Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Today's Puritans are obsessed with the idea that somewhere out there people are doing disgusting things in their bedrooms. The advance of the modern-day Torquemada, Kenneth Starr, is clear evidence that the fascination with sexual impurity and the impulse to quash it are alive and well in America.

In the lurid imaginations of the religious right, gay men are capable of unbelievably wicked sexual practices. The most infamous of these is so-called practice of "gerbilling," said to be the insertion of a gerbil into the rectum for sexual pleasure. Given that stories about sex with gerbils have been circulating for some time, Miss Poubelle was not surprised to receive another gerbilling story recently in her mail.

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In this version, allegedly from the Los Angeles Times, two men were admitted to a hospital in Salt Lake City after suffering injuries from a gerbilling session gone wrong. One man inserted their pet gerbil "Raggot" into the other's butt, and when the animal wouldn't come out, he "lit a match, thinking the light might attract him." The match ignited a pocket of gas, expelling the flaming gerbil into the man's face, and breaking his nose.

Miss Poubelle was able to find half a dozen versions of this story on the web, varying in the details of the men's names, the name of the rat, the newspaper where this story is said to have appeared, and the specific injuries suffered. These are the unmistakable marks of an urban myth, and in fact, the alt.folklore.urban Web site has an impressive amount of evidence that the whole concept of gerbillling is an invention.

Miss Poubelle finds it disturbing that gerbil stories seem to have begun at about the same time as the AIDS epidemic. She suspects that one of the reasons these stories are so popular is that they paint gay men as sexually depraved and therefore deserving of whatever happens to them.

But the thing that caught Miss Poubelle's eye about this particular version was the fact that story used the term felching to describe the activity that the men were engaged in. Felching is a most peculiar word. Its origin is a complete mystery, and there is a surprising amount of disagreement over what exactly it means.

When Miss Poubelle first heard the word in the early 1980s, it was defined for her as "the practice of sucking cum out of a freshly-fucked asshole." A web search confirms that this continues to be one of the ways that the word is used. But several other variants have emerged, as well. One person claimed that felching was "sucking the semen out of a pussy or ass with a straw," which seems a rather dainty method. And others claimed that felching was the same thing as gerbilling. Based on the variety of definitions given, all Miss Poubelle can conclude is that for many English speakers, felching means something like "a disgusting sexual practice, the details of which I am unsure of."

Given that Ken Starr's did not interrogate the president about his possible felching activities, Miss Poubelle can only conclude that the independent counsel is still unaware of the existence of such practices. Which is a pity. For given the wide disparity in what the word means, Clinton could have amused us all and claimed with some justification that his answer would all depend on how you define the word felch....