Toilet Talk, Amazon and Derek McCormack's 'Castle Faggot'
Come, child: virtue is just an illusion whose worship causes perpetual suffering, in countless transgressions of true desire. I ask you: can such denials be natural? Would Nature truly advocate that which offends her?
from 'Philosophy in the Boudoir' by Marquis De Sade
Our villain – let’s call him Jeb Ffezos – lives in a high castle made of bone-concrete. As a building material bone-concrete is only available to the real elites, the thick luxurious cream that rises to the tip-top of the global one percent. Bone-concrete is made by mixing one part cement to two parts sand to a further two parts aggregates. Aggregate is a broad category of coarse to medium-grained particulate material used in construction. In order to make bone-concrete this aggregate must be solely comprised of the bones of expired workers. Jeb Ffezos was able to build his magnificent, high walled and many bedroomed castle because of his endless supply of human bodies, both young and old, worked to the bone object-picking in his vast Mammonzon Painforest empire.
In the final throes of the plagued year 2020, Canadian writer Derek McCormack released his novel Castle Faggot, a scatological odyssey through FAGGOTLAND: the deepest, darkest and dirtiest amusement park for gay men. Shortly after its publication Castle Faggot was banned by Amazon. It’s hard not to see this temporary ban (it appeared for sale again a few days later) as a small victory, a triumph of the grotesque over homogenised, predatory capital. The book itself is an abject carnival, brimming with shit and corpses right from the very beginning. Castle Faggot opens with a prototype brochure for FAGGOTLAND, accompanied with the tagline ‘Faggots! – Kill yourselves!’ There are angular voids where illustrations of the amusement park should be, left blank so you might project your own promotional material that goes beyond McCormack’s imagination.
It is within these blank boxes that we are introduced to the crown jewel of FAGGOTLAND: Castle Faggot and its darkly whimsical inhabitants, who are breakfast cereal mascots: Count Choc-o-log, Boo-Brownie and Franken-Fudge. The castle itself is as far from fairy tale as it’s possible to be, a shit-smeared Burroughsian fantasy. ‘There are dead faggots in the tower. They’re caked in their own blood. There are dead faggots in the library. They’re caked in their own shit. The ballroom? There’s a faggot hanging from the chandelier.’ I tried at first to intellectualise the scene. Is McCormack making a statement against the historically disposable attitude towards queer and other marginalised bodies by the ruling class? It surely wouldn’t be difficult to draw a line and make it so, but to over-intellectualise Castle Faggot would be missing a trick. Clearly there is liberation to be found smearing faeces over the boundaries and I believe McCormack’s true intention is to have us playing down in the stink with him.
Perhaps it was the toilet-talk rather than the decorative dead bodies that caused Castle Faggot’s temporary suspension from Amazon. In an article written for the Independent in 2019 a journalist reports that ‘workers at an Amazon warehouse are having to urinate in plastic bottles rather than go to the toilet during their shifts.’ Why would Ffezos clamp down on workers’ toilet breaks in this way? I have some ideas. At the end of each gruelling shift a huge truck emblazoned with the Amazon logo, a vaguely phallic upward-tick, rumbles out of the warehouse rammed with plastic bottles full of workers’ piss. Ffezos stands anxiously at a window in his high castle, wringing his hands impatiently as the truck backs up across the drawbridge over the moat (also piss?). He runs down and flings open the door, his heart beating fast and light in his chest as thousands of still-warm bottles are deposited in his lobby ready to fill his evening bath. Did McCormack cut too close to the bone for piss-pig Ffezos? I guess we’ll never know.
The conjoined absurdity and obscenity take some getting used to but it’s worth strapping yourself tightly into one of ‘Boo-Brownie’s Buttfuck Bumper Cars’ and enjoying the ride. The action in Castle Faggot mostly takes place in a section entitled ‘Rue Du Doo’ and features the aforementioned breakfast cereal mascots as its puppet-cast alongside cameos from several thinly-veiled parodies of famous historical Parisians (Arthur Rainblo, Cocoa Chanel). What ensues is a hilarious and bawdy mess: macabre tales of death and defecation interspersed with toilet humour. It is here that we meet McCormack as his teenage self. He introduces himself: ‘Mom and Dad call me Jon-D. My teachers call me Derek. My classmates call me fudge-packer. Or fruitcake. Or faggot. Or fag.’ Now the puppet-master of his teenage destiny, Jon-D becomes bigger, queer-er and more obscene than anything a teenage bully could imagine, using vulgarity as a means of survival in an already hostile world. As the old saying goes: when in doubt, freak them out.
In the ‘Content Guidelines’ listed in the ‘Help & Customer Service’ section of its website, Amazon states: ‘What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.’ In its guidelines regarding the sale of pornography it states that content including ‘soiled undergarments’ is strictly prohibited. It’s strange then to think of Ffezos soaking in his tepid bath of workers piss taking offence at ‘soiled undergarments.’ I look over the content guidelines again. What do I expect to deem offensive? Actually – I expect timed toilet breaks that force workers to neglect their basic bodily functions in favour of profit margins that benefit a distant and malevolent multi-billionaire to be deemed offensive. On the book’s back cover there is a quote from Edmund White that reads: ‘This is what it feels like to sit in a crib with another baby and to play blissfully with your own shit while your mothers sat downstairs drinking cocktails.’ If McCormack has successfully captured the freeing childlike glee in letting yourself indulge in society's grossest desires, then Ffezos with his assumed universal moral-code and cack-handed censorship represents the greedy child, unreasonable, demanding and self-obsessed to the point of derangement.
I imagine Ffezos in Faggotland and I know he would hate it. The inevitable corporeal realities of death, sex and shit would be too much for a powerful multi-billionaire so separated from bodily reality that he treats his workers like underperforming flesh sacks waiting to be replaced by hardier, metal-shelled controllable robots. There is no warmth in Amazon’s sanitized perversion of the world. It’s not somewhere I would ever choose to exist. Despite its monstrous appearance, I think there’s a heart in Faggotland that beats even harder for being buried in shit. Near the end of the ‘Rue Du Doo’ section Jon-D has his first sexual encounter with Arthur Rainblo, who oozes into his mouth like a ‘chocolate Sunday.’ By the time Jon-D exclaims, ‘I have fallen in love with Castle Faggot. I have fallen in love with a boy! With your consent, Count, I’d like to stay and become a citizen of puppet Paris – un Pouparisien!’ I’ve been sucked so far down the colon of Castle Faggot that I think I want to join him.
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