Crazy in the ass
There was that one time, recounted somewhere in Notes of a Dirty Old Man, that he accidentally fucked a guy. To be honest, he didn't seem that shook up about it. Then again, he admitted this outright, so if he did it again, especially if he did it on purpose this time, there probably would have been some mention of it.
One other thing - that picture of him with that gay writer. Someone put it up here recently. What was that about?
I remember that piece in
Notes... as being mostly sardonic, funny, with some of his wicked observations about matters-sexual. I mean, imagine the Great Lover Bukowski waking up in bed with someone after this wild all-night party"”people stoned and out of their minds"”and he assumes it's a woman without knowing for sure. Then his antics"”Bukowski being Bukowski"”go on from there, like going ahead in his attempt to ream "her" without making sure of the bedmate's gender. I find that hilarious and I think Bukowski meant it to be.
He also makes some funny comments like, well, he once imagined that fucking someone in the ass might be the answer to all of life's problems, or at least to his. That can be a
guy thing and not a gay thing. Like, what's it like?"”and then you imagine it as one more unknown in life to expunge by finally having the experience so you no longer have to obsess about it. After all, how many guys haven't obsessed about wanting to buttfukk their girl friends, and did? In the story it seems like he actually went ahead and did it, or gave the funny impression that he did. It was part of his little exposition on his obsession with anal sex as the solution to the riddle of life. I thought it was a funny story at the time, and the point of it, what made it work, at least to me, was that he
wasn't a homosexual but here he was, through this unlikely set of circumstances, trying to fuck this guy in the ass! That's what made it funny. I
still think it's funny. Maybe he did.
As to his alleged bi-sexuality, I would only go so far to say that Bukowski came in contact with people of all sexual persuasions, including some homosexual writers with odd sexual proclivities and eccentricities, and these people made for good stories, especially because Bukowski felt superior to all of them, or so it seems. He wrote about them as he did with everything else in life and he accepted it all, as it was going on, as fodder for his typer. But that doesn't mean he was getting reamed in the ass or was actively seeking it, though there may have been some minor experimentation (I'm guessing) or curiosity.
I'd go back and reread this piece myself for more of the details but my library was a casualty of my move from CA to AZ years ago. (It's okay because I felt that I'd absorbed most of the beauty and savagery of his writings anyway.) Nevertheless, someone should find this piece and share what he says and look up some of the exact quotes I'm referring to. And of course, he sometimes exaggerated events for humorous effects because he was a poet and not a proctologist.