Silas in the Library

Part of the 'Butt Monkey' series of stories by Robert Furlong

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"The Sambia people are a tribe of mountain-dwelling people whose society is well-known by cultural anthropologists for its ritualised acts of male homosexuality. Among their more widely-recounted practices are semen ingestion and oral-anal contact, especially between males of inter-generational age."

I scanned down the rest of the page and then through the remainder of the chapter. Nothing. There was plenty of information about ceremonial fellatio between the males of the tribe, and there was even a picture of a battered earthenware bowl showing, fairly unequivocally around its edge, men engaging in anal intercourse together, but there wasn't a single additional comment, note or reference on the fact that these tribes-people liked licking each other's butts.

I slammed the book closed and put it back on the shelf. I was getting nowhere here.

It had become clear that, while the internet was teeming with links on rimming, filtering out the snippets of potentially useful information from the myriad of spurious and pornographic websites was nigh on impossible. So I had decided to retrace the footsteps I'd left decades ago as a schoolboy and headed to the town library to research the subject using the simple sword of the card index and the trusty shield of the Dewey Decimal numbering system.

And yet the abundance of books on the shelves had proven to be equally frustrating. References to male-on-male rimming, although often tacitly and ambiguously worded, could be found in almost every section, especially in anthropological studies which had just been browsing. Even dear sweet Enid Blyton's back catalogue could throw up the occasional oblique reference to the practice ("From his vantage point, Julian could see Uncle Quentin and Mr Forbes skulking from the pantry, looking shamefaced and with their eyes darting around furtively. The stains around his uncle's mouth were, he observed, patently not chocolate").

However, I wasn't interested in finding out that the practice existed – I was well aware that it did. Nor even that it was enjoyed between men from all walks of life and of all sexual persuasions. I had, after all, discovered without very much room for doubt that such an interest existed in myself, and I was just about as average a guy as you could hope to find.

What I wanted to know was what could entice heterosexual men to do such a thing to one another. It was on that point – an extremely pertinent point from my perspective – that I was drawing a definitive blank.

Seeing my frustration, the librarian, a tall dark-haired man who I'd noticed watching me for a while, walked over and asked if he could help.

"I'm doing a bit of research," I said vaguely, loath to reveal the topic which I could imagine a man in his position being appalled by. Smiling, I added, "I... er... don't seem to be getting very far."

I noticed his name on his badge. Silas P Langley. Chief Librarian.

"The card index is a bit out of date," he said, glancing at the list of numerical shelf locations I was working my way through. "All the books we've bought recently – from about 2002, actually – are only recorded on the computer system."

His voice was a little camp and that, coupled with the way he was fiddling with his tie for some reason, gave me the impression he was probably gay. Perhaps the topic of my research might not be so surprising to him. He might well have nuzzled his face between the occasional pair of buttocks himself.

"Each book has been scanned, so you can search them for specific words or phrases," he went on helpfully. "That might speed things up a bit."

"I assumed I had to be a member to be able to log on...?"

"Not at all." He added, with a rather pointed smirk, "I operate a policy of open access."

I'm sure you do, I thought.

"Well, that's very helpful. Thank you," I said.

"What is it that you're researching?" he asked. "Perhaps I can point you in the right direction to... you know... get you started off...?"

The sly look on his face made me wonder whether I was being hit on.

"It's... er... for my son," I lied. I didn't like to drag Jake into this but I felt the guy needed to know that I had managed to father offspring, albeit a few years ago, and so was likely to be straight. In spite of my fledgling interest in certain anatomical areas of my own gender, I was far from ready to be chatted up by a gay guy.

"It's for his... sociology project," I went on, fully aware that sociology was the last subject Jake would ever study. "It's about sexual tastes and... er... why people are drawn towards certain... well... practices."

"Which practices in particular?" he asked with a half-smirk and one eyebrow raised. I wondered how long he'd spent in front of a mirror perfecting such an expressive look.

"Homosexual practices," I answered, hoping to knock the wind out of his insinuatory sails with my directness.

He nodded, his smirk broadening a little and his eyebrow arching a little higher. He didn't seem at all thrown by my admission; if anything he seemed encouraged by it.

I wondered if perhaps this is how gay men flirt together.

"That's still quite a wide net to cast," he said, softening his expression into a smile. "Can you be more specific?"

"I think my son was asked to look into certain... er... taboo practices. Acts which were, at the time, culturally unacceptable... and... er... what motivates men to do that kind of stuff."

He nodded, still smiling. "I think the history section would make a good hunting ground." I followed him over to the right area and he pulled out a large volume from one of the shelves.

"Why don't you have a look through this," he suggested, "and I'll see what else the computer can drum up."

"I don't want to take up your time," I said, after thanking him. "You probably have a lot of other things to do."

"It's no problem," he said with a rather affected flick of his eyebrows and handed me the book. "In any case, we're pretty quiet today."

As he walked back towards his desk in the reception area, I noticed that his backside was nicely muscular – no doubt the result of an exercise regime far stricter than I could ever keep to – and I momentarily considered where flirting back with him might lead.

The book he'd given me had the snappy title, "British Sexual Offences during the Late Victorian Era: 1872-1901". It was primarily a collection of court proceedings from around the country, most of which concerned young women who had been caught soliciting. There was, however, a whole section summarising "Offences between Men" and it was to this that I turned after I had taken the book over to one of the reading desks, complete in time-honoured tradition with its own green-shaded lamp.

Leafing through the cases, it seemed that most of them were for what were referred to 'unnatural crimes' between apparently consenting men who had had the misfortune to have been witnessed indulging in surreptitious sexual encounters. While the details of their ill-fated trysts were usually unforthcoming, the tone of the accounts being condemning rather than descriptive, I was interested to discover whether any of these unfortunates had been caught rimming, and, if they had, what on earth the incredulous judiciary of the day would have made of men committing such an act together.

The accused in these pages came from professions as diverse as blacksmiths, soldiers, cigar-makers and coffee-shop proprietors, as well as solicitors and men of the cloth. Their brief unions seemed to have been formed with complete disregard of the strict class codes of the time: a school master had been caught with a coachman; a village rector with a butcher's apprentice. Often the men were punished for their 'indecent and abominable conduct' together and it was time and again noted in the court summaries that the facts of their cases were 'unfit for publication'.

But not always.

Occasionally the surviving records were rather more lurid and sometimes there were just enough tantalising details for me to recognise that occasionally – very occasionally – the men had been witnessed indulging in acts substantially more intimate than plain old buggery.

I found a case from the Central Criminal Court of two men who had committed what was described as an 'infamous crime'. One of the men was a labourer called William Beevers, the other a soldier serving in the Scots Fusilier Guards. The shameful deed had taken place in the overcrowded terraced house in which Beevers was a lodger, part of a long-since demolished and redeveloped area of London near Westminster. It had been witnessed by 'a very respectably dressed woman named Mary-Ann Piper' who was a fellow lodger in the house.

Mrs Piper had been asked by the landlady to sit up late to make sure that another lodger, a man with the wonderfully Dickensian name of Theophilus Craze, did not abscond from the house without paying his rent. She had positioned herself on the landing between the first and second floors but had not seen Craze, him having retired to his room and presumably gone to bed. Instead, late at night, she had heard Beevers let himself into the house accompanied by the guardsman, and had crept to the top of the stairs to see them down below in the hallway behaving towards each other in manner which she described as 'very indecent'. They had then gone to the back kitchen and had closed the door behind them while the intrepid Mrs Piper had tiptoed downstairs to listen in on their 'lewd conversation'.

Eager to assure herself of what was taking place between the men, she had peered through the keyhole and had seen the labourer committing an 'abominable act' on the soldier. She had then crept back upstairs to the landlady's chambers and had told her what was happening, only to return to the scene of the crime in time to hear the tinkle of a few coins being given to the soldier before he departed the house.

When questioned in court about what exactly she had seen, Mrs Piper had replied simply that it was 'the thing which a woman will not do to a man'. This piqued my interest. Clearly, she could not be referring to sodomy because surely a woman cannot, rather than will not, do that to a man, no matter how adept and versatile she is. I wondered whether Mrs Piper could have been of such a delicate disposition that she might regard oral sex as beyond the faculties of a woman. Or, for that matter, masturbation.

I read on, intrigued.

Mrs Piper had been asked whether the soldier had found the act which was being performed on him agreeable. She had replied that she could not tell because he had been turned away from her and she could only see that 'his britches were hitched down at the rear'. Beevers, however – who she could see very clearly – had been in a state of 'some agitation'.

She had then been asked to more specific about which parts of the labourer she could see through the keyhole. "His face", she had replied, "in all its sinfulness... doing that which any godly person would find deplorable. And his lower part in his hand... so appallingly inflamed."

At that point the judge, Chief Justice Levene, had declared that the matter should be thrown out of court and ordered that neither man's record should be tarnished by these allegations. There was, he decreed, "no evidence of sexual impropriety which warrants retribution by this court, but merely an inappropriate choice of setting on the part of Mr Beevers to express the unfathomable curiosities which nature saw fit to endow him with". Case dismissed.

I read the passage twice to make sure I had fully understood its meaning. The judge was basically saying that if the labourer had been seen penetrating the soldier, he'd have banged them both up. But he was not prepared to accept that rimming – which was, I assumed, what the meddlesome Mrs Piper had been alluding to – was a homosexual act. What he'd said suggested he regarded it as a natural biological impulse between men; an innate urge which was so distasteful it could not even be openly discussed, but which it would not, nevertheless, be appropriate to punish.

Chief Justice Levene had been, I suspected, a man very much after my own heart.

It didn't answer my question as to why men were drawn to do such things to one another, but it was fascinating to discover that at least one judge was sufficiently enamoured with the practice to be able to rule, even within the deeply repressive atmosphere of a Victorian court, that it did not warrant punishment.

I flicked through the rest of the section and found only one case which was in any way comparable. This involved a cab driver and a gentleman who had been caught together in a 'shocking position' in the alleyway behind a public house. Two female witnesses had attested to the 'vileness' of the gentleman's conduct as he "knelt low to indulge himself behind the driver who had assisted him by lowering his attire". And yet, as with the case of the labourer and the soldier, the case had ended with neither man being punished.

I glanced back up to the top of the page. Chief Justice Levene had, once again, been the presiding judge.

Silas the Chief Librarian interrupted me with a printout of a few further books which matched my enquiry.

"Has that one proven useful?" he asked.

I shook my head. "It gives examples but it doesn't explain why men are compelled to do this kind of stuff. In a way, the danger of incurring so severe a punishment makes it even more curious as to why some men were still willing to take the risk."

He smiled. "I suppose, the more intense the sense of gratification, the greater the gamble someone will take to achieve it."

"At the risk of death? Capital punishment was still routinely meted out for some of these crimes at this time."

"Homosexual sex has, it would seem, an appeal which exceeds such concerns."

I smiled. "It must be pretty good, huh?"

He grinned at me. "I've heard it has its own... singular charms."

"The question I'm trying to find an answer to," I explained, trying to steer things back to the task in hand, "is whether there's a natural desire in all men to experience physical intimacy with one another. That's the crux of it."

"You mean, that's the question your son is trying to find an answer to," the librarian corrected me with a smirk.

"That's right," I agreed, feeling my cheeks colour a little. My ears have a tendency to turn scarlet at such times. "My son... yes, of course."

The librarian looked down his list and drew a cross next to the name of one of the books. "You could try this one. The author comes across a bit pompous at times, but he tries to answer questions about why people are attracted to certain things."

"Have you read it yourself?"

He shook his head. "I've only flicked through it. It's quite a popular book for guys who are... well... struggling with certain issues."

He threw me a knowing look and I realised he thought that's what I was. I had to admit that I was indeed struggling with certain issues, but not the ones he was probably thinking of.

Nevertheless, I went over and found a copy of the book he'd suggested and took it back to the lamp-lit reading desk to leaf through it.

The author, Thomas Franklin, was an American doctor and a long list of letters denoting his various qualifications followed his name on the cover of the book. I wondered if that was a good sign.

I glanced down the contents page and went straight to the section entitled, "Why are some men gay?"

Disregarding the first half of the chapter in which he spouted his views about the genetic and cultural bases of homosexuality, I was drawn to the subheading, "Gay men and anal sex."

Maybe there'd be something useful here.

First off, though, he seemed to be of the view that all gay men practised anal sex. I was sure that wasn't true: there'd been an item about it on 'Embarrassing Bodies' on Channel Four. The immaculately coiffed presenter – who'd seemed like the kind of guy who would know about such things – had said that some gay men don't enjoy anal sex in either role and instead prefer an eroticism centred on each other's penises. He'd had a name for it but I couldn't remember what it was.

Nevertheless, I read what Thomas Franklin MD FCFP MRCS MB BCh BAO thought about why gay men supposedly find bottoms so deeply erogenous.

"The fetishization of the male rear is the gay variant of the heterosexual male's fascination with feminine curvaceousness. The voluptuous shape of a full pair of buttocks, especially in younger men, is directly comparable to the rounded swell of a woman's bosom. Indeed, the potent sexual appeal of the breast-like shape, inherently found in males of all cultures, is intensified in gay men by the inclusion of the anus between the buttocks – a hole which lends itself with relative ease to penile penetration."

That's all very well and good, I thought, and it certainly helps to explain how my interest in women's breasts has been so effortlessly widened to include a fascination with other men's backsides, but it doesn't even begin to enlighten me as to why I'm attracted to putting my face down there.

I read on.

"American gay culture seeks to beautify the male rear and glossy magazines targeted at young gay men depict models flaunting their buttocks, and sometimes their anuses, in overtly provocative poses. Such a focus on the male behind as a breast-substitute and thus an object of sexual titillation has had the effect of promoting many gay men to experiment with the practice of analingus."

Analingus? The 'anal' part must obviously refer to the anus and 'lingus' part – if my schoolboy Latin served me correctly – to the tongue. I figured the guy must mean rimming.

"In this, the heterosexual male's natural desire to stimulate the breasts of a woman with his mouth and tongue is transferred in the gay male to equivalent practices using his partner's backside. Some men prefer generalised oral contact with the whole buttock region in a direct mirroring of the heterosexual norm, while others prefer to lick the anus itself in a more specialised and uniquely-homosexual variant."

Uniquely-homosexual my arse, I thought, and then smirked at my unintended pun.

But seriously, this guy had no idea what he was talking about. He clearly had no concept about what was so exciting about the taste and smell of a man down there. About what made it so arousing, even to a straight guy like me who had never previously thought my own gender in a sexual way.

I scanned down the rest of the section to see if he mentioned anything relevant to men like me, but he just kept labouring the point about the backside being the gay version of a woman's breasts.

I wasn't buying it. If I wanted to work my mouth over a pair of breasts, surely I'd direct all my efforts into a finding a woman who'd let me. I would hardly go sniffing around another bloke's arse to see if it was workable as a substitute.

No. This guy was way off the mark.

I looked up and saw the Silas the Chief Librarian peering over the desk lamp at me.

"I can see from your face that one wasn't any good," he said.

"Not hugely, no." I passed him his list back. "Are there any others on here which might be better?"

He ignored the list and handed me a book he'd found using the computer search.

"Try this one," he suggested. "This book was cited about half a dozen times using the keywords I put in."

"Which keywords?"

"Oh, you know," he said, grinning rather salaciously. "Homoeroticism... clandestine pleasures... secretive male encounters... things like that. Just the kind of keywords to get the computer's juices flowing..."