When Ellen walked back toward me, I saw that she'd donned a black leather crotch harness, to which she'd affixed a thick, ten-inch, flesh-colored dildo. She stood before me, positioning the end of the strap-on just an inch or two from my lips.
"Now, suck my cock," Ellen commanded coldly.
***********
Sometime during the early, hopeful days of the Obama Administration, I had a lobbying contract with a do-gooder environmental organization from California (Citizens for a Clean Future, or some bullshit) to raise awareness about the critical need to conserve fresh water. As usual in Washington, the do-gooders were a public relations facade for a less do-gooder group, a private corporation that stood to make millions by getting Congress to subsidize the sale of water recycling systems to major cities around the country. But that's a different story.
The do-gooders spent a lot of money setting up an exhibit in one of the Senate office buildings to demonstrate how it was possible to turn raw sewage into perfectly safe drinking water. In order to demonstrate the importance of changing public attitudes, they included in their exhibit a drinking fountain in the shape of a toilet. And they invited passers-by to drink from it.
Now, the do-gooders' commode-shaped device was made of sparkling white porcelain. It had never been sullied by the slightest trace of shit or piss, nor had it ever been anywhere near anyone's exposed ass or genitals. The water it provided came from the very same pipes as the water everywhere else on Capitol Hill. The only difference between the toilet drinking fountain and any other drinking fountain was its shape.
But no one could do it.
No-one -- not one exalted Member of Congress, not one lowly staff member, not one vulturous journalist, not one curious visitor -- managed to put their lips to the fountain and drink. There was a lot of gagging and heaving, and one prominent Senator actually vomited into the fountain, causing a brief shut-down of the exhibit. As the person organizing the whole affair, I couldn't beg off from participating in the spectacle, and I was surprised by how much effort it took to choke down my revulsion enough to take a token drink.
Such is the power of symbolism in the human imagination.
***********
Kneeling before my wife, I felt the same feelings of intense revulsion for the artificial penis, which she now commanded me to take into my mouth.
Since becoming Ellen's submissive (now her slave), I'd spent many contented hours with my tongue probing deep inside her anus, or licking grime from the soles of her feet. On a couple of occasions, when she'd felt that improving my attitude or behavior required a more severe lesson in degradation, she'd even chained me to the toilet by my collar until I'd licked the entire bathroom floor clean of the yellow stains remaining from the puddles of her piss she'd left there to dry. I'd even made peace with her demand that I always eat my own ejaculate, although I can't say that I ever learned to enjoy the practice.
But to suck on a perfectly sanitary piece of silicon -- one which just happened to be in the shape of the male sex organ -- seemed beyond my capabilities. I forced myself to use the same logic that had enabled me to drink from the fountain at the recycled water exhibition.
It doesn't mean anything. It's not real.
I reminded myself that the object had been manufactured at a factory somewhere in China. I imagined the assembly line, where workers wearing blue Mao suits impassively stuffed thousands of dildos into paperboard boxes with plastic windows, giving no thought at all to what the items actually represented. I thought of the myriad uses that the plastic in the dildo was used for, only one of which was to fill penis-shaped molds.
But I still couldn't do it. My mouth stubbornly maintained its distance from the tip of the strap-on, and my lips remained tightly pursed together.
Ellen, meanwhile, was being distinctly unhelpful. "What's the matter, faggot?" she taunted me. "What are you waiting for? You've always dreamed of sucking on a cock, haven't you? You know that deep inside you're a queer. Come on, faggot, do it." And on, and on, and on.
As usual, my wife's choice of words was no accident.
***********
Long before, I'd confessed to Ellen that what we today call homophobic slurs had been the go-to insults of my classmates in middle school, used so often that they had long since (at least to the uncloseted among us) lost any meaning. At the time, I would have been much more offended by "nerd" or "weirdo" than by "faggot" or "queer" since the former were aimed at my specific vulnerabilities, while the latter were used by everyone against everyone on every conceivable occasion.
In the intervening years, of course, America underwent a cultural revolution. "Gay bashing" (by which I mean vicious, physical attacks by gangs of teenagers on gay couples making out in city parks, not ill-considered posts by clueless users of social media) fell out of fashion. Legalizing gay marriage morphed from a radical idea of the leftwing fringe into a reactionary pillar of the cis-white supremacist patriarchy, making only a brief stop in the center as common-sense public policy. And anyone who at all valued their career eventually learned to tread very, very carefully around any discussion of LGBTQIA+ (the most inclusive acronym as of this writing) topics.
A couple of years previously, I Googled my best friend from middle school (his family had moved to Texas the summer before ninth grade), and I learned that he had become a pretty successful and very openly gay actor in LA. My subsequent attempts to get back in touch with him were ignored, and I suspected that our frequent use of the word "faggot" while we were growing up was a major reason. He, of course, had used the term as frequently as any of us, but that didn't stop me from lying awake at night wracked with guilt over the self-loathing he must have felt during the years that we were friends.
In addition, I'd confessed to Ellen that my relationship to the word was complicated by a few tepid, tentative, and ultimately unsuccessful experiments in bisexuality back in the sixth grade. These were nothing remotely romantic or even explicitly sexual. More of an "I'll touch yours, if you touch mine" type of thing. I hastened to reassure her (or perhaps myself) that no bodily fluids of any kind had ever been exchanged. Once I lost interest in these experiments, I became convinced of my rock-solid heterosexual orientation, and I grew as disdainful of "queers" (as we labeled gay men before they coopted the word for themselves) as everyone else.
The result of all this history was that Ellen calling me a "faggot" while commanding me to suck on a realistic (albeit oversized) plastic penis was doubly potent, a fact which she no doubt understood. On the one hand, it filled me with a burning shame over my casual (but no doubt extremely hurtful) use of the slur in childhood, which at the time had seemed perfectly natural but which now felt abhorrent. On the other, it tugged at a thread of doubt about my own sexuality, one which I'd kept carefully concealed for decades.
