GLR January-February 2026

ritual enacts what theologian James H. Cone insisted: that God dwells not in the halls of power but in the struggle of the op pressed for self-determination. Here the “divine” is located in the vulnerable, truth-telling space where marginalized people articulate the terms of their own embodiment, transforming their historical position as objects of control into subjects of their own sacred drama. The safe word, then, becomes a profane prayer made sacred by its function. It’s a word of ultimate power, a sovereign utter ance that can halt the constructed universe of the scene instantly. This is a radical, practical theology of grace, not a top-down par don from a distant deity, but an immanent, ever-available power vested in the most vulnerable person in the dynamic. The sub missive, who may outwardly embody powerlessness, holds this ultimate veto. This inverts the traditional Christian paradigm of redemptive suffering. Here suffering (or its simulation) is not a passive, endured path to holiness but an active, consensual, and revocable journey toward ecstasy and self-knowledge. This model of chosen, negotiated power offers a devastating critique of the systems that govern our bodies outside the dun geon. Capitalist heteronormativity depends on naturalized hier archy and the extraction of life without consent. It thrives on our alienation from our own sensual, ecstatic potential. The queer kink scene, by contrast, organizes itself around the prin

ciples of enthusiastic agreement, mutual pleasure, and the sa credness of individual autonomy. The ecstasy sought is not a private high but a communal testament that another world is not only possible, it is already being practiced. Thus the intense, blissful feeling often called “sub space” for the person receiving and “dom space” for the one in charge isn’t just zoning out or escaping reality. It comes from a clear, thoughtful agreement between people, built on trust, care, and honest talk before anything even begins. This deep, uplifting feeling is like what writer Audre Lorde meant by “the erotic”— not just sexual pleasure, but a strong, positive energy that helps us to resist injustice. It’s not about running away from the world but about knowing yourself and the world better. This kind of powerful, freeing experience only happens when we truly re spect each other’s humanity. In a world that often takes away queer and trans people’s control over their own bodies, choos ing to give that control willingly within safe, agreed-upon lim its is a bold way to take it back. This isn’t just role-playing. It’s real freedom, felt in your body. T HE U RGENCYOF S ACRED P RAXIS T HE THEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL BLUEPRINTS forged in the queer dungeon were never meant to stay there. They are, by their very nature, exportable, a portable sovereignty meant to be deployed

Cruising with Boyd McDonald ARTMEMO

zine Straight to Hell: The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts , which began publication in 1973 and featured reader submitted sexual escapades. His books had one-word titles like Meat , Cum , and Wads . He billed it as “a magazine for the lower and upper classes: always coarse, never common.” Entries were edited but not censored. They often had a diaristic quality and were full of odd details that ring true to life and are often missing in more traditional porn. Describing a sex act with a married man in a public restroom, one reader wrote of how the man’s “cock was resting on my ear as I licked his balls.” Reader submissions ran alongside photos from the Athletic Model Guild (McDonald called Mizer “the De Mille of posing strap pictures”) or amateur photos. McDonald was interested in making a historical record, one built on memory and nostalgia for pre-gay-liberation sex. He con vinced a handful of shops that sold porno graphic materials to carry his self-published magazine. By the 1980s, its circulation re portedly had grown to 20,000. Gore Vidal was a fan. So is John Waters. McDonald collected and shared stories for more than twenty years, obsessively firing off mis sives, working with purpose and intensity. Cruising the Movies , originally published

M ICHAEL Q UINN A SKINNY YOUNG MAN stands with his back to you, hands on his cocked hips. He’s wearing only briefs, socks, and sneakers. His sneakers look a little grungy. His underwear is a little baggy in the seat. Your eye goes right to that gap by the leg hole—and your mind is flooded with erotic possibilities. This image comes from the cover of Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV , by Boyd McDonald (1925– 1993). I was hypnotically drawn to this fire engine-red paperback when I saw it for sale at the Metrograph, a movie theater on Man hattan’s Lower East Side. I was there to see Pink Narcissus , James Bidgood’s 1971 technicolor soft porno, for the first time. Despite the stylized beauty of that spectacu larly strange film, I couldn’t stop thinking about this black-and-white picture of a guy in baggy underpants. I ran out of the theater afterward to buy the book. Maybe every gay man is introduced to old Boyd at some point, the way we all seem to become acquainted with Bob Mizer’s muscled men in posing straps in the pages of Physique Pictorial . It’s like a rite of passage. Cruising the Movies wasmy in troduction. But McDonald, I soon learned, is best remembered for his notorious maga

in 1985 by Gay Presses of New York, col lects McDonald’s articles about film, many of them originally written for the maga zine Christopher Street . The book was reis sued in 2015 by Semiotext(e) with an indispensable introduction by filmmaker and author William E. Jones (who would later go on to write the definitive Boyd bi ography, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell ). McDonald was born in South Dakota in 1925, dropped out of high school, attended Harvard after World War II thanks to the G.I. Bill, and worked as a “hack writer” at Time and IBM, drinking himself into oblivion. He stopped drinking when he quit the corporate world, went on welfare, and moved into a single-room-occupancy hotel on the Upper West Side to devote himself to his life’s work: documenting the details of homosexual desire. He spent hours chain-smoking and watching old movies on a black-and-white TV that “cost $80 and has brought me an estimated $80 million worth of ecstasy.” He wrote Cruising the Movies with the aim of creating an encyclopedia of old Hollywood films airing on late-night TV: Westerns, cir cus pictures, gangster movies. “Many ho mosexuals are authorities on movies and my comments in this book, however much they may seem like hasty judgements, are the re

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