Fridae

What's your favorite porno VCD? Is it the one where the two strapping blond policemen fellate each other for the same amount of hollow-cheeked strokes and then get down to it rather clinically over the hood of a squad car (Watch my hair with that windscreen wiper!)? Or is it the one where the swarthy lorry driver picks up the slim student hitchhiker, grunts a bit and then forces the hapless youth to perform oral sex on him in his dirty cab?

Even if you can manage to get yourself off on the majority of mainstream porn that pits two equally buff and equally dim jock studs against each other in an orgy of equal opportunities sex, I'd wager that most of us like to see something a little more one-sided and a lot more rough. The sheer number of gay porno movies that feature some sort of workman, generally an electrician or plumber clad in dirty jeans, being set upon some bouffy-haired, and presumably housebound, voracious queenie type is staggering, and begs the question: Why don't we want to see TWO obviously gay-identified guys going at it?

The answer is not to be found in a tirade about internalized homophobia but in the age-old gay male obsession with rough trade. It's about sex not political correctness. We all like a bit of rough. It's the clich� that won't go away, and nor should it, fueling as it does a myriad of jerk-off fantasies and the delicious frisson of delight when we hear gasps of jealous wonder from our drinking buddies in the bar. "That security guard let you blow him? NO!"

We like it rough, or at least in our fantasy lives. And lesbians are no exception, if Gina Gershon's performance as an ex-con in Bound is anything to go by. I regularly cross the street so I can saunter slowly past a construction site, and if they're digging up the road with their shirts off, I've been known to fake a call on my mobile phone and stop dead, talking away to an imaginary colleague about deadlines while casting lingering but surreptitious looks at the beefy sweating eye-candy just a few feet away. So it was with abject horror on my trip to Tokyo I discovered it is illegal for a Japanese workmen to remove his shirt in public.

As if the Japanese are known for their delicate sensibilities or something. But it all still works in the Asian context, the movie Bugis Street, for example, or My Beautiful Launderette, where rough trade is the main object of the protagonists' desires, whether actual love is involved or not.

In a community that prides itself on acceptance and fairness, we have a startling propensity to throw our supposed belief system out of the window when it comes to sexual fantasies, and masculine, hard-working, completely straight-identified men have always been the crux of our longings. Of course, in the last two decades or so we have managed to remasculate our gay role models and some elements of the community go out of their way to prove that they're just as rough and tough as your stereotypical straight man. But if we are to be honest with ourselves, we want to be able to believe our rough trade is actually straight, and not some butched-up Mary.

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Popular novelists such as Mel Keegan would have us believe that our obsession with rough trade is one that has a long and colorful history. And so it does. From the gladiators of ancient Rome and the samurai of Japan - men trained to kill being perhaps a historical ultimate in straight-acting rough trade - to sailors, cowboys and mechanics, gay literary and cinematic wish fulfillment more often than not has an element of rough trade at its center, an unequal relationship. Keegan's swashbuckling pirate heroes and the founding of San Francisco as a gay privateer haven in his doublet-ripper Fortunes of War is an excellent and thoroughly entertaining example of this.

But the phenomenon of rough trade isn't limited to popular modern fiction. E.M. Forster's Maurice had his gamekeeper Scudder, and British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s abounds with homosexual plots and subtexts involving shady criminal and underground characters, best typified by the classic movie "Victim" starring Dirk Bogarde as a gay man being blackmailed by some rough trade he has an encounter with. In fact, the whole concept of rough trade seems to hark back to some bygone era when illicit fumblings in alleyways with a drunken sailor was all the action a gay man could generally get, the same thrill of doing something forbidden that gets people off who cottage public toilets, I presume.

As "trade" originally meant sex with someone who didn't identify as gay, our fascination with rough trade might actually be a not-so-sublimated desire to have sex with a straight man. Indeed, although the term "straight-acting" is considered a slur in many gin-drinking circles, there is no denying that for a great many of us the idea of giving a supposedly heterosexual man a decent blowjob (i.e. the kind he could never get from a woman) is a real turn-on.

Furthermore, it is these "straight" images of masculinity that we are all weaned on from the moment we get our first whiff of male pheromones in the school locker room. I'm not saying that gay men can't be masculine or that mechanics or construction workers can't be gay, but a straight man is the ultimate in rough trade. I'm also convinced that the type of masculine straight men we used to fantasize about before we knew we could come out and find gay ones just like them are exactly the types of rough trade we go looking for later in life.

My father is an Irish laborer who used to race pigeons, so almost every Saturday afternoon when I was growing up our back yard would be full of his workmates from the morning shift at the construction site. Ostensibly they would be there to help build the new pigeon loft but weekend after weekend they would just sit around drinking.

My mother would complain, but a yard full of construction workers sporting tattoos, a thick layer of grime and sweat and the occasional beer gut didn't bother me, no sir. The more they drank the more willing they were to pick me and swing me round, to let me sit on their strong shoulders or even trace the outline of their tattoos with a fascinated finger.

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I didn't know then why I liked it, but if you blindfolded me and put ten men in a line up, I'd wager I could, to this day, pick out which man was Christie Neagle by the smell of his musk alone.

I've spent my life scanning construction sites for a glimpse of tattoo on a dirty forearm and I now live with a builder. Rough trade becomes fetish, which in turn becomes your reason to live. Incidentally, quite a few years back I was having a drink with my father in a bar and told him about the profound effect of those Saturday afternoons on my developing sexuality. He cried into his beer.

Another friend who lived in Japan sought a different kind of rough trade - Japanese salarymen who would let him suck them off if they were drunk enough. Now while a salaryman is not exactly your classic workman rough trade, in a society where construction workers must wear a cotton shift when they're on the job, you have to find your masculine stereotypes somewhere, and for my friend there was nothing like the thick cock of a drunk and disheveled Japanese man in a suit. Now that's rough, but it also brings us back to the straight question. Is any straight man therefore rough trade?

Of course, Japanese gay iconography does have the yakuza as a more classic example rough trade, and films featuring ugly men with full upper body tattoos are a hot commodity, but there is no denying that your average straight Joe is more of a conquest and it's these conquests that we tend to brag about in the bar. As I've said, you will certainly have a more avid audience if you're giving a blow-by-blow account of sucking off the straight cable guy than talking about sex with your gay lover. Like, we all do that.

Now you may have noticed that all of the above rough trade scenarios involve oral sex only and that's not a coincidence. Tell me your classic rough trade fantasy scenario isn't the workman/noodle vendor/truck driver unzipping his pants and you just falling to your knees to worship? Why don't we want to top them, or have them top us? Is it that the timeframe of these illicit encounters generally doesn't allow for it, that if you're in a fucking situation you've crossed some sort of boundary and the trick becomes too gay and it's just not rough trade anymore? Or is it about having power over these supposedly straight men? You've got someone's cock in your mouth you're certainly in control. You're also getting them to do something that they shouldn't. That's an undeniable attraction. But the bottom line of why we like rough trade is about manliness, and how we perceive ourselves, even in this day and age when the queers are rougher than the hets.

Talking to guys who go for rough trade, they deny it's internalized homophobia that means gay-identified men don't turn them on or want to buy VCDs of pumped up queens having sex. Their argument goes that if as gay men we are attracted to men, why not go after the "real thing"? We like rough trade because they're maybe not so clean or meticulously groomed, if you're lucky enough to get them home they're not going to judge your bed linen and, perhaps best of all, you can just wipe your mouth and walk away. Rough trade, no commitment, no hassle and no drama. It's the oldest gay tradition there is.