Hey, Faggot:

Every day my mail contains at least three questions about “gerbiling.” In the eight years I’ve been writing this column, I have never addressed the gerbil issue, but now, this week and this week only, I am breaking my silence. Clip and save this column, for I will never discuss gerbils again. Ahem. To begin, I would like to make a controversial statement:

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This statement is not controversial for the reasons one would hope: it isn’t controversial in the “Hey! That’s uncalled for!” sense, like, say, a woman at a dinner party announcing she doesn’t have a hedgehog in her vagina. That would be uncalled for, because no one would have suspected her of so concealing a hedgehog. But being a gay man or Richard Gere in America means always having to reassure people that you don’t have a gerbil in your ass–at dinner parties, during family reunions, at funerals, on CNN, at passport control, wherever! For while gay men and, I assume, Richard Gere don’t put gerbils in their asses, not a day goes by that someone–usually a straight 13-year-old boy–doesn’t try to shove one in, figuratively speaking.

When the gerbil drops into the anal cavity, remove the wet paper-towel roll, leaving the string you’ve tied to the gerbil’s tail hanging out of your ass. The gerbil, now trapped inside your anal cavity, thrashes around, desperate for air. It is this thrashing that provides pleasurable sensations. Once the gerbil is dead, remove it by pulling on the string. Repeat.

Now I feel I can write with some authority that no one has ever actually stuffed a gerbil up their butt, perhaps with more authority than I can write that God and angels do not exist. I’ve had conversations with hundreds of outrageously kinky people, gay and straight, who’ve told me the craziest shit: I once chatted for an hour with a guy who married his horse. (He was deeply offended when I asked if his horse was a he horse or a she horse. “I am not a homosexual,” the hetero horse-fucker informed me.) Both in my professional and personal life thousands of guys have freely admitted to doing the most out-there, dangerous, risky, stupid, kinky stuff. But not once in all these years has anyone ever told me that he, or anyone he knows, or anyone anyone he knows knows, has ever put a gerbil in his ass. Like the doomed gerbils themselves, this story has no legs. It is an urban legend.