E-Mail This Article to a Friend All you zombies BY DAN SAVAGE

I’m a pretty normal guy except for one thing: I’m sexually attracted to zombies. When I was a kid, I loved to watch horror films that featured them. Then as I became a teen, I started to masturbate watching zombie flicks. I fantasize about having sex with zombies while trying not to get bitten, but eventually I end up getting devoured. I also fantasize about a woman gangbanged by a group of zombies who then rip her apart and eat her. Is this a form of necrophilia? Are there any other people out there with the same fetish? When I was about six, my best friend and I discovered the dead body of a drug addict in an abandoned house. Do you think that has something to do with my fetish?

Concentrating on Rotting People Sexually Exciting

Last week I promised my readers a column dedicated to advice for 15-year-old girls from adult women. But I’m afraid that column is going to have to wait. In light of the passing of Pope John Paul II, a column dedicated to female sexual and social empowerment somehow doesn’t seem appropriate. So this morning I went digging through my inbox looking for a letter that better captured the Zeitgeist.

Okay, CORPSE, you’ve got a zombie fetish. That’s too bad. Though you’re probably not alone, your fetish will complicate your love life. While GGG folks will cheerfully indulge their partners’ kinks, there are limits to what a kinky boy can reasonably request. Naughty Catholic schoolgirl? Demanding mistress? Secretary of state? Those are role-playing scenarios that any reasonably accommodating girlfriend would say yes to. But animated corpses, violent gangbangs, gruesome deaths, and cannibalism? The only women willing to go there will be the ones who share your fetish. (And if they’re out there, they’re online somewhere.) The sucks-to-be-you fact of the matter is that very few people find death attractive — look at how hard John Paul II clung to life. If a man who was convinced he was going to heaven was that afraid of death, how do you think the average bar slut will feel?

As to why are you a zombie fetishist, CORPSE, that’s harder to say. Could it be all those movies you watched as a kid? Maybe, maybe not. Lots of kids watch zombie flicks, but only a few become zombie fetishists. Was it the dead body you discovered at age six? Maybe, maybe not. Did the kid you were with grow up to be a zombie fetishist too? Probably not. I’m afraid there are no easy answers, CORPSE, no good explanations why one kid exposed to zombie flicks winds up with a zombie fetish and another kid who watches the same zombie flicks does not. People are weird and sex is a fucking head-trip. What can you do?

Okay, speaking of weird and perverse head-trips: this will come as a shock to many of my readers, but I’m Catholic — in a cultural sense, not in an eat-the-wafer, say-the-rosary, burn-down-the-women’s-health-center sense. I was so Catholic that I attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, a Catholic high school in Chicago for boys thinking about becoming priests. Along with my classmates, I got to meet the pope in 1979 when he dropped by our school during his visit to Chicago. We gave him a soccer ball.

I would be lying if said I wasn’t pleased to see John Paul II’s papacy come to an end. On one of his other visits to the United States, the pope condemned an "[American] culture that seeks to declare entire groups of human beings ... to be outside the boundaries of legal protection." That’s rich coming from the same man who ordered bishops in the United States to oppose civil-rights laws (including hate-crime laws) that protect gays and lesbians, leaving us "outside the boundaries of legal protection." In 2003 a Vatican screed condemned not only gay marriage but also adoptions by gay and lesbian couples. Allowing gays and lesbians to adopt children, the Vatican said, "would actually mean doing violence to these children." (Hmm. Violence against children ... perhaps we should defer to the Catholic Church’s expertise on that subject?) And two days before my boyfriend and I celebrated our 10th anniversary, in February, the pope rose from his deathbed just long enough to describe gay marriage as part of an "ideology of evil." Gee, J.P., you shouldn’t have.

What’s maddening about this pope’s signature gay bashing is this: when the pope — the dead one, the next one, the one after that — says something stupid about homosexuality, straight Americans take it to heart. The Church’s efforts have helped defeat gay-rights bills, led to the omission of gays and lesbians from hate-crime statutes, and helped to pass anti-gay-marriage amendments. But when a pope says something stupid about heterosexuality, straight Americans go deaf. And this pope had plenty to say about heterosexual sex — no contraceptives, no premarital sex, no blowjobs, no jerkin’ off, no divorce, no remarriage, no artificial insemination, no blowjobs, no three-ways, no swinging, no blowjobs, no anal. Did I mention no blowjobs? John Paul II had a longer list of "no’s" for straight people than he did for gay people. But when he tried to meddle in the private lives of straights, the same people who deferred to his delicate sensibilities where my rights were concerned suddenly blew the old asshole off. Gay blowjobs are expendable, it seems; straight ones are sacred.

So forgive me if I can’t get behind the orgy of cheap and easy piety that’s greeted the death of this pope. Watching the talking twats on CNN pay their respects to this "universally beloved man of God" (how many of them have had premarital sex, I wonder?), to say nothing of the suddenly so-reverent assholes on Fox News (Bill O’Reilly didn’t have many nice things to say about the pope when he opposed the invasion of Iraq), is making me want to throw a bottle of lube through a stained-glass window.

Yeah, yeah: I’m sorry the old bastard’s dead, I’m sorry the old bastard suffered. But I’m not so sorry that I won’t stoop to working John Paul II into a column about zombie fetishism. I don’t want to be a total asshole, however, so I’ll close this week’s column with a subject John Paul II mightily approved of: male chastity.

Here is some more info for CHASTE, the young man who wondered about the health consequences of spending a great deal of time locked in a male-chastity device and being denied orgasms by his mistress:

1) The long-term inhibition of erections will lower your testosterone levels and make you calmer (and more subservient). 2) Your penis will shrink, and you will not get hard enough for intercourse. 3) However, your orgasms from oral or manual teasing will be incredible — multiple also.

Chaste Boy

I can’t imagine a lot of men are going to be clamoring for male-chastity devices after reading your letter, CB, but thanks for sharing.

For the record, folks, not every guy under lock and key is, like CHASTE or CB here, going for long stretches without erections and orgasms. Some women lock up their men’s cocks only when they are not in use or for when their men are out of sight. One of these women, writing at the male-chastity Web site www.tpe.com/~altarboy, paints a slightly more enticing picture of male-chastity devices. Locking up her husband’s cock has brought them both "greater sexual pleasure by channeling his sexual energy away from masturbation and to having sex with me," she writes. "A woman will find that after her guy uses one of these he pays more attention, his erections last longer, his orgasms are more intense, and he can have more of them while making love."

Dan Savage can be reached at mail@savagelove.net