Porno's playin' in the background--cheap backdrop for this piece. With the New Year's column cutbacks, I'm paid in Viagra (tm) and the dirty movies that come in the mail, just to stay in the mag. Either that or find a day job--slavewage corporate pigdom. I choose the former. Where else can you surf the smutsites and tell your boss, "I'm working." And it's true! Ahh, the wages of sin.

Eurotrash vampire porno plays on. Count dickhead's getting fellated by a Hungarian blonde wearing pale blue press-ons. I'm immune to this male fantasy bullshit. Girl I know, who's no angel, says I'm too perverted for anyone. She used to give masturbation shows onstage at a beer and pretzel and pussy pisshole for spare change. Fuck you! I've got agents rejecting my novel. I wordwhore for a higher purpose. Anais Nin wrote pornography to fund her novels. She also fucked her father, on a regular basis, as an adult. And her work's revered by feminists. Not to mention, my father's dead, so...

Lately, an old acquaintance who works for a literary arts organization has been acting holier than thou, too. Back in the day, we used to make fun of the gentrified yuppies trying to take over NW 23rd Avenue. Now she's one of them. And I'm on the outside, still throwing stones. The lines are being drawn. Sharply. Behavior, thinking and writing outside the norm is not tolerated by those in the status quo. Unless your radical free expression has been corporatized, sanitized, packaged and sold to the masses... at Starbucks (vanilla skinny decaf no foam fantasy).

Back in the day, she once confessed to me: "I have this fantasy, I can't get outa my head, of this writer I know suspending me by the ankles in some run-down building with a dirt floor, and having his way with me, swinging helplessly upside down."

Female perversions. And how they love to point the finger at me and say, 'Ooh, you're so perverted and look at what you do,' while they run home to drown in ice cream and masturbate to gang rape while surfing for smut. Being out in the open, waving my freak flag high, invites some people to project their demonic persions onto me, because they don't have the guts to own it.

Fear of not being normal--shucking peas on the inside as a private property owner with all the right stuff. Was it really that long ago we were afraid of the opposite: being labeled as straight, on the inside,

part of the system, normal, square, owned by "the man?" Step outa line, the man doesn't come and take you away (except in Seattle); but your friends and peers and neighbors will turn and run away, in fear and loathing and disgust, because you're not trying to grind it out inside the system.

But I digress from female perversions. I have witnessed and heard tales of fantastic excursions by rabid women which my dirty mind could have never conceived by its lonesome. Of course, the reverse is true as well. My point is this: women want and need the stinky kinky, too. But they want you to think you made them do it, or they were only following your lead, or trying to please you, or the male paradigm made them do it. Or, 'you know I'm really uncomfortable with that fantasy, but hey, do you wanna do it again?'

It's high time for women to own their perversions and quit scapegoating proverts (that's a pervert turned pro) like me. In psychological terms, it's called projection: what you cannot accept in yourself, you project onto someone near, then judge it and condemn it. Or, dumping your garbage in someone else's yard.

I've had lovers who: Liked to pretend they were pimped out to me and I'm their john. Come wake me

up, crawl into bed and fuck me after spending the night with another man they picked up in a bar. Insist on anal sex every Sunday afternoon, religiously, after brunch, football and the paper have been consumed. Try and pass me off on their girlfriends. Insist on calling me daddy, over and over, like a mantra. Fuck my best friends, just cause they can. Dress me up as a woman. Play the role of a man. Fantasize about fucking a dog or their own father or me fucking the 14-year-old down the street. Deliberately call me another man's name while orgasming. Pretend I'm gay and fuck me with candles in the ass. And that doesn't include recent lovers still living... in Portland. Then there's the stuff I couldn't bring myself to write about except when hiding behind the veil of fiction. But never mind all that. Rex has become a lightning rod because I'm freely expressing the dark recesses of the mind. Excuse me, but where did you expect to find free thinkers, artists and social amputees... at the mall?

Perversion has a political and artistic place in society. From Marquis de Sade and the Libertine Philosophy, which wormed it's way into the French Revolution, to Anais Nin, Henry Miller and the absinthe-drinking cafe society, to William Burroughs' Junky and Naked Lunch ("wet soapy hand, sudden raw hard-on"). If women want to participate in the political, transcendent and transforming power of sex, then they need to own and carry their perversion with pride and quit projecting it onto men--asking us to do the dirty work. Take out the garbage. What it comes down to is this: do you have the courage to step outside (the norm), naked, stripped of society's conventions and shout your weird to the world?

It's a new millennium. Microwave the Tupperware (tm). Put the gloves on and climb in the ring. There's many a man who's dying to get knocked out by your punch-outa-nowhere perversions. Sex as sly manipulation is dead. Try sex as the secrets are over declaration of independently, uniquely, weirdly sexual I am. And men will turn off their computers and throw away their male dominated porn tomorrow.

Or, forget I said all that. Right now, sex in the missionary position with the lights out and not a word spoken seems like the best possible perversion to me.

PHOTO: BREATHES