Getting It On: A Condom Reader  
edited by Mitch Roberson and Julia Dubner  
(Soho Press, paperback, 1999; 240 pages)  

t's not a good idea to read your lover's mail. Apart from having to put up with a nagging conscience, you're just bound to find out something you don't need or want to know. I learned my lesson ten years ago; while going through my first boyfriend's papers, I came across a letter from his faraway ex-girlfriend. Skimming it, I quickly found what I was looking for (my name, of course), but then, the bomb: "Yes, condoms suck!" she wrote. "Suck" was underlined several times to emphasize her sympathy, and their camaraderie in superior, au naturel sex. They were like cosmopolitan tourists sending each other postcards from hick towns. He had complained about me, and the sex we were having.
     It's been years since I've encountered a condom (or a penis for that matter; my lover of three years is a woman). But I used to sleep with men quite often, and the notion of intercourse without condoms seemed like a utopian, pre-AIDS fantasy. Something out of the Summer of Love, a gay San Francisco bath-house in the '70s or its equally fantastic antithesis, a '50s-style, virgin honeymoon. Yet I always knew that there were other people somewhere still having it. And that my boyfriends had been or would soon be having it with one of those people: someone more permanent, more adventurous, or with a more pristine past. This wasn't paranoia. Most men would come right out and say so often, I thought, as a kind of disclaimer or apologia, implying that their whole performance was much more impressive under less restrictive circumstances. Their past girlfriends usually took on a slightly mystical quality, whether the rubberless sex was an indication of the woman's brave recklessness or honorable marriageability. Sometimes it was a surreal combination of the two: the first man I ever had sex with was on the rebound from a latex-free, sex-in-elevators, on-location-in-Rome affair with a woman whom he'd planned on betrothing. "She was crazy, though," he said nostalgically. "We were like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald."
     For many of us thirty and under, heterosexual sex without a condom is nearly impossible to imagine. Released just for us this Valentine's Day, a poetry and prose anthology predictably titled Getting It On (even the Trojan ads use this pun), edited by Mitch Roberson and Julia Dubner, takes on the whole range of the latex experience. Despite unremarkable poetry, the collection is an elegant homage to a sadly under-fetishized product. There are plenty of universal moments, like this one in Hester Kaplan's "On the Narrow Side":

Park picks up a brand called Rovers, and reads that they offer maximum pleasure with a minimum of effort. When I begin to giggle, he's encouraged and reads awkward English from a box of Silk Kimonos. Soon we're both laughing, red-faced, shushing and bumping each other in a nervous flush of growing embarrassment.

At the other end of the spectrum, T. Coraghessan Boyle provides something for that rare breed, the condom aficionado, with his elegantly creepy "Modern Love," in which a woman obsessed with hygiene and disease wears a full-body condom during sex ("It's Swedish," she explains). Kim Addonizio follows suit with "A Brief History of the Condom," about jacking-off while wearing a rubber ("I have, frankly, never encountered a human body which gave me as much pleasure as the simple, unassuming condom").
     Unsurprisingly, a number of selections in Getting It On focus on male anxiety about wearing rubbers. An excerpt from Martin Amis' novel The Rachel Papers is the most evocative: "After thirty seconds my cock was a baby's pinkie and I was trying to put toothpaste back in the tube." (If you've ever tried to orally reinflate a flagging, balloon-flavored dick, you understand the degree to which men are fragile creatures.) These humiliating moments, while perhaps no fun for Amis' narrator and his brethren, can be weirdly erotic for women. Amis likely had no idea what he was doing for yours truly when he wrote "My rig, in its pink muff, looked unnatural, like an overdressed Scottie dog."
     Back in the day, I sort of liked the wrinkly little gizmos. I liked that alien, rubbery, nonoxynol-9 smell mixed with human come and sweat there was something futuristic about it, as if Close Encounters of the Third Kind had ended in an orgy. I liked finding them in a drawer my lover's or mine under a bunch of socks, and what that implied: that we expected to have sex at some point in the not-too-distant future, and that one of us had actually been thinking about it when we weren't together. I liked pinching the packets, squishing the unseen rubber around in its fluid. I even sometimes liked their suggestion of a kind of conditionality, an ambiguity about commitment that added to the excitement. But I absolutely hated the way condoms implied a criticism of one's past; one boyfriend clearly felt that, unlike previous cunts he'd sampled unsheathed, mine had been in too many places, places he somehow found suspect ("I just assumed you'd slept with gay men," he said finally. "I wish!" I laughed, wondering if his fears of contamination were only about disease). But even more, I hated the unspoken sentiment that we were missing out on the Real Thing.
     The idea that only unfettered, male/female intercourse is "real" sex has been famously unfair to Monica Lewinsky, to the millions of us who fuck people with the same genitalia, and to anyone having the kind of het sex that falls somewhere in between marital commitment and extravagantly heedless French-movie liaisons. In Between isn't good enough somehow. In Between doesn't count. In Between, of course, is a condom.
     That's why I find Getting It On's most intriguing selection to be Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't," in which two technically virginal teenagers are about to give it up on the beach, but are interrupted, first by a sandy prophylactic:

. . . I groped for it, found it, tried to dust it off, tried, as Burt Lancaster never had to, to slip it on without breaking the mood . . . Your thighs opened like wings from my waist as we surfaced panting from a kiss that left you pleading oh Christ yes, a yes grasped sharply as a cry of pain so that for a moment I thought that we were already doing it and that somehow I had missed the instant when I entered you . . . entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life, into a life as I wanted it to be lived yes but O then I realized we were still floundering unconnected in the slick between us and . . . we slammed together still feeling for that perfect fit, still in the Here groping for an Eternity that was only a fine adjustment away, just a millimeter to the left or a fraction of an inch further south . . .

We went at it then, as if it were before, before the world became such a complicated and dangerous place, when man and woman had no fear of communicable diseases, no self-consciousness, when there was no original sin. We fucked as if we were in Paradise.

     Myself, I've always thought that with all the fun things any two naked people can do, why so much fuss over intercourse? But tonight I realized even I hadn't fully escaped the allure, however illusory, of the Real Thing. An old friend just called and happened to mention that he'd never really had it work out with a condom. Here we go again, I thought. "I've never had hetero intercourse without them," I offered testily. "We did!" he insisted. I was stunned, and, I admit, a little concerned about his memory. Was it the drugs? "We did? No way. How irresponsible! What did we use?" "You used a sponge," he explained. Gross, a sponge? I couldn't imagine what other girlfriend he was remembering and then it came back to me. Sort of. The runny, toxic-flavored foam, the sponge's worrisome porousness. Apparently I had tasted Paradise, lived Burt Lancaster's Eternity, experienced that "irrevocable moment" for an entire summer and forgotten. Perhaps the dirty little secret about the Real Thing is that, rubber or no rubber, no one's having it. Either that, or we all are and we just don't know it.