Neigh, Neigh, Nanette

Frighten the Horses Heat Seeking Publishing

Frighten the Horses, a self-proclaimed "document of the sexual revolution," is celebrating this Valentine's Day with its first fullcolor glossy cover. Admitting that this step certainly "complicates things," copublishers Mark Pritchard and Cris Gutierrez nevertheless seek to scale up their high-spirited "zine" and its circulation of fiction "as dirty as we can find it."

However, our sample of Harvard students, when presented with FTH, failed to fully appreciate the new cover. Instead, the majority devoted their attention to its titillating content, haphazardly flipping through the pages, reading out snippets of sexual extremism with a spaced-out kind of disbelief, and were generally quite uncomfortable. "I don't know what to think," admitted one sophomore resident of Adams House, summing up the overwhelming ambivalence this "zine" elicits.

Why this confusion? Frighten the Horsesaims to "cover queer and women's issues" as well as feature erotic articles which could not be published elsewhere. In so doing, FTH encompasses a hodgepodge of seriousness and silliness regarding the most sensitive sexual and political issues. Most of its serious work--opinion columns, news section, feature articles, and book reviews--is for the most part terribly written and renders the weighty topics of gay rights, abortion, censorship and feminism largely ridiculous. Lou Ann Thomas concludes her piece on political rifts within the gay community with the cheesy plea that "we need each other. We need our gay brothers and they need us, their lesbian sisters, for our fights, for our rights and for our own struggles to keep our minds and our hearts open."

The zine's primary focus on raunchy sex, however, undermines this melodramatic tone. Here, too, the writing is uneven. The first piece is entitled "Stiff" and relates how a college student is overcome with attraction for a cadaver in the bio lab and indulges in necrophilia. Knowing the area above the corpse's groin would be "messy with incisions," she appreciates his legs as "muscular and hard as a rock, although rigor mortis was probably more responsible than exercise." Much to her delight, "the penis [was] still intact." While topics such as necrophilia, bestiality, and sadomasochism may sound intriguing, the poorly written pieces in FTH suffer the same fate as other bad pornography, sacrificing eroticism to ludicrousness.

Pritchard and Gutierrez, producing the "zine" from their San Francisco apartment, proudly explain their writing selection by the fact that they have "no taboo subjects." Looking for "truly transgressive and well-written" work, Pritchard and Gutierrez also require that it be genuine, and evidently see no contradiction in their boast, "Our fiction is real." Gutierrez insists that we are repressed in our daily lives, and it is therefore important that these writers can "write their own truth." Thus featured is "Piercing Insights," an expose, complete with eight graphic photos of Nancy Irwin enjoying the experience of having 60 22-gauge needles threaded into her back. Her accompanying letter proclaims the "mutual trip" of the event, describing how one of her friends held her hands and "laughed at me while I screamed" while the other "didn't just slide [the needles] under the skin. She went for the meat!" Irwin also notes that once the sixty needles were secure, the group enjoyed tea in the living room.

The confusion of FTH's image is compounded by its inclusion of a few well-written, powerful works. Sigfried Gold's ironic "Coherent Explanation of Straight While Male Sexuality" has some clever insights, its narrator complaining. "I can't stand straight men: they don't lust after me. All they want to do is win arguments with me or beat me at pool. I don't need that shit." Along a similar vein of psychological insight, Michael Manning, an acclaimed sex comic, explains his art through the statement, "I like the idea of humans and animals having sex together. We think of animals as lower, but we also nurture them. It seems like a normal impulse to pull them up one level, to our level."

Our sample of Harvardians was curiously uninterested in FTH'S chaotic parade of sexual perversion. Admitting that while it was okay to look through, all of our participants declared they would never buy it, and that they felt confused by its message. FTH is ultimately just a collection of pornographic shocks, most of which are badly written, interspersed with serious pieces on gay rights and abortion. Sold by subscription and in bookstores and newsstands across the country, the growing zine has a circulation of 5,000 and remains optimistic. Although the impression caused by the pieces is ambiguous, underlying each work is the reaffirmation of the fact that "we are flesh. We are blood. And we can play with it."