By the time I get home it’s nearly dark. I’m soaked to the bone, skin blue and shriveled, feet numb and bloody, chilled, shivering, feverish. I wrap one towel around my head, another around my shoulders, a third over my legs and sit in front of the television for hours drinking hot tea and watching cable network evangelism. The first hour features a fiery preacher who explains the sufferings of Jesus for Mankind while threatening me with eternal damnation and a gospel rock singer with lips made for fellatio. Later, before my very eyes a blind woman has her vision restored by the love of Christ and a cripple walks when he accepts the Lord as his personal savior. As the camera pans the audience to show the radiant faces of the true believers I see a pretty woman in the third row that I want to fuck. I am exalted, mesmerized, shivering uncontrollably.

At eleven o’clock I switch off the television and pray on stiff knees in total darkness for an hour and a half. I go to bed exhausted and hopelessly horny.

GREG BOYD

on “Horny,” first published in Best American Erotica in 1993

When I wrote “Horny,” I was living in a wind-blown town on the central coast of California best known for broccoli, beets, and strawberries. There was a real-life character who used to hang out on the sidewalk downtown at the main intersection with a big, crudely constructed wooden cross strapped to his back.

In such a bland place, I suppose he was something of a local celebrity, or at least that’s how I viewed him. No doubt I could’ve simply asked him why he insisted on parading around with the cross. Surely he would have been happy to warn me away from sin and lead me toward repentence and life everlasting. But I suspected I’d get only half the story that way.

What interested me then, and continues to interest me now, are the deeper, unacknowledged motivations that occur when religion and human sexuality intersect. Since religion and sex were originally so closely linked as to be inseparable, it’s little surprise that sacredness, ecstacy, submissiveness and domination, denial, worship, and love are all the shared vocabularies of both. Whether we’re talking about an ancient fertility cult or the modern Christianity, sex underlies our basic psychology, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Rereading the story now, I marvel that being devout can be so sexual, and that being horny can be so indeniably holy as well.

Pinkie

Jennifer D. Munro

He strolled through the bar as if the fire hydrant anchoring his cul-de-sac might throw his hip sockets out of whack, an orthopedic nightmare. He thrust his pelvis toward me as he neared. He tipped his shoulders back, lest he topple forward from the staggering weight of that anvil crammed in his crotch.