Chris Girman
What to Do with a Cocksucker Tattoo
I don’t know why I did it.
It was years ago, 2004 Austin, where “keeping it weird” meant more than California techies wearing shorts to work. I’d graduated law school without a job, and I was still fastening suspenders to work at my summer (now full-time) bartending gig at TGI Fridays. I hadn’t travelled overseas in three years. I’d met few gay men in a city supposedly filled with them, and I wondered one day after the gym what it might be like if men who had sex with men marked themselves in some way. My friend Jo cautioned about the infamous Nazi-era pink triangle, but I insisted that every man attracted to other men should have a “cocksucker” tattoo stamped across their foreheads. Fuck ambiguity. The irony, of course, is that I wasn’t sucking any cock. I was simply tired of the is-he-isn’t-he? stares at the gym or risking my job with a free-drink extravaganza to any hot guy who’d shown even the slightest interest in me.
But I didn’t exactly decide.
I just sort of walked into a tattoo parlor on Austin’s east side one day after work, where a server friend had told me his older brother apprenticed. I asked for Mark by name, he was cute, and two hours later I was branded a “cocksucker” along my lower back in a compressed urban font of kinks and frizz inked green along the top and edged in black: a “cholo” font, as Mark had explained, which I’d later learn originated from the Mexican-American art movement in the 1970s. I was attracted to the style because I loved all things Latin America, starting when I first backpacked across the region in college. Despite everything being a blur that day in the tattoo shop, I do remember Mark’s light brown goatee and the way his heavy hands pressed gently over my skin, how he checked in with me—“you okay, bro?”—about a dozen times. He’d say it while his hand softly slid up from my lower back to my shoulders, squeezing me along the way. The irony, dramatic this time, was that I was getting what I wanted (affection) while getting what I thought I wanted (a tattoo).
But I'd grown up since then, and it was time to get the damn thing removed. I was tired of telling a made-up story of the band I was in during college—The Cocksuckers—who screamed into microphones and banged guitars in our anti-establishment crusade. I'd hoped for my tattoo to sound cool and innocuous to others, the naivety of youth responsible for my antiestablishment ethos. Besides that, my concocted story confirmed an ambiguous sexuality, which benefitted me around the presumed homophobic MAGA brood oddly lurking around my Planet Fitness locker room. But enough was enough: I'd had my initial consultation with an assistant, and today I'd get the removal started with the doctor.
Two barrel chairs roomy enough for sister German Shepards flanked each side of an even whiter leather chaise lounge hovering on one-inch walnut blocks over a white and grey marble floor. I was older, supposedly more refined, and if I were ever to get my tattoo removed—my sins absolved—I’d prefer to do it at a day spa between sips of champagne instead of smoke-filled parlors off the alley by rough trade bearded men and bad-ass twiggy girls inked in roses and revolvers.
Before long a woman appeared, not the svelte and perfectly coiffed Bridgit I’d pictured in the waiting room, but a curlicue of a woman resembling the delicate font on her Bridgit’s Day Spa sign, but more like a clunky Arial Rounded & Bold.
“Hi, I’m Bridget” she said, her curled hair falling haphazardly, and the jagged pulp and enamel of her teeth resembling tiny amulets in her mouth. She led me down a skinny hallway, where I noticed the square of her red shoes as she lumbered past walls that appeared to close in behind her. She looked like a woman skilled at peeling radishes—exactly the woman I needed to get the job done!
Her face barely reacted while I told her about the location and wording of my tattoo, so I began with some explanation I thought she deserved. She interrupted me mid-sentence. She’d removed everything from butterflies and biblical verses to hearts inscribed with names, she told me. Just last week she expunged the words H-A-T-E and K-I-L-L from a pastor’s knuckles. He was a very kind man who’d lived a very hard life, she said, and we’d all be better off not to judge who we are and how we got there. That insight pivoted my mind from the pastor to my own predicament as I removed my shirt and leaned forward on the table.
Branding myself a cocksucker might have been a homophobic choice. I’d attached my identity to sexual acts (cocksucking) or sexual-attraction terminology (msm: men who sleep with men) so I could renounce any “gay” affinity for RuPaul, showtunes, or Cher. Better cocksucker than “fag” or “queer,” I reasoned. With this tattoo, I felt more connection to my buff and heterosexual tattoo artist than Jack McFarland from Will & Grace. Sure, I was white and privileged, but I also worked hard to establish my heteronormative masculinity precisely so I wouldn’t be marked as gay. But that left me wandering the Sinai desert in search of my people. I didn’t think much about the others: the queens, butches, and/or transgender youth who’d been beaten—killed, even—precisely because they bore markers of dissident gender and/or sexual presentation. Teena Brandon. Muhlaysia Booker. Leslie Feinberg. Marsha P. Johnson. Matthew Shepard. And so many more. Instead, I assumed the tattoo would make my attraction to men more obvious, initiating a safe space of gay dates, and first kisses. I had no conception of the LGBTQ community at that time, so attaching myself to imagined fellatio seemed reasonable and risk free.
My tattoo was also aspirational. Like many men who are attracted to men, I’d spent much of the 1990s terrified of AIDS, then much of the new century trying to figure out exactly what I feared now. Getting fucked was still out of the question, and the anal-insertive role scared me too, as condoms might break or in a fit of frenzied desire I might remove them entirely. Cocksucking didn’t appeal to me either, and I feared disappointing the straight guys anyway, who’d come for the Great Gay Blowjob, but got me instead.
I listened to Bridgit and her assistant as they inspected my back. Yet soon my mind returned to 15 years earlier and why I might have stood on the precipice of that tattoo parlor and continued inside. I needed people to know that things were not as rosy as they seemed despite my appearance and intellectual capacity: I was hurting and needed that hurt acknowledged. In some ways, too, I was confirming the low opinion I held of myself, a self-assessment groomed in the heterosexist world where I could never fit in no matter how hard I tried or fantasized about unavailable straight men.
But a lot had happened in 15 years, and perhaps that’s what I’d been wanting to share with Bridgit. I didn’t know back then that I could articulate my sadness in writing, or that a therapist might understand. That perhaps I’d been doing it all along in my journals. I didn’t know yet that I’d eventually accept the body God had given me instead of exhausting myself at the gym so I might seem more attractive to those very men who might harm me. I didn’t realize that sadness passes, reappears, and passes again. I hadn’t trusted enough to love, nor been hurt enough to know what healing felt like. I sought, instead, to bypass all that with a tattoo, too young to understand that before I could proclaim anything, I needed to experience it first.
Perhaps that’s why I did it.
Behind me I heard a whirl like a dentist’s drill. Then it stopped and voices emerged from near the open door. “I’ll be right back,” said Bridget, clasping my shoulder in a way that reminded me of Mark, my tattoo artist, all those years ago.
Still bent over on the table, I realized this tattoo had made me no more available than I ever was before. But it captured something I’d found on my travels abroad as an exchange student, backpacker, and tourist. Perhaps I wanted the world to know I wasn’t as boring as I might seem. The young man contemplating intellectual property laws in the library basement could also hitch a ride with strangers or hike his way through the Andes. Perhaps, too, I was seeking a way to force myself to accept my same-sex attractions; my back couldn’t turn its back on itself. Maybe that tattoo was my way of replicating the confidence I’d felt in Latin America, so walking into that tattoo parlor was like walking up to the counter and buying a bus ticket to the Bolivian unknown. And if I couldn’t trust myself entirely or if I sometimes made bad choices, at least I’d learned to rely on the kindness of others. We possess imperfect information, both at home and abroad. Yet I’m still here and I’m still safe. People have helped me, and I’ve returned the favor. Perhaps, as well, my tattoo verified my affinity for the dark and queer and poor masses, some confirmation that I, too, will always lean and leak, a rupture that may never fully heal: I could “pass,” but I chose not to. I’d marked myself with a positive self-identity in a withholding world. My pain had been memorialized, my personhood affirmed.
The assistant shaved her nails with a pumice stone beside me.
The negotiation of masculinity between two men is a constant battle. Although the confidence I possess today far exceeds that of 15 years ago, I must have intuited back then how a masculine man intentionally disrupting his own masculinity by branding himself a cocksucker threatened the gender hierarchy upon which this world was arranged, the same effect produced by a bearded man in heels. Yet a man on his knees ought to do so in private, most agree, and that I would question such belief at my young age showed both a quiet confidence and a youthful naivety. But my life had been a decent one, I realized, turning back to the door and waiting for Bridgit to return. People should get a chance to see for themselves without my own censure. Expunging that tattoo would erase an essential part of what I’d gone through and what I’d become.
Bridget was not surprised by my decision. She offered to round out the “c” and the “u,” so it read as “cooksocker” instead. She placed her iPad on the table next to me and removed her glasses. I reminded myself that she was just as tilted as me. I remembered, too, that she was more invested in pampering than cover-up, and perhaps she’d been pampering me all along. Up close I noticed her flawless marble skin, a contrast to the slapdash jumble that made up the rest of her. I’m not sure what to make of “flaws” anymore other than their relativity and temporality. I’m as flawed as everyone else, tattoo or not. I told her I wasn’t sure what a “cooksocker” was, but I surely wasn’t one of them. She laughed and suggested her favorite treatment instead, a papaya facial scrub. I imagined biting the fruit whole and spitting out the skin. Then I’d suck out the pulp the way it ought to be eaten—moist and dripping—like every good cocksucker knows.
It was years ago, 2004 Austin, where “keeping it weird” meant more than California techies wearing shorts to work. I’d graduated law school without a job, and I was still fastening suspenders to work at my summer (now full-time) bartending gig at TGI Fridays. I hadn’t travelled overseas in three years. I’d met few gay men in a city supposedly filled with them, and I wondered one day after the gym what it might be like if men who had sex with men marked themselves in some way. My friend Jo cautioned about the infamous Nazi-era pink triangle, but I insisted that every man attracted to other men should have a “cocksucker” tattoo stamped across their foreheads. Fuck ambiguity. The irony, of course, is that I wasn’t sucking any cock. I was simply tired of the is-he-isn’t-he? stares at the gym or risking my job with a free-drink extravaganza to any hot guy who’d shown even the slightest interest in me.
But I didn’t exactly decide.
I just sort of walked into a tattoo parlor on Austin’s east side one day after work, where a server friend had told me his older brother apprenticed. I asked for Mark by name, he was cute, and two hours later I was branded a “cocksucker” along my lower back in a compressed urban font of kinks and frizz inked green along the top and edged in black: a “cholo” font, as Mark had explained, which I’d later learn originated from the Mexican-American art movement in the 1970s. I was attracted to the style because I loved all things Latin America, starting when I first backpacked across the region in college. Despite everything being a blur that day in the tattoo shop, I do remember Mark’s light brown goatee and the way his heavy hands pressed gently over my skin, how he checked in with me—“you okay, bro?”—about a dozen times. He’d say it while his hand softly slid up from my lower back to my shoulders, squeezing me along the way. The irony, dramatic this time, was that I was getting what I wanted (affection) while getting what I thought I wanted (a tattoo).
But I'd grown up since then, and it was time to get the damn thing removed. I was tired of telling a made-up story of the band I was in during college—The Cocksuckers—who screamed into microphones and banged guitars in our anti-establishment crusade. I'd hoped for my tattoo to sound cool and innocuous to others, the naivety of youth responsible for my antiestablishment ethos. Besides that, my concocted story confirmed an ambiguous sexuality, which benefitted me around the presumed homophobic MAGA brood oddly lurking around my Planet Fitness locker room. But enough was enough: I'd had my initial consultation with an assistant, and today I'd get the removal started with the doctor.
Two barrel chairs roomy enough for sister German Shepards flanked each side of an even whiter leather chaise lounge hovering on one-inch walnut blocks over a white and grey marble floor. I was older, supposedly more refined, and if I were ever to get my tattoo removed—my sins absolved—I’d prefer to do it at a day spa between sips of champagne instead of smoke-filled parlors off the alley by rough trade bearded men and bad-ass twiggy girls inked in roses and revolvers.
Before long a woman appeared, not the svelte and perfectly coiffed Bridgit I’d pictured in the waiting room, but a curlicue of a woman resembling the delicate font on her Bridgit’s Day Spa sign, but more like a clunky Arial Rounded & Bold.
“Hi, I’m Bridget” she said, her curled hair falling haphazardly, and the jagged pulp and enamel of her teeth resembling tiny amulets in her mouth. She led me down a skinny hallway, where I noticed the square of her red shoes as she lumbered past walls that appeared to close in behind her. She looked like a woman skilled at peeling radishes—exactly the woman I needed to get the job done!
Her face barely reacted while I told her about the location and wording of my tattoo, so I began with some explanation I thought she deserved. She interrupted me mid-sentence. She’d removed everything from butterflies and biblical verses to hearts inscribed with names, she told me. Just last week she expunged the words H-A-T-E and K-I-L-L from a pastor’s knuckles. He was a very kind man who’d lived a very hard life, she said, and we’d all be better off not to judge who we are and how we got there. That insight pivoted my mind from the pastor to my own predicament as I removed my shirt and leaned forward on the table.
Branding myself a cocksucker might have been a homophobic choice. I’d attached my identity to sexual acts (cocksucking) or sexual-attraction terminology (msm: men who sleep with men) so I could renounce any “gay” affinity for RuPaul, showtunes, or Cher. Better cocksucker than “fag” or “queer,” I reasoned. With this tattoo, I felt more connection to my buff and heterosexual tattoo artist than Jack McFarland from Will & Grace. Sure, I was white and privileged, but I also worked hard to establish my heteronormative masculinity precisely so I wouldn’t be marked as gay. But that left me wandering the Sinai desert in search of my people. I didn’t think much about the others: the queens, butches, and/or transgender youth who’d been beaten—killed, even—precisely because they bore markers of dissident gender and/or sexual presentation. Teena Brandon. Muhlaysia Booker. Leslie Feinberg. Marsha P. Johnson. Matthew Shepard. And so many more. Instead, I assumed the tattoo would make my attraction to men more obvious, initiating a safe space of gay dates, and first kisses. I had no conception of the LGBTQ community at that time, so attaching myself to imagined fellatio seemed reasonable and risk free.
My tattoo was also aspirational. Like many men who are attracted to men, I’d spent much of the 1990s terrified of AIDS, then much of the new century trying to figure out exactly what I feared now. Getting fucked was still out of the question, and the anal-insertive role scared me too, as condoms might break or in a fit of frenzied desire I might remove them entirely. Cocksucking didn’t appeal to me either, and I feared disappointing the straight guys anyway, who’d come for the Great Gay Blowjob, but got me instead.
I listened to Bridgit and her assistant as they inspected my back. Yet soon my mind returned to 15 years earlier and why I might have stood on the precipice of that tattoo parlor and continued inside. I needed people to know that things were not as rosy as they seemed despite my appearance and intellectual capacity: I was hurting and needed that hurt acknowledged. In some ways, too, I was confirming the low opinion I held of myself, a self-assessment groomed in the heterosexist world where I could never fit in no matter how hard I tried or fantasized about unavailable straight men.
But a lot had happened in 15 years, and perhaps that’s what I’d been wanting to share with Bridgit. I didn’t know back then that I could articulate my sadness in writing, or that a therapist might understand. That perhaps I’d been doing it all along in my journals. I didn’t know yet that I’d eventually accept the body God had given me instead of exhausting myself at the gym so I might seem more attractive to those very men who might harm me. I didn’t realize that sadness passes, reappears, and passes again. I hadn’t trusted enough to love, nor been hurt enough to know what healing felt like. I sought, instead, to bypass all that with a tattoo, too young to understand that before I could proclaim anything, I needed to experience it first.
Perhaps that’s why I did it.
Behind me I heard a whirl like a dentist’s drill. Then it stopped and voices emerged from near the open door. “I’ll be right back,” said Bridget, clasping my shoulder in a way that reminded me of Mark, my tattoo artist, all those years ago.
Still bent over on the table, I realized this tattoo had made me no more available than I ever was before. But it captured something I’d found on my travels abroad as an exchange student, backpacker, and tourist. Perhaps I wanted the world to know I wasn’t as boring as I might seem. The young man contemplating intellectual property laws in the library basement could also hitch a ride with strangers or hike his way through the Andes. Perhaps, too, I was seeking a way to force myself to accept my same-sex attractions; my back couldn’t turn its back on itself. Maybe that tattoo was my way of replicating the confidence I’d felt in Latin America, so walking into that tattoo parlor was like walking up to the counter and buying a bus ticket to the Bolivian unknown. And if I couldn’t trust myself entirely or if I sometimes made bad choices, at least I’d learned to rely on the kindness of others. We possess imperfect information, both at home and abroad. Yet I’m still here and I’m still safe. People have helped me, and I’ve returned the favor. Perhaps, as well, my tattoo verified my affinity for the dark and queer and poor masses, some confirmation that I, too, will always lean and leak, a rupture that may never fully heal: I could “pass,” but I chose not to. I’d marked myself with a positive self-identity in a withholding world. My pain had been memorialized, my personhood affirmed.
The assistant shaved her nails with a pumice stone beside me.
The negotiation of masculinity between two men is a constant battle. Although the confidence I possess today far exceeds that of 15 years ago, I must have intuited back then how a masculine man intentionally disrupting his own masculinity by branding himself a cocksucker threatened the gender hierarchy upon which this world was arranged, the same effect produced by a bearded man in heels. Yet a man on his knees ought to do so in private, most agree, and that I would question such belief at my young age showed both a quiet confidence and a youthful naivety. But my life had been a decent one, I realized, turning back to the door and waiting for Bridgit to return. People should get a chance to see for themselves without my own censure. Expunging that tattoo would erase an essential part of what I’d gone through and what I’d become.
Bridget was not surprised by my decision. She offered to round out the “c” and the “u,” so it read as “cooksocker” instead. She placed her iPad on the table next to me and removed her glasses. I reminded myself that she was just as tilted as me. I remembered, too, that she was more invested in pampering than cover-up, and perhaps she’d been pampering me all along. Up close I noticed her flawless marble skin, a contrast to the slapdash jumble that made up the rest of her. I’m not sure what to make of “flaws” anymore other than their relativity and temporality. I’m as flawed as everyone else, tattoo or not. I told her I wasn’t sure what a “cooksocker” was, but I surely wasn’t one of them. She laughed and suggested her favorite treatment instead, a papaya facial scrub. I imagined biting the fruit whole and spitting out the skin. Then I’d suck out the pulp the way it ought to be eaten—moist and dripping—like every good cocksucker knows.
--
Chris Girman is a licensed Texas immigration attorney and an associate professor of nonfiction writing at Point Park University. His books include The Chili Papers and Mucho Macho: Seduction, Desire, and the Homoerotic Lives of Latin Men. His creative and critical work have appeared in multiple venues, including Salt Hill Journal, Eclectica, Hobart, The CEA Critic, San Antonio Review, and the anthology What I Didn’t Know about Becoming a Teacher. He is raising his teenage nephew and two cats, Lucky and Laney. He escapes to Latin America whenever he can.
Chris Girman is a licensed Texas immigration attorney and an associate professor of nonfiction writing at Point Park University. His books include The Chili Papers and Mucho Macho: Seduction, Desire, and the Homoerotic Lives of Latin Men. His creative and critical work have appeared in multiple venues, including Salt Hill Journal, Eclectica, Hobart, The CEA Critic, San Antonio Review, and the anthology What I Didn’t Know about Becoming a Teacher. He is raising his teenage nephew and two cats, Lucky and Laney. He escapes to Latin America whenever he can.