THE FOLLOWING PIECE of writing appears in Family Parables, a collection of short fiction by the Slovene writer Boris Pintar, published by Talisman House in December in my translation. The collection consists of four short stories, each between eight and fifteen pages in length; a novella of some sixty pages, which lends the collection its title; and this piece, “Eros/Thanatos,” placed interestingly between the short stories and the novella, almost as a summing-up of the former (the last of the stories is about a man who brings home a hustler) and an introduction to the latter. Its own genre is difficult to pinpoint: is this fiction, an essay, or a poem? Is this the author’s own voice, or a fictional one belonging wholly to the work itself? Or is it perhaps a foretaste of the voice of one of the characters in the novella “Family Parables,” which is punctuated by the soliloquies of a homophobic psychoanalytical researcher who considers herself the embodiment of society’s “superego”? We cannot know for sure. But what is clear is that Pintar here invites the reader to reflect on the role of male homosexual desire in a heterosexualist society, one in which power is wielded by repressed male homosexuals, whose stake in upholding the hetero norm (and male dominance) is therefore all the greater.
Although the principles explored here are universal, the society to which Pintar refers is, specifically, present-day Slovenia. This is a country that can boast the oldest organized and officially recognized gay and lesbian rights movement in post-Communist Europe (in existence since 1984). As a result of these activists’ hard work, Slovenia enjoys very progressive legislation with regard to sexual minorities. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Slovene gay men and lesbians still live in the closet. The phenomenon of the heterosexually partnered closeted homosexual is far more common than that of the “out and proud” gay man. Still, Slovenes like to think of themselves as a liberal, open society, and a sign of their “tolerance” came in 2002, when the group Sestre (“Sisters”), a trio of drag queens, was chosen to represent the country at the Eurovision Song Contest. They came in thirteenth place but achieved fame throughout the continent, at least for a season. Pintar alludes to this group in “Eros/ Thanatos” as “three sisters, three yearners.” He also calls them “Fair Vidas in drag,” referring to a famous character from Slovene poetry who was tempted by the prospect of a better life abroad and abandoned her husband, child, and homeland, only to find herself miserable with homesickness. The group Sestre, however, did return to Slovenia and at least one of their number went on to achieve considerable success as the host of her own TV talk show.
— Rawley Grau
THE GAY is a boy on call—a callboy, a rent boy, a prostitute, a whore. The go-go dancer, as he parades the desired virtues and bulges, lets his glance sweep over the men who lean their backs against the wall, who hide their eyes behind beer bottles and reach nervously for the popcorn and peanuts as they size up their prey—a prey, they know, who will let himself be caught. Or rather, they will let him catch them, since they lack the courage to approach this madly hopping rooster but wait on their stools for the chosen king of the coop to discover in them his chicken feed. Gays walk around the Turkish baths draped in short towels they keep wrapping and rewrapping on their hips, as if to unveil for a split second their pubic area, which in fact they don’t show, but only grab at suggestively through the towel, holding in their breath to tighten their abdominal muscles in front of men with abdomens as round as the domes on the holiest shrines of East and West. They move with broad strides, as if they had been playing soccer even before they learned to walk—despite their boyishness, they want to show everyone how manly they are. They can be a man or a woman, whatever the client needs to relieve his tension when he orders a massage-plus-orgasm. They present their services to the newcomers—one after another, there’s someone for every taste: who would be best?—and put their arms across their shoulders and keep them company in the lounge, watching TV serials where nobody knows what the characters are talking about. Just to be surrounded for a little while by young men who sit with their legs wide apart and laugh out loud amid the gloom of the other faces, silent as the spheres on top of domes. They offer both external and internal massage, and if they can’t satisfy the client’s fleshy ass with their pricks, they will massage the prostate by hand. The gays are there to satisfy the needs of well-respected men, the pillars of society, who have a family at home, a wife and six children—because mothers have no sexual desire. The role of the gays is to preserve the families of responsible men; they themselves have no needs of their own, and they are not the subject. In their uselessness they are useful to the men who are useful to society. These men are doubly men, since they live with a woman whom they avoid touching as the devil does the cross, and whom they flood with attention and drown in obligations in order to divert her from sex. These are real men, who lift their legs to the ceiling in Turkish baths and impart the meaning of existence to gays. Their wives do not have steam baths where in the dim light they can straddle the warm cocks of soccer players, for women must be pure and emotional; they don’t have sex with guys they don’t know but wait for their husbands to stuff them at Christmas and Easter. Having sons is enough for women. While they go hysterical in the privacy of their homes, the men seek a cure in the public display of their powerlessness.
The gigolo is not a gay. He too performs his peacock dance, but he lets himself be caught, so he can set the terms. For the gigolo, fucking men is like selling bottles of beer from behind a bar; it’s his profession, the same as repairing the underbodies of trucks during the day. The gigolo does not kiss, does not caress, does not take off any more clothes than necessary, does not let himself be fucked, does not tolerate homo sex; he is the man, and those who hire him, the woman, the whore who does what he tells her to do. The gigolo shows them that it won’t get hard by itself for someone who is old or fat or skinny, so he orders them first to suck it to make it stand up, then to undress, turn around, and assume the position, and jabs them a few times with his stinger like a buzzing bee. Do the milk and honey ever flow so lavishly for women? Sex as the orgasm of a man and the circumcised women who are after his sperm! The ancient cultures instructed people in the techniques of sexual pleasure, for both men and women, but our modern propriety has created a range of substitutes that turn incapacity for pleasure into a higher state of consciousness. The fervent conversion of others under the tutelage of our own ego is a form of hatred toward the primitives who enjoy their pleasure without concern for our inability to achieve orgasm—until the day when artificial intelligence reigns and reason becomes a commodity, as the body is now, and slaves celebrate their victory.
Two instincts are at battle in the human being: the life instinct and the death instinct. The death instinct is the dominant one in war, the life partner of men, but in women it is the life instinct that dominates, revealing itself through the death of the individual in the offspring. The homosexuals can be placed on the side of war. Like the medieval Dance of Death, gay and lesbian activism tries to pull everyone, from beggar to emperor, into the vortex of equality to zero. Gay activism can be useful as a transitory contributing factor in strengthening the growth of the economy, so long as it doesn’t spread to the group intended for reproduction. Society tries to keep the percentage of its write-offs in check. But instead of enjoying a well-earned rest from their decadence, they rise from the ashes like the phoenix, and sing, dance, play, write poetry, have festivals, and celebrate their creativity with all the stubbornness of the tortoise who wanted to replace the cock on the belfry. The grave casts its pall over the light of life. It’s not enough for them to have multiplied in the underworld; they crave the light of day, the glare of the spotlight. They want to infect the vital essence of the community, like the blasphemy of the Templars or the mockery of the contagious. The denial of one’s gender—once punishable by death—is now part of a show business that invents an educational mission for itself. Three sisters, three yearners, Fair Vidas in drag, as the costumed, unattainable longing of a nation to fly through the stars of Orion: the nation’s very being was rent in two, red and black, like two sides of the same body, of the same gender, the public side and the secret side; one part wanted to go to the moon, the other part was afraid of revealing itself to the Martians. But the sisters united their votive body like a nation voting on sovereignty that is otherwise divided within by self-loathing; even those who out of envy hated the sisters swallowed their vanity for a moment and, from local towns to world capitals, devised schemes for launching the first Slovene rocket into orbit. After the successful launch, the self-avowed celebrated their short-lived victory, while the conspirators laid low and waited for the final triumph. The national lyric elevated Fair Vida to the status of literary heroine, so she wasn’t going down helter-skelter in a shipwreck caused by a sudden gust of wind—which did not mean, however, that she might not go under eventually. In its expectation of salvation and satisfaction, the altar of the motherland demanded the surrogate heart of a hero of lesser fame. But the heart was resurrected and flew into the sky before the eyes of its executioners. Instead of the movement choking to death on its fear, black widows wave red banderoles; the more you trample them down, the higher they fly; the more you try to wipe them out, the more they crawl out of their holes, like a pestilence that feeds on death. Instead of shutting their mouths in despair, they shout like holy fools; instead of destroying themselves, they destroy their persecutors; instead of standing still, they leap like grasshoppers from flower to flower and pollinate the pistils where silkworms spin cocoons. This whole instinct for self-preservation, which they so generously sow in the furrows of the desert, is nothing but the other side of the death instinct, and all this life-affirming creativity can only lead to future misfortune.
Translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau.
Boris Pintar, a Slovene writer, is the author of a novel Don’t Kill Anyone, I Love You
Rawley Grau, originally from Baltimore, moved in 2001 to Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he works as a translator and English language editor.
