Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Sheree Rose, a photographer and dominatrix, instructed her associate Bob Flanagan to maintain a journal of their intercourse life for one 12 months. After they have been completed fucking, she had him attain over, seize a pen, and write down what occurred. She was at all times giving him prompts, in writing and in mattress. With this challenge—which might quickly grow to be a e book, titled Fuck Journal—she mixed the 2.
“Bob was my invention,” Rose stated of the way in which she inspired Flanagan flip his life as a masochist with cystic fibrosis into artwork. Earlier than they met—at a Halloween occasion in 1981, each dressed up useless—Flanagan had been a poet. Rose was a middle-aged divorcée, a housewife-cum-punk; her partner-to-be was 10 years her junior, with two years to stay.
Bob Flanagan.
Photograph Sheree Rose. Courtesy ONE Archives on the College of Southern California Libraries.
Or so he thought. As an alternative, Flanagan lived till 1996, by which period collaborations with Mike Kelley and the 9 Inch Nails—in addition to Visiting Hours (1994), a touring set up that mixed power sickness and sadomasochism—launched him into fame. Each Kelley and NIN found the artist after he nailed his penis to a wood board for an notorious efficiency titled Nailed (1989), and the band subsequently employed him to star in a video that was quickly extensively banned. In it, a mechanical gadget tugs Flanagan’s nipples and genitals as he reclines in a wheelchair, finally pretending to die.
When Flanagan died for actual, on the age of 43, it was the longest recorded life anybody with cystic fibrosis, a genetic dysfunction, had ever lived. And it’s tempting to wonder if his longevity had one thing to do with the way in which he embraced the details of his physique—its limits and its pains—as an alternative of combating or hiding them.
However again to Fuck Journal. It was first printed in 1987 in India by Kalakshetra Press, a writer of spiritual tomes. When a cargo of Flanagan’s books finally made its solution to customs, officers glimpsed the title and, apparently offended, dumped them into the ocean.
So writes Rose in her foreword to a brand new version of the e book. Fuck Journal has been one thing of a cult favourite—extensively storied, laborious to search out, with solely 300 copies having been smuggled out of India. However that stands to alter due to Hanuman Editions, whose reissue, out in Might, boasts a memorable introduction by Johanna Hedva, Flanagan’s fellow disabled artist and author.
Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose.
Courtesy ONE Archives on the College of Southern California Libraries.
The e book is smut, and it’s matter-of-fact. “Like a grocery checklist,” Rose writes. Flanagan’s entries are quick, scrawled out in a state of bleary bliss, starting from the banal (“Valentine’s day fuck despite being drained”) to the transcendent (“I’m wondering if I’m nonetheless alive”). It will get lots kinkier than that.
Remember the fact that all of the whereas the person was dying, his physique changing into undone in much less leisure methods; he was having fun with a bunch of little deaths earlier than the ultimate large one. He was discovering pleasure within the ache, surrendering corporeal management, submitting to Rose. Life was going to show his physique inside out whether or not he appreciated it or not. So he discovered a solution to prefer it—which appears smart.
