By Daniel Moldoveanu

Title logo by Julian-Jakob Kneer

As I patiently awaited my next Penicillin shot at Jessie’s (popular gay practitioner in Berlin), my friend Charlotte told me I remind her of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), a famous children’s book by Eric Carle about an insect that needs to learn the threshold on how many fruits it can really eat before a fragile body says “no, no.” According to Wikipedia, this roaring literary success creates a link between my reality and that of George W. Bush. Twenty-three years old when the book was published, the former president later declared it an enlightening tale about greed, one that exercised a tremendous impact on the relentlessness of his spiritual development. It appears that influence waned when it came time for his administration to invade Iraq.

I don’t really talk to the staff at Jessie’s, and when they attempt to raise their tone at me – as is customary for the German subconscious – I confidently gesture a sassy “stop” sign with the face of my palm. This asserts power and dominance by immediately ending the conversation, giving them the feeling of there being a higher authority which I might turn to for help, reminding them that their prescriptions are replaceable and so are they, so I would appreciate it if their institution would handle my case with a little more compassion or care. After being there so many times, what is there really left to say? Years of being a hungry power bottom have made me my own nutritionist, proctologist, dermatologist, psychologist, international relations press agent and more.   

Notice for an STI ‘blind treatment’ in hand, I continue my wait at the infamous pharmacy on Motzstrasse, Quartier Apotheke, which really is an office extension of every other practitioner in that… colorful neighborhood. I think back to David Hoyle’s afterparty drag performance in the Volkbühne Red Salon and feel grateful to have been there because it reminded me of at least one good reason not to kill myself: out of spite.

Privileged are those whose biggest experience of homophobic violence is the Austrian government’s shameless audacity to call them up for military service. This was all the more unnerving in my case because it took the Austrians longer than a decade and a lawsuit to grant me citizenship. To this day, I remain exiled with an upgraded passport but no realistic right of return, because the only place you’ll ever catch me wearing cargo pants is at a queer rave, and I’ll do it because I like to cuddle up with the muscles and the daddies, discarding my own kind in favor of those dominant categories on GayMaleTube.com that have so shaped my cumming of age.

Taking a deep breath before the needle pinches my buttock, I glance over the notifications on my phone, and try to calculate what percentage of those are related to the libertarian depravity I emotionlessly think of when my parents inquire about any “special friend.” Let’s see… there are eight notifications from Grindr, another five from the “TroubleMakers London” group, seven from the “Intern.SexFunGroup”, twelve from the exclusive “Dicks – XL Only” Telegram group and someone sent an advert for jaw fillers in the “Mykohoes” chat I thought I muted a long time ago. The list continues on Sniffies, PlanetRomeo, Scruff and Barebuddy, but I stop counting those. Eggplant emoji said “Hey hole”, I replied “Yes sir.” What is this all for? What would someone like Hervé Guibert think of my complete disdain for self-preservation? Emancipatory or self-harming, despite not knowing the answer, I know damn well it can’t be both.

For all his beauty, intelligence, ability and stardom, there was nothing, absolutely nothing that granted Hervé even a splint slither of rejuvenation. AIDS was seated in the corner chair of every room and the passenger seat of every car and on the bench at every bus stop and near the corner of every bar: death became a fucking architecture. To the friend who did not save my life (1990) makes writing feel like a temporary fixture, a futile attempt to hold on to something, anything, to cover holes that are leaking, to find shortcuts of hallways that are circular, as your very life and those of the people around you continue to deteriorate in such a biological and factual way, this very immanence and the dread you feel whilst being shaken and still paralyzed force you to intrinsically fight a race against time by mistaking the potency of expressing uncertainty in your self-reflections with that of a categorical, pending, slow decay. Laurence Sterne, a heterosexual, nomadic, terminally ill predecessor to Guibert’s, had the same kind of grip on writing. In Tristram Shandy (1767) he states:

“Time wastes too fast, and every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen (…)”

Rest in peace babes.

Zipping my jeans up, I imagine the benzathine liquid filter through the protein myofibrils that, according to Google, constitute the muscular structure of my ass and I think about how, when Carrie Bradshaw asks: “How could it feel so good, when it feels so bad?”, Samatha Jones replies: “Oh, honey, they design it that way.”  

Samantha exudes a brand of promiscuity that is cosmopolitan, expensive, self-proclaimed. As long as she can breathe and kneel she will 1) wear whatever she wants and 2) blow whomever she wants. What role does death play in her brand? Diagnosed with breast cancer and still insisting on being treated by a celebrity doctor, this femme fatale gets to share the waiting room with her contemporary polar opposite, an asexual nun. She takes a short second to realize this means the person next to her never had sex, before asking if she’s at least allowed to masturbate. Who cares what the nun answers, because what matters is what Carrie Bradshaw wrote in her column pending: “Samantha felt a little better knowing that saints and sinners, despite their habits, get the same treatment when it comes to cancer.”  

Exiting towards the subway at Nollendorfplatz, I catch a short glimpse of the Cuban hunk who fisted me at Laboratory last week and try to mimic a sort of half-raised, polite smile, to perform the impression of not holding any grudges despite my inability to walk straight. His type of promiscuity feels different than Samantha’s, and it makes me think of my somewhat questionable late-night mid-week excursions to the basements of Berlin’s “downtown” district of Neukölln. I’m then reminded of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage (2018), a shaky camera lens that affords us, through the bushes and shadowy weeds of a Parisian periphery, insight into the brutal survival of a nocturnal street hustler.

The film begins, as it so often does, with a doctor’s interrogation. As a sex worker, sober or on heavy drugs, Léo enjoys kissing each and every one of his clients, seemingly yearning for authentic intimacy anywhere he can find it and with whomever would give it, addicted to vulnerability, unaware of passive-rejection, constantly seeking it in the most direct and violent ways. This demeanor prompts his straight crush to ask him if he “[actually] enjoys being a whore.” Towards the end of the film, he seems to foster a deeper bond with a gentleman that would salvage him of a bleeding future feeding of looted apples; a calming, soothing figure, tranquil as the French would say, to domesticate him in a gentle way. One sunny morning, back in the wilderness, it becomes clear that Léo can wholeheartedly love just about anyone, but only for a short stay.

I think a lot about suffering and being vulnerable and what it means to emancipate yourself from those feelings because they’re nothing but obstacles to everyone’s chase in the world of today. The difference between Léo’s and Samantha’s promiscuity is that the former is in perpetual, fundamental conflict with “civilized” society whereas the latter is a proud winner of the capitalist girl boss game. At opposite ends of an ideological power trajectory, one suffers, the other dominates; one is impulsive, the other calculates; one is always on the fringes, the other represents.   

Throwback to Barcelona where that bearded muscular tall guy, Miguel, hosted Andrew, Nick, Hector, Vlad, Bernhard and myself in Steve’s suite at the Axel Hotel. Nick asks: 

“Is he still coming?” 

Hector wanted to know who’s in charge of music and Vlad complained the porn needed switching up. He’s into beefier dudes, not whatever Belami bullshit was playing. Luca spilled the poppers. Chris declared we had run out of Viagra, Andrew locked himself in the toilet with Miguel while Steve suddenly responded: 

“Which guy?”

“You know, that bearded muscular tall guy you showed me earlier. The one we exchanged numbers with at the waterpark, who sucked your dick in the toilet, like, before the fireworks went off after the Offer Nissim set.”

“That could be anyone,” Nick said, “… did Miguel send him the QR code? I need a charger. Is there any M left?”

All of a sudden Abdul comes knocking, so bearded, so muscular and so tall, he rams me against the bedroom window, and then leaves again. His friend was waiting in the lobby because Steve denied him entry. “That bitch didn’t say hi to me at La Demence last August,” Steve said. It turns out Renzo stole the poppers. Also, there was no more M.

I get out at Alexanderplatz and parkour my way ahead. For the past weeks I’ve had this earworm from the pilot episode of VEEP (2012), and it’s Mike McLintock (head of media relations) aggressively shouting over Dan Egan’s (soon to become political staffer) crisis management intervention, and he’s just frantically repeating: “Who the fuck is pretty boy? Who the fuck is pretty boy?”, and I google the phrase and it turns out you can find an exact snippet of those 3 seconds on getyarn.io. Good question, I think, starring at the tall blond German Neanderthal that infiltrates my radar somewhere on the U8: who the fuck is pretty boy?

Pretty boy takes 1.5 mil. in his peach juice, chases it with water and enters the arena at White Party. His muscles become increasingly more tense as he advances between bouncing slabs of testosterone that begin to look like Marvel character men. It’s a battleground, a jungle; the only faces to be remembered and dwelled over are those who didn’t reply to his ‘wyd’ texts at 3 am. The double-texters are already conquered, checked-off and flushed down the drain. Stacks on top of stacks of gay men paid good money to be noticed in this samsara and he wants to get fucked by literally every single one of them. The party sucks, who cares. Everything happens at the chill-out, the afters, the boss level to this computer game.

Twenty seven, from a smalltown looking good
Looking for some loving tonight
Come abuse me
I want one maybe more boys, taking me out really hard
You can spoil me, you can buy me sexy clothes
and I will let you do anything
Come abuse me
I want one maybe more boys, taking me out really hard

Tobias Bernstrup’s “27” extended club mix: Real.

Having arrived at home, I begin ranting to my boyfriend about this obsessive desire that feels so existential, this need to become a special kind of demographic that presides over all other sectors of the meat market; how it makes me go crazy when certain guys will notice him but not me, and if I just hit the gym harder and have shorter hair, if I just become the algorithmic lump sum of all the most liked Instagram images I can actually achieve that point of extremity, that final scene in The Perfume where Jean-Baptiste Grenouille pours the scent over himself, prompting an entire village of peasants to cannibalistically disperse his body off the face of the earth “purely out of love.”

His steroid ass just sits there, relating empathetically, staring into his lap, he says, “yeah but… it never stops.” Days later, I already feel like rutting in the mud again, and we have a fivesome with Brandon, Tim and NKanon_XXL(wateremoji). Despite douching for an hour, something’s off. I just lack that certain kind of “anal Zen.” Why will my body not do as it’s told? Shaking and still slightly dissociated from poppers, I assume my penalty, forced to the time-out toilet self-reflection we all know so very well. Genial streams of tap water enter and exit my rectum as I contemplate my place in the world. A few hours later, back home and on my side of the bed, I end that spiral and conclude: “What the hell, at least I still came.”

© Daniel Moldoveanu, 2024