GLR July-August 2025

the less likely one will be able to enjoy it. Such a paradox is at the heart of The Farce of Sodom, or The Quintessence of De bauchery . Having sampled the pleasures of male anal inter course, King Bolloximian (bollocks are testicles) outlaws heterosexual relations, making sodomy the law of the land. Soon, no masculine rear is safe from assault, and only the gift of “forty striplings” from the neighboring King of Gomorrah saves the sexually insatiable Bolloximian from violating the posterior of his fifteen-year-old son and heir, Prince Prickett. An apocalyptic denouement occurs as women are driven mad by unsated desire and men die in the agonies of venereal dis ease. But even as fire and brimstone rain down on the kingdom, as in the biblical tale of the cities of the plain, Bolloximian re fuses to return to the original sexual order. Instead, in the play’s final lines, he vows to “reign and bugger still,” retreating with his favorite catamite “to some darker cavern” where “on thy buggered ass I will expire.” “To die” was then a euphemism for achieving orgasm. Bolloximian is in effect hoping to spend the remainder of his life buggering his favorite. His vow is both a parody of Cav alier love lyrics in which the male speaker, going off to war,

claims that he wants nothing more than to die in his female beloved’s arms, and the ultimate reaffirmation of the pleas ures of anal intercourse: he will sacrifice everything for one last butt-fuck. Rochester’s play is possibly the most emphatic valorization of the male anus in history, and a subtle antici pation of the crisis in American gay culture in the 1980s and ’90s. Gay Liberation fostered a militant resistance to unin spired, socially imposed heterosexuality. Even as the AIDS epidemic spread as a result of this newfound sexual libera tion, many gay men resisted the closing of bathhouses and other sites of licentiousness as part of the majority’s attempt to mandate heterosexual conformity. Rochester may have been a martyr for sin in a way that Parsons did not anticipate: a martyr’s crown is the reward in another realm for resisting spirit-deadening conformity in this one. As 19th-century critic William Hazlitt shrewdly commented, Rochester’s “extrava gant heedless levity has a sort of passionate enthusiasm in it; his contempt for everything that others respect, almost amounts to sublimity.” Larry Carver’s Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure is the fifth full-length monograph on Rochester to appear in the past

fifty years, and the first to treat The Farce of Sodom as a pivotal work in Rochester’s develop ment as a poet and satirist rather than as a piece of cheap pornog raphy. Carver insists that all of Rochester’s works be read bio graphically, as the search for identity by a conservatively raised individual forced to nego tiate the excesses of the Restora tion court. A materialist who believed that physical pleasure was the proper end of nature, Rochester satirized both conser vative moralists who preached the sinful nature of desire and libertines who overindulged the sensuous appetites. Carver’s book demonstrates how, in an at tempt “to establish an ethical he donism based on nature,” Rochester frankly confronted his own excesses, making for a po etry in which the satirist is him self satirized. In a letter written to his wife at the end of his life, Rochester observed sadly that the great crisis of human existence is that there is “so great a dispro portion ’twixt our desires and what it [Nature] has ordained to content them.” Mick Jagger was not the first person to com plain about trying, trying, and trying, but never getting any satisfaction.

Underwear Nostalgia

“Boxer shorts are no good for football,” coach said, which meant tighty-whities for all of us in 1995, colored briefs rare, boxer-briefs not yet common. I was already a waistband watcher in those days of teenage straight boys lifting shirts to wipe sweaty faces. I came to know them by their brands: Robbie Hanes, Jockey Jim, Frank who always wore the FTLs with the blue and yellow stripes. How predictable it would be to rhapsodize on “the basket,” pushed up and out. I appreciated it of course, as you would any playful zoo animal rearing up, pressing its nose against the bars, but it was the utilitarian fly fronts, so readily associated with the easy masculinity of fit dads reclining across two pages in the Filene’s catalog, that “did things to me.” It’s what our teammates wore; it’s what our fathers wore, underwear of pubescent boners, of over-the-hill balls beginning to sag. In my dreams we’re all gathered in one high school locker room, men of various ages, same style, different brands. Ryan scratches his pouch. Darius adjusts himself without shame. Archie does a handstand while Dan and Mike hold his legs. This is the same casual intimacy we had yesterday.

No one has a hard-on, but it wouldn’t matter if he did.

M ICHAEL M C K EOWN B ONDHUS

TheG & LR

32