine. It's actually better than fine. To be honest, I am the sexual version of crack. There are whole clinics set up for people who became addicted to sleeping with me. All right, the truth? Not so fast."
--John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence (New York: Hyperion, 1995)
Okay, here's a little bit about myself (for best results, you might want to hum the theme to "The Dating Game" as you read):
I am a white male in my early 30s who just moved to the big city from a thoroughly bland suburb in Southern California. I was born with a hereditary bone condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, which resulted in at least a hundred fractures and dozens of surgeries during my childhood and adolescence. When I was 14, a doctor told me that sex was out of the question for me because I was too fragile. It took me more than 11 years, but I eventually got to prove him wrong.
I had both the fortune and misfortune to grow up during that R-rated, sweat-drenched-and-polyester-clad decade, the 1970s. By the time I hit my early teens, the fruits of the permissiveness of the previous decade had ripened and their juices were saturating popular culture. Sexual images and issues were everywhere - even in children's books (such as those by Judy Blume) where menstruation, masturbation, and extramarital sex became hot topics. For a young Gimp feeling the first jolt of testosterone in his system, the '70s were a vast improvement over the repressiveness (and attendant hypocrisy) of earlier eras.
The times did have their shortcomings, however - and I'm not just talking about the tacky clothes we all wore. For the most part, the hormonal frolickings of the Saturday Night Fever days passed us Gimps by. The message I got from AB culture as a horny teenager was that the new sexual morality belonged to the strong, the healthy, the physically perfect. Even relatively enlightened portrayals of disabled people, such as Jon Voight's role in Coming Home, conveyed this message - here, Gimp sexuality is shown as something lost, or missing, to be regained only if you're granted the opportunity to muff-dive Jane Fonda. Elsewhere in the movies, and on TV, disabled people were depicted as they always have been: innocent, "inspirational," and of course, without a nasty thought in their pretty little heads.
So, in the face of all this negativity, I spent my teens and early 20s - a time when most of my contemporaries were exploring and experimenting with their sexuality - studying, reading sci-fi novels, drinking, taking drugs, listening to punk rock, and playing Dungeons and Dragons. Not necessarily in that order.
For a while I even convinced myself that I'd "gone beyond sex" - that I, in the clearheadedness bestowed upon me by my status as a sexless cripple, had somehow moved to a higher spiritual plane than these AB friends of mine who went around humping like crazed gerbils. It sure as hell beat feeling sorry for myself - or so I believed. I believed it even when I was excusing myself from class and heading for the bathroom to "relieve" those feelings I claimed to have transcended.
Six times a day.
Or was it seven?
Eight?
I don't know. I guess I lost count.
Bring Out the Gimp
"To realize our sexual freedom, our goal must be to infuse the dominant sexual culture with the richness of our own experience. We must celebrate our differences from those without disabilities. We must see that our differences in appearance and function which are the sources of our degradation also contain the seeds of our sexual liberation."
-- Barbara Faye Waxman, "It's Time to Politicize Our Sexual Oppression," The Disability Rag, March/April 1991
Put any half-dozen Gimps in a room together and it won't take long at all for the conversation to come around to sex - or the lack thereof. The constriction, frustration, and outright violation of our sexuality is something we have all felt deeply and painfully at some point in our lives. Some experience it more directly than others - those who live in institutional settings, for example, who are often punished by administrators or staff for engaging in sexual activity. (I know of one woman who, as a child, was raped by a hospital orderly - after a nurse on duty had tied her hands to the bed rails to keep her from masturbating.) Disabled people on SSI often find their benefits reduced or cut off if they marry. And some persons with disabilities, both physical and mental, reach adulthood and go to the doctor to find out why they and their spouses have been unable to conceive a child, only then to discover that they had long ago been sterilized without their knowledge.
Even if we escape these indignities, we still must contend with cultural messages that de-eroticize us and devalue us in the eyes of potential partners.
But what do we do about it? Should we transform our sexuality into a disability-rights issue, as Waxman suggests? She calls for us to "politicize our sexual oppression," but what does that mean, precisely? It's not like we can force anyone to have sex with us. So how do we demand that society take us seriously as sexual beings? By taking nude pictures of ourselves and posting them on suburban walls in the dead of night? By lobbying for Gimp discounts at Nevada brothels? By staging "fuck-ins" outside the Jerry Lewis telethon?
And how will all of this help me get a date next Saturday night?
Even so-called "sex radicals" such as Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle - people on the cutting edge of writing and research about sex and sexuality who argue persuasively against the Puritanism of the larger culture and in favor of greater sexual freedom - seem to have trouble with the concept of Gimp sexuality. When their writings touch upon it at all, it is in the context of discussions about women's erotic fiction (where disability is often used as a metaphor for powerlessness) or debates on legalization of prostitution. Depicting disabled women as helpless victims of psychotic men is nothing new, and it does nothing to advance the growth of disabled people as sexual beings. Nor does arguing that prostitution should be legalized because that is the only way male Gimps will ever get laid.
Yet who says we even have to wait for ABs to get a clue? As a rule, the Gimp community - as individuals, and as a movement - spends far too much time as it is waiting for cues from the non-disabled to tell them when it's "OK" to pursue their goals or strike out on paths they want to take anyway. Who says we can't begin to examine our own desires and define our own sexual selves, one by one, without their approval? All it takes is a willingness to believe that being sexual is OK regardless of what prevailing notions say, and an even more important willingness to go wherever that belief takes you - whether you're male or female, straight or gay, conventional or kinky, monogamous or free-spirited.
But where to start?
You're looking at it. You're probably touching it, too.
I mean your computer, of course.
The Scarlet Letters
"As was once the case with the telephone, it is hard to predict how computers will shape our lives, including our erotic interactions. Some people find much existing online discussion to be a waste of time . . . Others wonder if maybe cybersex and cyberplay are becoming too much of a substitute for 'real life' interactions. Yet others find that for them, online interactions and cyber-communities are real. They provide a forum for solidarity, for learning, for activism, and for finding playmates and partners."
-- Liz Highleyman. "Cyberkink Delivers! Resources Abound for Online Kinksters," Cuir Underground, December 1995/January 1996
For a Gimp interested in sex and sexuality, the net has three things that recommend it over the more traditional methods of exploration. I call them The Three A's:
Resources
I've slanted the selection of links here in favor of information and support as opposed to direct offerings of sexual materials - first, because tastes in erotica vary widely and it's best for net.perverts to discover the sites they like on their own; second, because there are thousands if not millions of sex-related sites out there and listing them all is impossible. Besides, if you're really looking for plain old smut, chances are that you've already found it.
The following is a description of some of the more popular sites, along with a couple of others that I've found interesting, and a few more that are actually disability-related.
One of the best places to start surfing is at Elf Sternberg's Home Page. Elf Sternberg is a Usenet institution of sorts - a longtime poster to newsgroups in the alt.sex.* hierarchy whose advice has come to be trusted by many readers of those groups. He also maintains the alt.sex FAQ, quite possibly the most comprehensive and practical guide to sex available on the net. Another good site is called, simply, AltSex, although I find it hard to read using Netscape. (Note to web-page designers: Using gray text on a black background is a great way to give people headaches. Just so you know.) The materials at the University of Washington's Society for Human Sexuality tend to be rather academic and dry, but it's an excellent resource as well. The Coalition for Positive Sexuality is a teen-oriented site that aims to help young people through the minefield of adolescent sexuality without being patronizing or judgmental.
It also might be useful to read the various sex-related newsgroups on Usenet, although be careful: Many of the regulars on these groups are quite cliquish and will flame you to hell and back if you don't lurk long enough before posting. The group alt.support.disabled.sexuality is much gentler toward newbies.
One of my favorite sexually-oriented places on the net is Emily Way's A Thinking Person's Guide to Sex - not because of the dirty pictures (there are none), but because of the insightful comments on sex and politics by Emily herself. And I'm not saying that just because she's a friend of mine. (Her related site, The Body Eclectic - about the human body and our relationship with it - is a must for any disabled person wrestling with his or her body image.)
If you're looking for other Gimps, and you're interested in the pitfalls of dating as well as the technicalities of sex, there's The PeopleNet Disability DateNet, by Bob Mauro, a New York-based author who has written a book and numerous articles on sex, dating, and disability. For gay and bi men with disabilities, there's ABLE-TOGETHER, which also puts out a hard-copy magazine with personal ads, poetry, and nonfiction articles.
These are all good jumping-off points. But as I wrote earlier, the most important thing is that we come to know ourselves - our own fantasies, our own desires - and that we let those take us wherever they want to lead us. It's a regular all-you-can-eat salad bar of perversity out there, so we might as well just dive right in.
Bon Appetit.
I have cerebral palsy. I just read your article on a Gimp's Guide to Sex. I enjoyed it very much. You've had many of the emotions and feelings I had when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. I still have those same feelings and will probably have them to the day I die.
You're absolutely right when you say the only way for a disabled man to get his dick wet is through prostitution. Hell, no woman would even look at me twice unless I waved a hundred-dollar-bill at her.
Getting sex the natural way was virtually impossible for me. Even then I've gotten burned more times than I care to mention. There are women out there that will take your money and leave you with nothing but your dick in your hand. It's happened to me several times. When you're disabled and not born into a wealthy family, money is hard to come by.
I'd like to share some more thoughts about disabled male sexuality with you. Let me know if you are interested.
Dan Riley
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