suck

Suck

Over the course of the publication’s intermittent production until 1974, the editorial group’s location rotated among cities in Europe and the United States, during short, intense periods when the group lived together; Suck also produced the Wet Dream Film Festival of banned erotic and pornographic films in Amsterdam, which took place in 1970 and 1971, and published a book (Wet Dreams: Films and Adventures) commemorating the festivals in 1973. “Everyone was lovely,” Williams recalls of the era in Haynes’s 1984 autobiography, Thanks for Coming! “Suddenly the vision of everyone Coming Together could only be physical . . . no longer intellectual. The sex politics of Reich, the belief of Auden that we must love one another or die, the holy orgiastics of Willie Blake, God’s Rake, had to burst through. . . . Suck was a display of pantheistic and revolutionary Schtupping. You cannot fuck everyone in the world, but at least you can try.” As Suck lore has it, the magazine’s first editorial meeting took place in the London offices of the Transatlantic Review, during which Williams and Shrimpton excused themselves to make love in an adjoining room. “Later,” Haynes wryly writes, “I looked back on this meeting as our first mistake. We should all five have made love together.”

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