In my many years as a practising queer man, I have explored many different facets of bedroom behaviour, giving the much hyped and drastically disappointing KamaSutra a freakin’ run for its money. Intimate positions of sexual euphoria – over, under, sideways, around, beyond, below, above, sixty nine, thirty three, upside down, downside up, East, West, North, South, and all of them together – have made me something of a navigational expert when it comes to the rocky roads of bang bang, thank you…oooh do that again! Adventurous and open as I am about most things in life (except for in tattoos and body piercings), I have explored such great heights, plunged such great depths, been penetrated and molested with such gay abandon, that I have now acquired a level of kink that can only be described as vanilla. Of late, I had come to believe myself omnipotent – knowing all forms of potency  - and smug in my knowledge that not much in sex (OK, except for tentacle gang bang maybe) can actually shake me out of my Ma Kamananda avatar, where I spend fruitful hours in studying the sex lives of amoebae (Oh OK, Octopi! No need to rub it in, you know!).

And it was in this state of omniscience (omni – everything; science – doing what you want and producing theories about it), that I recently received a jolt that I had only once experienced before when I had been hoisted on my fours, parted, licked, opened, dilated and finally penetrated with something that felt like a balloon – soft and hard and hot and inflating with every passing thrust, tearing me to pieces, till the tears rolled out, and the ankles winced and toes curled and hands clutched at the arms around me, and then the whole world burst into an orgasm refracted through lenses of pain and mind numbing relief. There is nothing like the first fuck, deep, meaningful, violating and invasive, that can leave such lasting impressions on you. However, way removed from my virginal encounters, I had thought myself safely immunised from the overwhelming emotions of a prostate orgasm. And so it was with a shock – something like a clown fish being attacked by a hyper-erectile shark with a toothy grin – that I discovered, all to myself, one of the most perverse and intimate positions one can ever dream of.

It all started, like all good stories do, once upon an untime, when there was this boi. The boi (keep those accidental paedophilic associations off this post please!), in the tradition of a well developed pattern of meeting, dating, and mating was an anomaly in my singling and mingling agendas that I have set out for myself, for this year. We have a history of mutually reciprocated unrequited love – He had a crush when I was not looking, I had a crush when he had his eyes closed, we both had crushes when we were on a rebound phase and now we are in a non-crushed position where we are together and not hitting on each other. The boi, all lean and not at all mean, a bit shy and bit-chy in that beautiful disarming way that people who don’t really mean it can be, out and ousted and holding a flame so high it looks like the statue of liberty on some nights; except cuter; and definitely not that old or rust eaten. The boi, flirtatious on the web, insinuating on the phone, suggestive on the email, superpoking on facebook, and extremely romantic – like condoms with Disney characters on them – in a good way.

So instead of snogging (well just a little bit of it), and shagging (largely by proxy), and rambunctious frolic (I have lived to use that word in a line!), we are engaging in variations of hetero-non-sexual dates, where we meet in cafes and look soulfully at each other over café frappe, watch movies with shared popcorn tubs, walk on moonlit and neon roads, surreptitiously touching shoulders, and talk late in the nights, about this and that, carefully staying away from professing love or declaiming poetry. And in all this Karan Johar – SRK type canoodling, he called up the other night, and made a demand so perverse, so completely intimate, involving hands and chocolate icecream and public spaces that it shook me to my very core. I could hear him, on the other side of the phone, giving me graphic descriptions about what he wanted to do, and I could imagine it all – his hands, his fingers, his lips, parting, a large tub of chocolate icecream melting between us, and all in a public area with swings and slides and people sitting on both the sides. And my adventurous soul was stirred to its heights, seeing it all in the purple and pink pornographic eye of my mind… I almost shied away from it, thinking it was too intimate, too extreme, too vanilla (ok, chocolate, I got the point), to be indulged in. But then, the instincts kicked right back in and I acquiesced.

Dressed in my winter best – green and brown and blue and white – I traipsed off, on an almost full moon night, towards the place of assignation. He met me there, clad in that beautiful shade of silver that makes you think of oysters and orgasms. We saw each other across the long tree canopied distance and with violins playing in our ears, the winter leaves getting into a frenzy, the world shrinking into a maudlin background, we covered that distance to come close; so close you could not have passed sea anemones through us. Grinning, like sea horses on a sea-poppy trip, we went in and ordered ice cream. It came, glistening, like a coral reef in muddy waters, and sat there, looking innocent, unaware of the heinous obscenity it was going to witness.

‘You mean, in plural?’ I asked, shuddering at the thought of the image, feeling the giant suckers running all over my body, the Octopus nestled between the legs.

‘Yeah dude, its like more the merrier, right?’ he grinned in an obscene display of his inner self. There are some people who are best known only at surfaces.

‘You think giant octopi, their feelers wrapped around your body, their slimy suckers pulling and suctioning at your penis is the greatest experience in the world?’ I queried graphically.

‘Yeah, yeah. Dude, don’t say these things out loud. I get hyper-erectile (my word).’ He gasped for breath and greedily slurped on his kimchi soup.

‘So that’s like gay sex with seafood?’ I said, trying not to look positively repulsed.

‘Hey, octopi are not gay. They are like straight.’

‘How do you know?’ I had a genuine question to ask. I mean how do you know whether an octopus is straight or gay. Or for that matter, male or female?

 
I decided to dig deeper into the secret and largely unknown gender, sex and sexuality life of the umbrellas of the ocean. Octopi are a delicacy in many parts of the world. There are countries that hold as traditional cuisine, octopus on a stick. National Geographic, apparently uses Live Octopus Eating videos to increase its TRP among people who now want to move one level above celebrities eating maggots on Fear Factor. James Bond made a whole lot of fuss about Octopuss. So it was time to delve deeper, into the very depths of what lies beneath the sex life of the Octopus. Does the Octopus have orgasms? Are they luckier than the pig (30 minutes, minion!)? How do we know which is a male Octopus and which is a female Octopus? And then, the million dollar question: Are there gay Octopi?

In conducting this exhaustive research (doing a Wikipedia search) and detailed reading (scrolling through search pages queried for Octopus Sex – No try it, it actually has results, including Tentacle Gangbang; There are new levels of Being Disturbed that I have achieved today) gave a whole lot of information. There are indeed male and female Octopi though the websites are shy about the gender determinacy tests – true feminism at work, I say.  The Octopi must have orgasms. Again, there is a conspiracy of silence around the issue. However centuries of Japanese imagination has been caught by the world of Octopi providing alien-type fetish orgasms to women. The Octopi do not belong to the conservative societies in the kingdom of Oceania. Apparently, the coral reefs are more or less a version of the SFO pride parade, where the Octopi, irrespective of gender and sexuality, mate in bisexual abandon, often in close voyeuristic proximity and orgies reminiscent of Greco-Roman imaginations. What is more, due to lack of contraceptives, mating results in baby booms. The baby boom means a month of starvation for the Octopi, guarding the eggs and then, in a severely Freudian manner, the males die a few months after the sex, the female dies a couple of months after the babies crawl out to take over the world. And if that is not enough, in times of stress, like wise men pulling their hair in reading Plato, the Octopus starts eating itself up, one arm at a time, due to unresolved Oedipuses.

 
In a species so confused and self consuming, it seemed unfair to actually even look for traces of evolved homoeroticism or camp behaviour. A noble species with such a high suicide rate and spinelessness (literally, er… no skeleton!), should be left to fend for itself without causing it further identity crises about gender, sex or sexuality. Hence, I moved from there, trying to determine, which, within the seafood would stand out as the poster boy for gay oceania. The Crab was immediately dispelled to greater depths, considering that it has been immortalised in a contagious affair of that name. The Shrimp, in a world where size does matter, was too small to be considered. The Lobster has been banished into lands where they dance the Quadrille and make mock-turtle soup. The oyster is mother earth, nurturing pearls – those are pearls that were his eyes – and hence naturally heterosexual being of the female persuasion. The Shark, with its toothy grin and the inability to swallow without biting, would never stand a chance at the title. The sea-urchins, as the name suggests, are pre-lapsarian and untainted by the vagaries of hormonal upsurgencies. Everything else, which was too unglamorous even to appear on a menu, is automatically filtered out and left without as much as a fin to recommend them.

 
Thus perturbed and pondering over this absolutely brand new question, I turned to the only person in the world who would have an answer for this. Meet Stalk. Beanstalk. Over long distance phone calls, staring at the almost full moon and trying to push down the repressed thoughts about the nature of a hickie from a Werewolf, I flicked the question to BeanStalk. BeanStalk, in his eternal wisdom, mixing memory with desire (Novermber is the stupidest month! Like, Ever!), without a blink or as much as a missed pulse, suggested, in a moment of psychoanalytic mayhem, that I should stick to watching gay pron. And then, in that one moment of insanity, when his much practiced tongue, slipped upon an idle word that was hitherto only seen on menu cards, was born this blog. Pron is the geek word for pornography. The prawn is probably quite high in the obscene creature category. The two are just a slip of the tongue away from each other and there is no other way out. This shall be, though giant octopi are all the rage in the orient, the blog to save the gay prawn and promoting the rights to queer pron.

 The shrimps are of course, just the red herring (some extremely mixed up ocean food and detective story metaphors there, me thinks), to throw you off the scent of the cum-lined Hansel and Gretel trail that I leave for you.

P.S. It is time to perhaps re-animate this blog :)

P.P.S. For those who expected a bang-bang remix of sea-food and stir fried prawns, I apologise. The best I can offer you are the completely random associations that stir in the depths of my mind. You are most welcome to come and plunge me deep. Lubricated. Latexed. ‘Lliterated. Because let’s face it, there is nothing more euphoric than a queer fish  (Coming next!) that tickles the prostrate and scares away the crabs!