I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams by Mark Dery

Author:Mark Dery
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2012-04-12T16:11:00+00:00

Instead of puckered flesh, his Borg anus had been enhanced and altered to receive. He had the perfect access conduit.11

The Borg also suggest a mechano-erotic take on the gay "clone" of the '70s, the mustachioed, short-cropped fixture of San Francisco's Castro district, instantly recognizable in Levi's and leather, flaunting his gym-toned muscles. Dank, dark, and hazy with mist, the tangled catwalks of the Borg ship cross the gay bathhouse with the S&M pleasure dungeon. The results are a natural habitat for man-machines whose form-fitting black armor resembles the accoutrements of the bondage fetishist, their flesh punctured by cables in a semiotic echo of the pierced ears and nipples popularized by gay culture.

The Borg make perfect mascots for a strain of gay eros that appropriates the imagery of the machine age. In The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today, Frank Browning mentions a sex club called Big Ironworx. This and other gay "invitation" clubs of the early '9os took place in "open rooms in the warehouses of depleted industrial zones, where in the small hours of the morning, young men lined up with their buddies to probe, caress, and gnaw at one another's flesh in dimly lit tangles of animal abandon .1112 Browning goes on to argue, following Georges Bataille, that sex can never be truly safe in the most profound sense because it is, "for most of us, our primary, residual, atavistic connection to the realm of animal

But if the animal is shorthand for that which is "inhuman" in every human, then we might just as easily argue that anonymous sex, conducted assembly-line style in abandoned industrial sites, unleashes the machine within. In Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, a stunned young man observes, of bathhouse orgiasts, "Their bodies were tools through which they could experience physical sensation."14 Thus, in ravenous sex, when the intellect is overmastered by the cravings of the flesh, the individual in question has in some very real sense been mechanized. Sontag refers in her essay "The Pornographic Imagination" to the Marquis de Sade's vision "of the body as a machine and of the orgy as an inventory of the hopefully infinite possibilities of several machines in collaboration with each other."15

From such a perspective, the subsumption of individual organisms into the Borg collective looks less like an Orwellian nightmare and more like a paradise of desire. It calls to mind the literary critic Leo Bersani's vision of a dizzy free fall into utter abandon, following the dissolution of conventional notions of masculinity. Browning paraphrases Bersani:

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