I read The Story of O, as well as Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and was shocked by how literature and extreme sexuality could be so powerful and effective. These stories were advertisements for the future. And I was, to say the least, blown away by the possibility of what my future might hold if I could get over my nerves and find a dungeon. Victorian pornography also featured dungeons, whipping and other forms of what are now called BDSM. I remember reading about cunnilingus and fellatio for the first time I was appalled and amazed that anyone would want to put their lips against somebody else’s genitalia. And how else but through reading and conversation would you have any idea of what sexuality might involve? Since the 1950s, the sexual field had been opening up. But for a young inexperienced kid like myself, some of these books – particularly the Victorian pornographic ones, like The Pearl – were a revelation. It must seem odd now to think that if you wanted a wank you’d read a book. The Tropic of Cancer and Miller’s great trilogy Sexus, Plexus and Nexus provided both the great thrill of writing with interludes of pornography which you could masturbate cheerfully to.Īt school these were called “one hand reads” some of the pages got sticky and yellow. The most overtly pornographic novel at that time, and for me the most enjoyable writer - and one I still love to this day - is Henry Miller. My father had many of the sexually experimental titles like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, and even Ulysses. My first enjoyable experience of pornography was in books. The magazines we could get our hands on, which were passed around, exposed female breasts but the vaginas were air-brushed and flat. At parties, concerts and even at home when times got slow.Īs for porn, it was difficult in the mid-60s to see an image of a naked woman outside of a classic or Impressionist painting. It was cheap and we would take it all the time. The most exciting drug in those days, and the one we all enjoyed the most, was LSD. Man, those Blues were depressing when you came down from them. It wasn’t until I started taking speed, in the form of little blue pills called Blues, that I saw both how effective and enjoyable drugs could be and what a deleterious effect they could have on your mental health. We would attempt to get high on this terrible brown shit – it was commonly referred to as ‘shit’ – and go and see the The Faces or The Pink Floyd at Crystal Palace Bowl. We would score at college gigs, or from hippie friends in pubs like Henekey’s on Bromley High Street or the famous Three Tuns, where there were gigs in the back room. People would say the country was awash with drugs, but I can’t tell you how hard it was to obtain a bit of crumbly old brown hash. The literature I was reading might be described as hard Russian, British, French classics from my dad’s library (If I didn’t educate myself, no one else was going to.) But the drugs and pornography available to us were, by contemporary standards, soft. I knew at least that writing had to be my ticket into the funkier world that existed a hour away, ‘up London’. My working day would begin in earnest at 4:30 when I arrived home from school, sat at the typewriter my father had given me, put a on record or turned on the radio, and resumed work on the novel I was writing about someone like me slowly drowning in misery at school. I was lucky enough in my mid-teens to discover writing and literature, pornography and drugs, at around the same time.
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