from An Unseemly Man

LARRY FLYNT WITH KENNETH ROSS

It takes a bold man to confess to having had sex with a chicken. And bold is certainly an appropriate word to describe Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, subject of the biopic film The People vs. Larry Flynt, who had enough gall (and, from some perspectives, sense of humor) to put a woman coming out of a meat grinder on the cover of his magazine and to confess in his autobiography to having done it with Ms. Little. And then having killed her.

As someone who has never wrung the neck of my coital partner in that slow-down time normally reserved for a cigarette, I can say that I was a bit taken aback by Flynt’s confession. I figure the least a chicken deserves having (counter to the usual meaning of the word) just been boned is a handful of corn kernels or a pat on the back. I once had the grave misfortune of looking after a chicken coop. The first night I was sitting, two dogs broke in and offed half my flock. I shed no tears. Chickens are nasty, pathetic, heinously filthy creatures whose brains are as small and hard as their beaks. After the massacre, one chicken was left wounded and unable to walk; when I put food next to it, the other chickens would come take it away, even though they had plenty for themselves. In an act of grim mercy, I eventually had to kill the poor bird with the back of a shovel, though the truth is I would have liked to have barbecued the lot.

The thought, then, of putting my privy member into the rump or whatever it is of a chicken could not be more anathema. But leave it to Flynt, who certainly has done more than almost anyone else to propagate the relatively grody aspects of the male libido, to lead the charge. Such noble campaigns as Freedom of Speech and Right to Sexual Expression often have unlikely heros; Flynt, in all his tasteless glory, is not least among them.

I have always had a voracious appetite for sex. I usually describe my sexual proclivities as pedestrian, and although my sexual behavior has ranged over the years from the bizarre to the heroic, only one of my early experiences could actually be considered “deviant.” This was the occasion when, at age nine, I had sex with a chicken. Yes, this is what the old preachers called bestiality. In the hollows of eastern Kentucky it wasn’t all that unusual. Sexual relations with animals — particularly cows, sheep, and horses — were common. Some of the older boys in the area told me that a chicken was as good as a girl — that its egg bag was “hot as a girl’s pussy” and “chickens wiggled around a lot more.” In fact, they added, it was better in some ways because you could just grab the first chicken that came by — no wooing, no waiting. Anxious to experiment, I caught one of my grandmother’s hens out behind the barn, managed to insert my penis into its egg bag, and thrust away. When I let the chicken go, it started toward the main house, staggering, squawking, and bleeding. Fearing that my grandmother would see the hen and want to know what had happened, I caught it and wrung its neck, then threw the bird in the creek. I decided that I liked girls better.