Guises

"You haven't worried about fallout from playing a gay priest role?"

"I've seen the references to a hit being taken on my fan club sites," I answered. "But I don't want to be stereotyped."

"Other than that, you'll do a wide variety of roles?" Carlo Vincetti asked. "Is it because you started in gay male porn and now have acquired a young heartthrob persona in movies?"

Vincetti was an Italian director of independent movies. We had met—he and the cute young man, Nico, who I'd heard identified as his son, but I had reservations about that designation, at the October Berlin Independent Film Festival, where my movie, Uncertain, about a young priest with a boyfriend and his difficulty in deciding what to pursue and what to try to give up. Vincetti was a boisterous, big-bodied man, whose personality filled every room he entered. I had suspected he had me in mind for one of his films, which could get quite kinky. He'd invited me to come to Manfred's, this Berlin drag queen show club, and I'd agreed.

He either wanted me for a movie or his bed—or both. He was a walrus of a man, but I'd heard he was really good in bed—that he was very well-endowed in equipment and knew how to use it—and his supposed son, Nico, turned me on, so here I was. Visions of Vincetti maneuvering both Nico and me in bed to his sexual advantage had floated through my brain.

"I think the porn video beginnings is far behind me," I said. "In any event, it's how a lot of movie actors got their start. And, no, it doesn't bother me what fan clubs think. I don't think I'll be in the movies for long."

"So, you might as well make a splash while you're here, right?" Vincetti said, patting my forearm. To do so, he'd moved his hand from on my knee under the table. I hadn't shied away from being touched there. I'd heard he had eight thick inches, the skill to drive a boy wild with those inches, and unbelievable stamina. I, in fact, wasn't planning on being in the movies for long. It was just a lark and had started to shock my staid family, but they had proved to be unshockable. My family ran a breakfast cereal manufacturing empire in the States. I had my MBA and was slated to move onto the board of that soon. I was just having a bit of fun before that.

If Vincetti had a kinky film role in mind for me, I was game, but he hadn't brought the topic up yet. His hand went back to my knee, a little farther up on my thigh now, and he squeezed. I smiled an assenting smile at Vincetti and looked over at Nico to see if he noticed, but the small, dark and sultry, willowy androgynous sort of guy, who probably was nineteen or twenty, three or four years younger than I was, was looking bored and was exchanging flirty gazes with men at tables around us.

The lights went up as one act was completing, and Vincetti whispered that he had something to do and for us to excuse him and then he was gone. Probably going to the john, I thought, and would be gone only briefly. But he was gone longer—through the next-to-last drag queen acts on the stage.

In the interval between those two acts, Nico finally turned his flirty smile to me. Batting his long eyelashes, he said, "I liked your movie. You are a sexy man. Are you here to be fucked by Carlo or to fuck me?"

"Yes," I answered, with a smile.

He gave a little laugh, showing approval of the answer. "You know he is not really my father."

"So I gathered."

"He is a big, ugly man, but he has charisma—and, with pills, no man is bigger. And, my god, what he can do with that dick of his."

"That's what I've heard."

"And at night, with the lights off, I can forget that he is ugly. Are you big too? Will you fill me and be cruel?"

I would have answered, but I wasn't quick enough in decided what to say before the lights were going down again, a zaftig, blowsy drag queen was filling the stage, and we were getting a rendition of Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" It was lip synched, but it was done well.

I was surprised when the act was over and the drag queen was coming down off the stage, sitting down at our table, and touching my forearm with his fingers. This close up I could see that it was Carlo Vincetti.

"Did you miss me?" He asked and laughed a hearty laugh.

"You surprised me. I didn't recognize you. You were very good."

"I am very good at a lot of things. Performing this way is very freeing. You should try it. You would be a smash hit. Nico here, is very convincing as a woman. I bet you would manage it just as well."

"Would I?" I asked. He looked pleased that my response wasn't a flat "no."

"I wonder how adventuresome you are, Evan Edings," he said, giving me what passed as a casual look, but I thought maybe it was more pointed than that. Maybe he was testing me. I wondered if this had anything to do with a movie role he was contemplating pitching to me. Vincetti's avant-garde movies were very popular just now. They were winning awards.

"Try me," I said.

"Later I wish to use you," he said, "But 'try me' is good for now. You don't mind me saying I'm going to fuck you, do you? Because I am."

"No, I don't have any problem with that," I answered.

"Whether or not you take a movie role I'm offering," he added.

"Understood," I responded.

"You have just left an Off-Broadway musical show, haven't you?"

"Yes, I played the Emcee in Cabaret."

"And you know the music well?"

"All but my own lyrics," I said and laughed. "That's my bane. I can remember everyone's lines and lyrics better than my own."

"And you could lip synch one of the songs from Cabaret?"

"Of course."

"Come with me," he said, rising, grabbing my wrist, signaling to the house manager, and leading me out of the room and down a corridor to a dressing room.

Twenty minutes later I was Sally Bowles from Cabaret here, on stage. Vincetti was an expert in cosmetics. I was dressed in a black leather corselette, with a padded bra, black fishnet stockings, a garter belt, black heels, a cute will black wig, and a black hat with spangles on it, and had been magically transformed into a sultry woman with cosmetics. I was pushed out on the stage and was lip synching to "Life Is a Cabaret" while making love to a small bentwood side chair. I almost wished the recording didn't include a woman's voice. I could have managed the challenge of singing it myself.

I was a smash hit, and Vincetti was right—and made me feel liberated and as if I was floating on the clouds.

Two hours later, wearing a satin slip, the bra and panties I had been wearing cast aside and mingling with those of Nico and Carlo, I was mounted, doggy style on Nico's ass on Carlo's Berlin hotel bed, fucking him, and Carlo was mounted on my ass, doggy style, and fucking me. Carlo had been fucking me for well over half an hour. Nico was right—Carlo was hung to take me to the limit of stretch and, with the pills he'd take, he was long-lasting. He had great thrust power and technique. He had a mushroom cap Prince Albert that could kiss and punish every inch of my passage walls.

* * * *

I closed my eyes to listen to the music. It was ethereal and soothing. Since much of it was on one tone, it should have been monotonous, going on one or two notes on a line with just a rise or fall at the end, but it wasn't tiresome. I, of course, couldn't understand the words, because they were all in Latin. But they were words I'd heard before. I didn't keep my eyes closed long, though, because of the handsome young priest who was singing the Latin mass so sweetly. He was dark and sultry, almost Arabic as many of those living on the northern edge of the Mediterranean were. But he had striking blue eyes, and, when the picked me out in the small congregation in the 9:00 mass that Sunday at the Church of San Giorgio, they seemed to bore into my soul.

The young priest was not the reason Carlo Vincetti had brought me to the Church of San Giorgio in Portofino, Italy, though. From Berlin, I had somehow become attached to Vincetti's entourage as he unfolded his idea for the unusual movie he was endeavoring to create, and we had wound up in Portofino, a picturesque peninsular seaside town on the Italian Riviera, where Vincetti had a villa overlooking the yacht basin and the sea. The movie, tentatively titled "Papal Guises," was about the rumors concerning a medieval-period pope who scandalized the Catholic world by maintaining a wife. This in itself was not enough to inspire a movie. What inspired Vincetti were the rumors behind the rumors—that the pope's mate wasn't, in fact, a woman, but was a young transvestite. And that, in addition, the transvestite liked to slip out of the papal quarters and service men in a male bordello in Rome. Even deeper than this were the rumors that the pope himself had a fetish for dressing like a woman and going to this brothel to lie with his transvestite. Both reportedly performed best sexually when taking on a guise of someone different altogether.

"The senior priest at San Giorgio," Vincetti said to me in suggesting we go to mass, "is on exile from Rome for his possible sexual misconduct with young men. I say 'possible' only because that hedging is what keeps him in any sort of church capacity. He had risen high in the Vatican hierarchy. I am patterning the medieval pope in my movie after him, and I thought you should see—and meet—him, as you will be playing his transvestite 'wife.'"

Nico refused to step foot in the nearby church, but I went, curious about what this senior priest, Monsignor Luigi, looked like. When I went up to receive the host, I found that he looked like nothing I could ever imagine from Vincetti's connecting him to the medieval-period pope he mentioned. The young priest was still in a raised pulpit, singing the mass, so I didn't get a closer look at him. The senior priest was a tall, heavy man, with a beatific smile for everyone as he dispensed the host. He was a graybeard, his hair thinning on the top of his head. He moved in graceful, flowing motion and was permanently marked, it seemed, with a look of benevolence and good will for all. He was a grandfather figure and, although I did not understand a word of the short homily he gave, the congregation received it so warmly, given with that perpetual smile, that I could almost feel they wanted to chuckle from time to time.

He gave me a searching look when delivering the host and then again, at the door of the church after the mass, took my hand when Vincetti was introducing us and checking to make sure that the monsignor would come to the villa for lunch, that I was afraid he wasn't going to give the hand back. I knew what undressing looks from a man and prolonged touching meant. I wouldn't have had to be told he was in trouble over relations with young men to believe he had a vice.

Vincetti warned me why the monsignor was coming to lunch, but after seeing the monsignor at mass I could hardly believe it.

There was every reason for me to have believed it, though.

After lunch on a loggia overlooking the Mediterranean at Vincetti's villa, Castelleto, I was left alone with the monsignor. Before the priest had even arrived, Vincetti had said to me, "One way of delivering an award-winning performance is to become the role. Your role in this movie is as the priest's mistress." I didn't have to be hit over the head with a sledgehammer to understand what Vincetti was suggesting.

Monsignor Luigi's English wasn't top notch and my Latin and Italian were nonexistent, but there was no misinterpretation in the advances he made when we were alone as to where this was headed. I wasn't surprised. Vincetti had, in previous discussions with me on his directing technique, said that his method was to steep his actors in the roles they were to play, and the relationship between the character in the movie modeled on Monsignor Luigi and that of my role was a sexual partner one.

I wasn't either religious or all that highly principled when it came to sex. If lying under the monsignor would help garner me an Academy Award nomination in any way, I would lie under the monsignor.

The monsignor knew his way to the attic room at the villa I called the Torture Chamber and he guided me there. I lay on the bed on my belly, my arms raised over my head, my wrists bound together, and the monsignor beat my buttocks, thighs, and back lightly with a leather strap before mounting me from above and behind and fucking me. There was meat on the bones of his large frame, but there also was muscle. He was hirsute, covered with curly salt-and-pepper hair, and there was little of the benign grandfather figure in him when he was seeking to hump me to the release of his seed with only his own pleasure and need in mind.

I didn't forget why I, for one, was here with him, though. All the time he was using me, I was absorbing this taking in how to present my character in the movie.

Vincetti hadn't misled me. He had said this was a study in the wide difference in guise that a man could take and that Monsignor Luigi was here because of what he did with young men in Rome.

"And that's why the pope of the movie script and his transvestite 'wife' had to meet in a brothel outside the Vatican," Vincetti had said. "The pope needed the preparation of scourging his partner to obtain and maintain an erection through the act, and they did not have the enabling equipment for that in the Vatican. What they had in the Vatican were too many scheming eyes."

"In the movie we'll use an X-frame and a whip. I'm surprised Luigi didn't use those with you this afternoon. We do have them in that room. Perhaps it's because I asked him not to break the skin, if possible. But maybe he found you so arousing that he didn't need more extreme preparation."

Vincetti hadn't explicitly told me that the monsignor would want preparation that extreme, but as I'd let the director bind me to an X-frame and whip me in a Berlin brothel, he must have assumed I was amenable to it. He had told me that a stylized version of that, suggestive enough to get the point across, would be included in the movie.

I perhaps went too far in Berlin in revealing that, yes, I did very much want to be in Vincetti's movie, not least because I wasn't being fully honest with him. He took advantage of my interest to establish that if he gave me the role, I had to become that person I would be playing, and that the pope's 'wife' had gone to brothels and serviced men. I would have to lie under any man Vincetti told me to. I agreed to that, not least because I thought the guise of a rent-boy would be an interesting one to experience. During the month of October, Vincetti pointed to Monsignor Luigi several times. I went under him each time, and, eventually, we were using the X-frame and whip.

The culmination of this, what would end in going to Rome and Vincetti's lawyer's office and executing a movie contract, at which time I'd have to reveal what I had not yet done and take whatever consequences there might be, would be the end of October. We were staying in Portofino until then, because Vincetti was hosting a costume Halloween Party the night of the 31st.

"I do so love dressing up and pretending to be someone else," he said. I well knew that to be the case.

After Monsignor Luigi left me that first time, I went to my room, slipped on a Speedo, grabbed two beach towels, and headed to the rocky beach below the villa and the Church of San Giorgio, on the western side of the peninsula. After swimming out to sea to mellow out and swimming back, I dried myself off with one towel and stretched out on my back on the other. I was dozing in no time.

At some point while I was there, I woke enough to see a willowy figure, looking somewhat familiar, probably a woman I'd seen in the village, I thought, picking her way along the rocky shoreline from below the church to the point of the peninsular. She had a pleasantly, but not voluptuously, curvy body and dark hair descending to her shoulders. She was wearing a red bikini, top and bottoms, and was under a floppy sunhat. After a sighting, I went back to sleep again. When I woke, I couldn't be sure I'd seen the figure at all. I also, though, couldn't get out of my mind the willowy aspect of the figure and the grace with which she moved from one boulder to the next.

* * * *

I was standing at the window of Vincetti's clifftop villa, looking east, down in the Portofino yacht basin through a set of binoculars. A small white yacht down there caught my attention and I was watching what was going on on the roof of the yacht's cabin. An older, beefy man was on his back on a large beach towel. A younger man—or a woman; increasingly I thought it was a younger woman—was stretched out on top of him in the position of the crab, his, or her, face facing up and feet and hand palms pressed into the cabin's roof on the sides of the guy's body under her, him. The man on the bottom was clutching the small, top figure's waist, and was helping to raise and lower the smaller, willowy body up and down on his cock.

The one on top had breasts, I decided—small but firm—so, I decided it was a young woman.

They weren't the only one's fucking. Behind me, on Vincetti's bed, the movie director was fucking his supposed son in the missionary position. I'd left the bed myself not too much earlier, where I had been under Nico, and Vincetti and I had been doing the young guy in a double, our cocks dueling inside the young man's anal passage.

Nico was a pro. He could and did take it.

The figure on top on the white yacht below, presumably a young woman, was intriguing. It was like she was dancing on the bigger, obviously older, man's body, floating above him, connected only at three points, his hands on her waist and his cock buried in her cunt. They were doing it right there in the middle of the Portofino yacht basin.

As I watched through the binoculars, arms encircled me from behind and a cock was pressed into the small of my back.

"Come back to bed, Evan," Carlo murmured.

"In a moment, Carlo," I answered. "I'm watching something bold."

"What?"

"A couple fucking right out in the open in the yacht basin—on the roof of a boat. A young woman on top of an older man, doing the position of the crab."

"Here, let me see." Carlo took the binoculars, put them to his face, and laughed. "That's not a woman—or wasn't a woman originally. That's our young priest at San Giorgio. The one you said had a gorgeous voice at mass a couple of Sundays ago. And that's Andrea under him. Andrea Balboni. He's the headmaster of a prestigious girls' school. That's his boat. He eats young men alive. He's who I've asked you to spend time with at the Halloween costume party. He has the biggest say in Portofino. I have to stay on his good side."

"That's not a man on top," I insisted. "She's got tits and she doesn't have a cock."

"Valentine is a fully transformed male-to-female trans," Carlo said. "Not that the church here is telling the Vatican that—at least until certain men in Portofino, including the monsignor and even me have had the novelty wear off of doing a cunt on a young man."

"Valentine, you say?" I took the binoculars back and watched. The dance of the fuck in what I had now learned was all that more attracting. The priest with the glorious voice and the willowy body. The one who had given me the eye during the mass. "Can you tell him I find him attractive and would like to hook up with him?" I said. Mass was the next day. I wasn't Catholic, although I'd taken the host to get a closer look at the priests during the mass I'd gone to.

"Sure, why not?" Carlo said. "Now, come back to bed. I'd like to try something out with Nico."

"In a minute," I said, putting the binoculars back to my face.

A few days later, I walked over to the Church of San Giorgio and entered it. The young priest, Valentine, was at the altar, fiddling with vases of flowers. When he saw me in the center aisle at the back of the church, he smiled and nodded, and walked off to the side, going through a door and leaving it open.