The Other End of the Erotic

by Corey Devon Arthur

I am a left-handed feminist who evolved Audre Lorde's erotic from the bottom up. I forged it from wounded flesh that fucked without feeling, to a newfound freedom, for all of humanity to feel. When Lorde first exposed her wisdom to the world, she did so through the lens of an oppressed lesbian Black woman. As an imprisoned heterosexual Black man, I felt excluded from her words. Feeling exiled led me to engage with another Black woman. It was crushing through scholarship without sex. The struggle was intense. It made me sweat. I swear it was worth every sentence of the intercourse. It began 38 years ago in a dark room, right before my Bic lighter went flick.

1992 we were teenage friends in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York that engaged in hungry human sex. It was mutually satisfying. It was sex between Black and brown flesh. 

We were in the bedroom at my uncle's apartment. He used it to bag up drugs during sundown. That morning, we used it as a hangout to ditch school. Color Me Badd was singing “I Wanna Sex You Up” on Hot 97 FM. We smoked blunts, swigged from a 40-ounce of St. Ides and watched Janet Jacme get jack-hammered by three Black men on a 24-inch screen television. 

“Ouuuuuu fuck. OOOOH. Emmmmm” left our lips. It was too dark to see. The glow of the blunt ember and the blue screen made the difference between our movements and the movie.

We were sweating and puddles of salty tasting fluid laid between the folds of lavender sheets. There were seven of us: Keema, Gia, Keisha, Gee, Kwame, Chris and me. By 12 p.m., we stepped off the edge at the same time. We were young and falling into our sexual selves together.

Group sex became a fixture of our collective identity. It took us where our walls couldn't follow. Against the world we would cuddle against one another.

1992, December 18 my fourteenth birthday. 

Our group hooked up for the occasion.

“I hate that bitch ass nigga,” I broke down in tears between smoking a blunt and crying about my dad, who left me for dead.

First, it was a hand that massaged my head. Then, a mouth found my cock. Next, something wet and slick started sliding up and down my dick. I closed my eyes, not caring about who or what. I fell into the fate of feeling fine and fucked up at the same time.

1993 

I found out Kwame was a foul stick-up kid who became a cold-hearted killer. At 14, he made tough guys suck his dick at gunpoint and robbed them for their drugs. I saw it with my own eyes.

“What up nigga, we good?” He asked, when his gun went “click.”

I was spell-bound, but not stunned. The sound of a swallow and a grunt snapped me back. I snatched and stashed the cash and dope. We both faded like smoke as my lighter went “flick.”

The next night our group hooked up and got lit from the proceeds of the robbery. No one said a word. We knew what the long “Sighhhh” signaled. It meant we came together at the same time. At the bottom, life was cheap. We sold crack on the corners for crumbs off the dollar. Some of us would trade our cunts and cocks for coin, if it made enough cents. The hood short changed our group by one heartbeat. Someone killed Kwame before we flipped our first package of rock.

1994, I was sixteen years old. 

We started having interracial sex with middle and upper-class adults. They called it a “get together or partying.” We called it profit.

“Yo Corey, white boys pay triple for dimes, and extra to watch you fuck their wives if you got a big dick,” Kia confided in me.

The rest of the group didn't dig interracial sex. The math settled the matter. We mentally spent the money before we did our first interracial orgy/drug deal.

“Fuck it. We'll still be Black tomorrow.” Gia said.

One time it was Keema, Gee and me. Allen, Timothy, Donna and Allie were our white clients. They weren’t kind to Gee because he wasn't hung as they hoped.

“I thought your cock would be bigger.” Allie pissed while Donna rode me on her living room couch. Gee could care less. He came on Allie's face just to be cruel, collected the cash and left. Keema calmed Allie down by caressing her lips with her cunt. Allen and Timothy sat silently and continued to stroke to what they saw.

“Fuck you, asshole,” Allie screamed at the door. 

Donna got off me, grabbed my penis and said, “Corey has enough cock for all of us to share.” And they did.

Sometimes it was bitter. But often it was sweet. I won't lie, it all felt fantastic.

The summer of 1994, I got arrested and sentenced one to three years for selling drugs. 

That's when sex for satisfaction turned into sex for the sake of my sanity. I was placed in solitary confinement for fighting while on Rikers Island C-74 Adolescents unit.

To escape the physical cruelty of the box, I masturbated to every sexual scenario I could conceive. That's when the screams of insanity started seeming sexy.

“AGGHHHHH! GET OFF ME!! PLEASE STOP! I’LL KILL YOU MOTHERLOVER!” emerged from various cells in the box.

Eventually, I started stroking myself until my mind completely cracked wide open.

A few months later, I was shipped to the adult prison system. In that prison, guards sexually assaulted us in groups under the guise of a strip frisk for security.

“Okay assholes strip naked. Open your mouths. Lift up your dick then balls. Turn around. Wiggle your toes. Now bend over and spread your buttocks. Hold ‘em open til I tell you to stop,” Guards armed with wooden batons shouted.

The procedure felt predatory. It degraded my self-respect and compassion for others. I made a promise to never again become someone’s prey.

The adult prisoners were older and twice my size, so I fought them for respect. When the pain of being punched became too much, I fell in with prisoners my age who endured the same. We made them leave us alone.

First, we used our fists. When that wasn't enough, we sharpened elongated pieces of steel. Then we made our point.

“Leave us the fuck alone!” I shouted over the adult prisoner screaming for help.

Between this and being repeatedly strip frisked, I was taught how to exercise power and cruelty over another human being.

1996, I was unleashed back into society, not rehabilitated, but animalized. 

The New York state prison system produced a pure alpha-male, Corey Devon Arthur Rex. I stabbed my dick in every hole of any woman I could kiss, extremely hard and long. At age 18, I made the erotic my personal bitch. 

1997, I was 19 years old and sentenced 25 years to life for murder and robbery.

I had become a teenage murderer with raging hormones infected by patriarchal poison. What once felt fantastic now defined me as a freak. Flick.

2000, I told my soon-to-be first wife, “Don't stop. I'm about to cum.”

We were in Attica’s visiting room. She swallowed what she could of my cock while I looked in the eyes of a Dominican woman watching us from the next table. 

2001, I married my 30-year-old Italian wife when I was 23. We had conjugal visits. At first, angry at the world, sex was enough to satisfy the both of us. Then, we craved more. She yearned for an emotional connection I couldn't yet conceive, and I desired more from our imagination than she could deliver. After a decade together, we got fatigued faking it and filed for divorce.

2013, I married my second wife. She was a white woman who was attracted to the fantasy of being fucked by a Black convicted killer. My back shots busted her psychologically wide open. She underestimated how defiling it could be and how deep my dick would go. 

“You a nasty nigga,” I hate you, motherfucker. She said, around the slippery sounds of me sucking her sore pussy. It was my erotic version of saying, I'm sorry.We finally figured it out. We were finished. That's how we parted with no hard feelings. Fantasies of flesh alone had abandoned me in real life. I had nothing but blood and cum on my hands with nothing to show for my life. Fortunately, I found feminism.

While incarcerated, I educated myself by reading law and revolutionary books. George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye led me to the minds of Angela Davis, Lolita LeBron, Assata Shakur and Kathy Boudin. Their wisdom cut me off at the cock. These women taught me a different form of warfare that found trust and care in equality. Thus, feminism.

2019, I embraced feminism as a new way to engage with the world with which I was at war. I reinforced my education through academia and earned an associate's degree. Reading Elizabeth Lesser’s Cassandra Speaks convinced me further. She showed me how women have been violated and fought back nonviolently since time immemorial. Lesser cites Pauli Murray’s quote that “One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.” 

I cried blood and tears on her words, and saw how I had been as cruel to my sisters as the world was to me. From that moment on, I considered every woman my comrade. 

This new consciousness didn’t curb my craving for companionship. However, I found the middle ground between a feminist and sexually fucked up. I made consent, care, and kindness a priority. Hence, I became a left-handed feminist. 

2020, I cut my feminist teeth as a two-time elected prison community leader during the COVID-19 crisis. I carried and cared for every human being on a compound. I wrote about the prison conditions during the COVID-19 crisis and published it in The Marshall Project. I published three more times in less than two years, the last time I came for blood, because back in the day, they spilled mine.

2002 I refused to strip frisk after a visit while at Attica. In response, prison guards violently ripped my clothes from my body, then they forced my mouth and wrecked them open for their inspection. Nearly a quarter century later, I exposed the sexually violent policy of the strip frisk to the public. I didn't punch up to make it hurt. I did it to make them stop.

2021 the parole board hit me with two years to repay me with pain. Outwardly, I was sturdy, on the inside, I was slowly losing my mind. This happened before, while I was in solitary confinement, there was the voice of Anne Frank in my imagination. She told me to save the flower. That rescued me. 

2023 I used my erotic to help others heal from their carceral wounds. I painted a collection of my aforementioned sheroes: Angela, Assata Catherine, Lolita, and other women. I named the collection She Told Me to Save the Flower which turned into a movement. I forced feminism into the prison system. Furthermore, I would end the brutality of the strip frisk, or die doing so. Flick.

The system refused to budge. Between being hit at the parole board for the second time and enduring the strip frisk over 1000 times, I was vulnerable and raw. I was also ready.

2023 I met a Black woman who pumped the power of Audre Lorde’s erotic via intellectual intercourse and authenticity. Dr. T is a college professor who travels the globe giving lectures to the young minds of tomorrow. She gifted me the beauty of her brilliance by editing my writings.

“You need to step up to this movement,” Dr. T flamed. Then went the flick on me.

I sat with Audre Lorde’s words of the erotic until they seduced me differently. I once felt disconnected by Lorde's dialect. Then, Dr. T closed that gap by spreading her space wider to let me think and feel as deeply as I could. 

I finally found and touched a place where all human beings shared the erotic equally. Audre Lorde left us her words to grow. She gifted us who she was, as she was, to help us become who we really are. 

This is who I became: a left-handed feminist who fights for humanity. I am a prisoner who shook with the carceral state and won as a matter of legal fact. As of 2024, New York state prisoners have the right to use body scans, thereby ending a sexually violent legacy of legal rape. That's just one way of honoring and evolving Audre Lorde’s “Erotic.” Now I'm coming for the world.

But before I could do that, I would have to shoot my shot at a single person, starting with Prof T.

2025 I sat in a prison phone booth at Otisville Correctional Facility and delivered the latest revision of this draft, although not before I was certain of her consent.  “Go ahead. Try me,” Prof. T told me. 

I touched her mind and mine at the same time and we went for broke. I breathed heavy the entire 25 minutes it took me to slay her with my words over the phone. I stressed every second, hoping she could hold on, and wouldn't hang up.

Some of my sentences got sloppy and slipped out. I was sweating and it was slippery because I had too much spit in my mouth. I slowed it down and regripped the black phone receiver. This was the nutshell paragraph we were grinding for. I flexed a little deeper inside her thoughts and blew everything I had over her imagination. After it was over we talked, and I tasted myself mixed with her thoughts. It was a timeless type of nasty, like sweet and sour between our two tongues.

Now, how erotic is that?