Cock-Sucker: The Artist's Tale

WARNING: This story includes extreme images intended not to shock, but as satire on the Brit-Art scene.

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Art for Art's Sake? Sex for Sex's Sake!

How did it ever get to this? It wasn't meant to be this way. There was so much more I was going to do, so much more I was going to achieve. Shooting stars they never stop. Even when they reach the top. But for me, it's ended up all so different. How did I get to this? I started at Art College. Dates? Totally fuzzy. What do you expect after the lives I've led. Anyway, it must have been some time around seeing that old queen Caravaggio in the Derek Jarman movie that I decided I wanted into art.

I studied at St Martin's College. That's where I, and a guy called Byron Hamilton, hook up almost immediately. We share a room. Sketch each other. At first mutually. Casual profiles, cartoon-caricatures, free-handing art with a Bic biro, etching it onto the back of a beer-mat while enduring the tedious chat-lines of boring Beatnik art-poseurs.

Progressing to full studies of each other for our own amusement, or for assessment. Often nude. I guess, even then, I knew he was better than me. So it gets he does the painting, while my talent is to be more passive. I assume poses, furnish curves, light, contours, shapes for him to replicate in oils. Were we lovers too? No, not exactly. But we do a bit of this, try a bit of that. Experimenting as awareness dictates, body piercing, nail varnish, distressed hair, part of what we imagine to be the bohemian libertine milieu. Embracing the bravado of virtually any kind of weirdness just to show how liberated we are.

We explore physical limits. We take what they used to call 'carnal knowledge' of each other. And naturally that involves some jittery below-the-belt lip-action, mutual tongue-tingling body-games. Tasting spurting fluids. It's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? It was expected. And we fit together good. We function well.

And Edgar Stromberg? When I first meet him, when we first meet, it's a student-art event, and he's present as guest of honour, to pass critical judgement on our student exhibition. I fix my gaze on his back, willing him to turn. He, unaware of the compulsion - conscious only that he has turned, turns towards me. He expresses interest. I'm flattered. He's a star, a legend. Who would not be flattered?

And I feel that same sense of bewilderment the Pevensie children must feel on their first step through the wardrobe into Narnia. With me as 'Edmund', the precocious betrayer, more sensitive, vulnerable, and self-centred than the others. He knows how to charm. Practiced in the art of deception. You know it's deliberate. A routine. While at the same time, when it's aimed at you, you're fascinated. At his invitation we share a cab back to his apartment. I'm both fascinated and repelled, so I scarcely notice him reaching across to run his hand over the front of my pants, tracing the shape of my cock gently.

"I'd like to get to you better" he said softly. "You" and his fingers circling my cock, gauging its size, squeezing "and you."

As soon as we're inside he unfastens the belt on his trousers and shoves them down. His shirt covering his thighs leaving just a hint of pubence and the dark shape of his testicles hung beneath the material. Then he shucks his left leg free of the pants, raising his right leg to remove the discarded garments, and his semi-erect cock lolls into view. Large, circumcised.

He smiles, turns his back on me and walks through into the next room, his arse wobbling beneath the flapping shirt. Leaving me the option of following, or not. I follow meekly to find him sat on the edge of the bed, masturbating lazily. Surely, if I want to make a good impression - which I do, if I want to guarantee acquiring the benefits of his art-patronage - which I do, it would be tantamount to crime to leave so promising a hard-on orally unmolested, to allow those imminent spurts to go undigested? I have no real choice in the matter.

My next move is obvious. What the hell? Squatting, with it quivering an inch from my nose, I glance hesitantly upwards and catch his eyes, calmly observing me as I go in to swallow its not-inconsiderable length gulp by gulp. His hands fold in around my head, holding me there as it nudges insistently at the back of my throat. I make a strangulated gurgling noise, and begin sucking, it goes on for some considerably slurpy time, until I'm rewarded by the trembling warm spurt of semen-gush.

It always seems so discourteous to spit out so intimately personal - and so copious a gift. So I never do. As I eventually draw back from its glistening droop, he's smiling his approval. After that first night, within a week I've moved in with him. I live with Edgar for five weeks, naively believing that he's working hard to promote my art, in reciprocation for the more intimate attentions I eagerly bestow upon him.

I meet former flatmate Byron in Starbucks to talk over the new situation. He has doubts. There's work to do, surely that must come first?

"Why work when you can party? My life will be my art."

He says he'll dedicate a piece to me in his first one-man show. He'll title it... um, let me think, yeah, 'Miss Slutty Spunkbucket Regrets'. I laugh. It's a joke, yeah...?

I watch him drink coffee, thinking 'I've come in that mouth, now - the parting of the ways, I'm going places, and he's lost the plot.'

With Edgar, soon, it gets... strange. He's... supposedly, drawn to my art. That's the point of contact, isn't it? I'd assumed it was my technique, my expression, my brushwork, he admires. The economy of line. But no. Fool that I am. It's the subject-matter. It's voluptuous contours of nude flesh. My body as displayed in Byron's paintings. The long curve of my cock, the smooth curves of my bum that he's sketched. That realisation only comes later. Gradually.

Meanwhile, wasn't it David Hockney who said there are three Gay men who control every aspect of New York art... or was it ten Gay men? - I forget, anyway, these guys control the art-world, and he knows each one of them. Edgar is sexually undemanding, taking the initiative infrequently - as little as four or five times a week, on which occasion I'm compliantly naked for him, crouched as he takes me from behind. But I'm anxious to please, I need to prove myself, and strive even when he doesn't respond or can't even sustain an erection. What's the point of offering yourself up as a sex-toy if you're being insufficiently toyed with? I'm beginning to feel neglected, underused, under-appreciated, more than a little bored and hence insecure in my new role.

Eventually he takes me to a party somewhere in a big house out Hampstead way, and it's here I meet Max Beardsley. At first there are no words. We have eye-conversation, nothing more, although - of course, I know and worship at the shrine of his work. When we do talk he's openly contemptuous about Edgar, he's also handsome and so arrogant it hurts. Edgar is a time-waster, he says, I'd do better to ditch him, hook up with the real power in the London art-world - and only he, Max, can furnish such introductions. While he's saying it his hand is in my groin, caressing and squeezing firmly and without hesitation. I'm both flattered and a little scared of him.

When he indicates I should follow him I have no choice but to obey, upstairs the bedrooms are all in use with heaving bodies strewn untidily everywhere, so he leads me into the toilet, locks the door, eases me unresistingly to my knees, and unbuckles his pants. He's intimidatingly hung and he fucks my face roughly without consideration for my comfort. There's no other way to describe it. I've never been treated so peremptorily or so brutally, and he rams it clear into my throat when the fierce hail of jism begins, so I near choke. Such an oral-tutorial is an incredible turn-on, one that fiercely perks me up below the belt until I'm so fired-raw my groin is painfully tense, and when he smiles approval, and concedes 'not bad', like a fool I blush up through the silver shimmer of gag-induced tears and thank him.

As we re-emerge Edgar's expression assumes a kind of injured dignity.

"These creative types, they're so temperamental!" he hisses at me.

But soon Edgar's engaged elsewhere. I don't think he really cares. And this night I go home with Max. Acting out roles. Inside his curtained rooms it's like there's no air, I'm breathless with heart-stopping anticipation. I know what I'm here to do. And I do it. Inviting him 'you be De Sade, and I'll be innocence personified.' Moments later we're both naked and I'm spread-eagled on the bed, penetrated first here, then there, passing the next hours in mutually intense neural stimulation. Until my body is an abstract expressionist canvas spattered with black candle-wax, glistening with perfumed oils, and streaked with white trails of glistening spunk. His, and mine.

Edgar Stromberg's forgotten. He's Art History. I'm with Max now. And I stay naked at his beck and call for the best part of the next months. Besotted with him. He's charismatic, full of dark depressions and huge roaring joys, lean looks and fierce silences, with half-closed eyes giving a perpetually sleepy expression, a confirmed somnambulist air, a highly effective mask for one of the keenest minds in art.

I watch him work in the studio. Waiting for my moment to be his muse. Then he lies on his back as I eagerly move in to fellate him, sucking for what seems like hours, so close I'm welded to the soft down of his body-hair, to the warm rise and fall of his belly-undulations, trying it in every way possible to please him. Then I lie on my back so he can face-fuck me so hard, sitting on my chest, his balls beating up against my upturned chin, impaling so deep I'm close to crying out in fear and panic of suffocation, but too scared to protest, too in awe of him to risk his disapproval. Making throaty drunken noises, until I'm sobbing and whimpering as he cums deep in my throat. 'Unnatural practices' they used to call this, I love that term. Yes, it's so right. The more he uses and humiliates me the more I love him. A dreamy-eyed stupefied forlorn fucked-up kind of love.

He values physical sensation. The physical above the spiritual. Above all else. And physicality is so important in creating art. There must be touch. Pigment beneath broken nails. I watch him pushing paint around. While he creates, the world is on fire. Cities in flame all around us. There must be terrible and repellent images in his head, hard-wired to the moon. And when they come out, he blasts them across canvas. Creativity, creation, re-creation, procreation, it's all the same. His most extreme karmic pharmaceutical reactions taking improvisational flight. He has paintings called "Dreaming & Silent Breeze". "Fuck The World" and "White Noise".

Then there's the installations. Sculptural shapes suspended in formaldehyde in large fluid-filled vitrine tanks. Cobalt and crimson illuminations that wash the walls like some high-tech lamination. Glints of hard aquarium-green light, all detail lost until they become... Shapes? Hallucinations? until there's only a twisting forest submerged in the unnatural luminance of alien atmospheres. "Feed Your Head" and "Preternatural Hermaphrodites". A dissolving morass of tentacles and copper weed. Fuzzy fronds filtering purple light, spreading in widening ripples of colour. And something else. Something important. Something significant. Something rearing against the density of air. And it's like I'm reading screeds of hallucinatory prose, seeing snapshots of the unconscious, the dreams and nightmares of this impossible place. I feel my inadequacy by comparison.

Gradually - as he promised, he introduces me to the Gay Art underworld, and I grow to think of myself as a part of this delightfully debauched society. A demimonde of beautifully narcissistic male models with long black curls of hair, outrageously glamorous transvestites, wealthy and witty patrons of the galleries, cultured and sophisticated, and the bohemian artists themselves. I can scarcely believe my luck, these are artists I'd queue to see exhibit at the Serpentine, the Tate Modern or the Cube. The stars of conceptual BritArt installations that outrage the tabloids and win awards.

I'm hanging out with the gimpface critics I've seen discussing the new Monet show or the latest Tracey Emin on the late-night TV-review, or read their pontificating in the arts publications. Or rather, Max is hanging out with them, and I'm here because I'm a totally-owned subsidiary of Max. Normally you'd pay big buck to even see them lecture. What could I do to deserve their attention? except - of course, the delicious naughtiness I'm more than qualified to bestow. And I imagine myself to be desired by them all. Enlivened by the flame of wine, and other pleasing substances. I tease and tantalise them, encourage and manipulate them. I'm young - aren't I? good-looking, highly sexed. Later, of course, I realise that it was I who was being used, passed from lover to lover, used and abandoned by them in turn, but in my inflated egoist self-image I'm using them to scale the social ladder. Like, how screwed up is that?

I live on pills that keep me awake for days on end, razoring my senses to the edge. He takes tablets too, a heart-murmur or some-such, an occasional breath-shortage which might curtail a work session, or a peak moment of erotic exertion. But it doesn't slow him. We spend time at decadent parties, with me competing for the attention of men - or being competed for. Always - in my mind, the centre of attention, in a pantheon of depravity. I never wear underwear so as not to impede a new lover's fingers. We are the degenerate spawn of the night, the depraved of the fin de siécle, the universal brotherhood of forbidden vice, the walkers in sodomite perversity, the favourites of the dark gods lost in this eternally sunless realm. The host sets out feathers, bottles of aromatics, slippery and tasty lotions, some twine, assorted and beautifully coloured thongs, and big plumed masks.

Often I'll take two or three men to bedrooms in succession, I prefer to give blow-jobs, but if they want anal then that's fine too, I accept this tainted love with equal enthusiasm. I remember, as the parties disintegrate into lazy disreputable sprawls of stoned bodies I don't even bother to dress, but parade naked, kissing and carousing casually as the mood takes me. I've always loved sex, and always had an exhibitionist tendency so it comes naturally for me to flirt. I'm well-hung, and appear that way even when flaccid, which is important, so I've never been less than peacock-proud to be seen nude (and admired) in company.

When I wake the following morning with a stranger, and we talk about incidents from the night before, they ask me "does Max object?"

No, he doesn't. The famous artist says "We change, we grow, otherwise it means the end of sex for me... and what we do becomes nothing more than tandem masturbation."

To me, we are figures in a Beardsley print. Sometimes when I return to Max's after a particularly debauched night I might feel used or momentarily ashamed - but the feeling seldom lasts. Once sober again, Max insists, and I agree, we are growing through artistic evolutions, and its most important aesthetic is to remain 'open to suggestions.' To influences. And there are compensations. We eat in Knightsbridge restaurants or queer Soho bistro's where they greet him by name. One weekend Max takes me to the Venice Biennale, another time to Florence.

But those days have left visible scars. You want to see? You're here to survey the wreckage, after all. But there are invisible ones too. Those you can't see. A painting doesn't gain weight, or lose weight. It doesn't change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. It remains unchanged. But the way we see it - day to week, month to year, alters it anyway. It is the same. We see it differently. Sex stops you thinking of things like that. Each act of sex takes you through time, twenty minutes closer to death. When you are in sex it renders you incapable of thinking of anything other than sex. It's a pleasing numbness that suffuses and nullifies your intellect. An anaesthetic for a deeper ache. An easy distraction. So how does it all start to come apart?

Max Beardsley and I go up to Manchester to arrange a gallery show, and we stay over with the gallery owner, Roland Blasco. At first he seems very intense, dauntingly so, rather austere, authoritarian, brooking no argument that contradicts his point of view. After checking out the gallery-space in the trendy St Paul's area, wiring DVD installations, setting up slide-projectors and lighting, we return to Blasco's house up on the edge of the high-ground towards Saddlesworth moor. It's a remote converted farmhouse overlooking the sprawling expanse of the city, so isolated anything could go on here and no-one'd ever know - other than those participating.

And, as we get inside, it becomes apparent it's not so much converted as in the process of conversion, stepladders and bags of plaster, coils of wiring and plastic conduits in the musty upstairs rooms. A soft-furnished studio, bedroom and lounge below - "we're restoring the original stone hearth and fireplace, putting a range in through there." Once inside his studio we settle down for further drinks.

Roland's boyfriend - Ian 'Brat', attentively assuming the waiter's role. He at first seems sullen and unfriendly, about eighteen, his head shaved to a mere shading, he wears an Aleister Crowley T-shirt with the eyes torn carefully out to reveal his rather prominent nipples. He wears tight black trouser with, I can't help but notice, a bulging crotch. He hardly speaks throughout the evening, with Max and Roland Blasco naturally dominating the conversation, but once darkness falls Max produced joints, the atmosphere begins to loosen up, and I find myself flirting a little.

Soon we're all, I guess, a little high. Blaso pulls out a recent canvas, a violent jangle of discordant colours surrounding a naked figure in a tormented position, his rounded sensual buttocks painstakingly painted. Instantly recognisable as 'Brat'. There are more, all nude, all of Brat. My attention drawn to the fact that, in some of the pictures where the genitalia is visible, he's uncircumcised, large - and totally lacking pubic hair.

At length, while Brat is serving him from a tray, Roland says "it's time for your party-piece, dear. Bring the specials."

Ian colours visibly and hesitates, but Blasco clips him sharply on the bottom. "Come on, don't be awkward" and the youth leaves the room.

Blasco leans over to me and shockingly lays his hand firmly on my crotch, squeezing insistently. I glance across at Max who just smiles his approval. "Watch this" smirks Blasco. "You'll enjoy it very much."

When he reappears he's carrying a thick portfolio of prepatory sketches. I sit there as we thumb through them. And they're stunningly erotic. Brat nude, legs splayed and sexually erect, Brat with hands tied behind his back, gagged, legs splayed, Brat masturbating, Brat ejaculating, Brat's anus and testicles, Brat's face with an anonymous penis touching his nose, Brat tongue-kissing a nude boy in the mouth. Although undeniably well-executed they're all figurative line-drawing stuff, strictly representational life-studies lacking Max's quirky individualism, essentially sexed-up variations of the kind of life-class work I'd done at St Martins.

Roland Blasco leers as he sits beside me. "See this one?" - Brat's lips forced apart by another penis, his eyes closed, Brat and another boy lying nude feeding on each other's erections.

"They're beautiful" I admit huskily.

"Perhaps you'd like to pose some time."