SPEAKING OF RIMMING

Feeling a nice, wet tongue inside you, or tasting a wide-open hole... it's yummy. From our first moment of childhood, we're supposed to be squeamish about what's Down There, so using our holes and the holes of others - as a source of pleasure is just plain fraught. Somewhere along the line, though, many of us learn to enjoy it. Rimming's a handy little perversion, easily mastered, no equipment required.

But as much fun as it may be, rimming is - sorry! - a health risk. Even an apparently healthy guy can be a Petri dish of germs. If you're the person being rimmed, you might get anal herpes and there may even be a slight chance of getting syphilis, but the real danger is to the rimmer. Diseases passed through rimming can be really unpleasant, maybe difficult to get rid of, and some can even kill you.

The good news is that rimming seems very unlikely to transmit HIV. Even if there's a bit of blood present, we're talking oral sex, and the HIV risk from performing oral sex is, from what we know, pretty damn low. (There is, though, some evidence that rimming can pass an agent implicated in Kaposi's sarcoma, the cancer-like skin disease seen in many HIV-positive queer men, and a few negative ones, as well.)

The bad news is that all sorts of other nasties make the gut their home. There's giardia, the parasite you can get from impure water on a camping trip, and E.Coli, the bacterium behind Montezuma's Revenge. There's also shigella, salmonella, and a host of other yucky things that can cause digestive upsets. Sometimes, as with acute shigellosis, the symptoms are unmistakable - severe cramps, chills, non-stop runs. But other things, like giardia, can cause milder symptoms.

There's also Hepatitis A, very easily passed from butt to mouth. While it's self- limiting, curing itself after a few weeks, those weeks can be uncomfortable indeed. (And especially dangerous to an already-damaged liver.) Fortunately, there's now effective vaccination against Hepatitis A; you might well want to take advantage of it.

But - and this is the really tricky thing - many intestinal infections can be asymptomatic; a guy can be infected and pass the stuff on to others without knowing it.

So what's a butt-muncher to do? Well, it can't hurt to get to know the guy you're going down on - a little discussion beforehand can be worth a pound of cure. But since he might not know what he's carrying, there's "protected rimming." Take a biggish sheet of non-microwavable plastic wrap, put a glob of lube on the hole in question, lay the wrap over the butt, and munch away. But (no surprise, really) this can take a lot of the fun out of things, particularly for the rimmer. And that wrap can really slide around.

If you're not going to use a barrier, a just-cleaned hole can help matters. A few protozoa are less likely to lodge in the gut and cause disease. Unfortunately, guys, this is one hobby that entails some serious risk-taking. Unless you use that plastic wrap, it just ain't safe. But (let's admit it) it sure is hot.

Simon Sheppard

Now here's your chance to meet the man behind this column. OutUK has an interview with Simon Sheppard or you can take a look at some of his books that are currently available:

       

Looking for something very sexy and just as smart? Man on Man collects the best and hottest gay sex writing by Simon, who is also co-editor of Rough Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power as well as a collection of gay erotica called Hotter Than Hell.

In KINKORAMA : Dispatches from the Front Lines of Perversion he takes readers behind the unmarked doors and black vinyl curtains that lead to the sometimes shocking, often hilarious, relentlessly arousing scenarios of extreme sex. There are also stories of bears in Tales from the Bear Cult: Beat Bear Stories from the Best Magazines.