Speaking Out (of his mind!)	Speaking Out Archive

In a recent report to me of the doings at City Hall I was informed of the following remark made by one city employee to another: "Don't eat potato chips; it'll make your cum taste bad." Of course, such vulgarity being expressed at taxpayers' expense doesn't really surprise me. Despite the crude manner and inappropriate forum in which this issue was raised, it does touch upon a valid concern for those individuals within the gay community who pride themselves on their efforts to avoid giving offense in all aspects of their behavior and activity. Gay sexual practices being what they are, the matter of seminal flavor seems to fall with the purview of legitimate scientific inquiry. It was of sufficient importance I felt that this question should not be left to the vagaries of gossip and rumor but researched thoroughly in the hope of providing some useful guidance to those gay men interested in esthetics and good taste.

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With this in mind I approached Dr. Blimpkin F. Moinkhauser, my dentist and a prominent semenologist, best known his fascinating monograph "Medicinal Uses of Semen Among the Bourgeoisie in the Weimar Republic." Having known Blimpy personally for many years I can attest to the fact that his interest in semen is perhaps matched only by his interest in food, thus making him an ideal researcher on this particular issue. What follows are excerpts from Dr. Moinkhauser's report:

The first problem we encountered was the actual wording of the proposition itself, that the consumption of potato chips made one's cum taste bad. The term "bad" in this context is scientifically meaningless, being more of a judgment than a description. Does caviar taste "goods or "bad"? The answer will vary depending upon the individual taster's affinity for fish eggs. The same subjective criteria come into play when attempting to evaluate the taste properties of various samples of seminal fluid. Is a savory ejaculate that which has a salty or sweet flavor? This problem is circumvented when we restate the proposition: the consumption of potato chips makes your cum taste salty.

The second problem was in determining who would be the most reliable subjects in making the evaluation. The decision was made at the outset to limit the sample of donors and donees to heterosexual males. It was felt that this would insure both an objectivity and a freshness of response that would be less certain if we included practicing homosexual males. In the interest of securing such an unbiased sample, we arbitrarily limited our subject pool to married Episcopal clergy. Once we had explained the scientific purpose of this research, we were gratified to find no shortage of willing volunteers. Indeed the enthusiasm for the project was such that at the end of the study many of the participants offered their services again in the event of a similar undertaking.

Our final problem was to devise an effective format for researching the hypothesis within the limited time frame Mr. Grubé had given us. After considering a variety of possibilities, we eventually adopted the following method:

We selected ten volunteers from our pool. Each was teamed with a different subject once every two days, until each of them had been coupled with all nine of the other participants twice. In each of the couplings both participants functioned in the dual role of donor and donee. This meant that our sample yielded 180 ejaculations. Each participant evaluated each of the other subjects on two separate occasions. On one of the occasions the donor had refrained from eating any potato chips during the two-day interval. On the other he had consumed at least four ounces of potato chips twice a day throughout this 48 hour period. Naturally, the donee was unaware of which cycle his partner was currently on.

Each of the participants was carefully instructed as to the proper method for providing the donee with the sample. Although the partners were free to use oral and/or manual stimulation during the period of excitation, just prior to the ejaculation, the donor's organ was to be inserted in the front part the donee's mouth so that the bulk of the ejaculate would be deposited directly on the donee's tongue. This procedure was adopted in lieu of the perhaps more popular practice of discharging the semen directly down the donee's throat. Our rationale for choosing this delivery system was that we wanted to afford the donee the maximum opportunity to apprehend and savor fully the flavor properties of the donor's emission. Donor and donee were further requested to assume these roles sequentially rather than simultaneously to prevent mutual orgasm with its concomitant risk of one or the other participant's "forgetting" that the proper phallic placement during ejaculation was the front of the mouth not the back of the throat.

After each donor had provided his sample, the donee made a confidential written evaluation of its taste properties. The donee selected one of the following four descriptions: a) Sweet b) Salty c) Bitter d) None of the above.

Interestingly enough, after tabulating the results and submitting them to an exhaustive statistical analysis, we found no conclusive evidence that potato chip consumption alone is a significant factor in flavoring a person's cum. Nevertheless, we felt this study has pioneered an important area for future investigation, namely the influence of various food types upon the taste properties of semen. Since it is likely that many of Mr. Grubé's readers have conducted their own informal research into this significant new area of scientific inquiry, we would hope that they would send their findings along to The Guide.

--Blimpkin F. Moinkhauser, D.D.S.