In the mid-1980s, Sheree Rose, a photographer and dominatrix, instructed her partner Bob Flanagan to keep a journal of their sex life for one year. When they were finished fucking, she had him reach over, grab a pen, and write down what happened. She was always giving him prompts, in writing and in bed. With this project—which would soon become a book, titled Fuck Journal—she combined the two.
“Bob was my invention,” Rose said of the way she encouraged Flanagan turn his life as a masochist with cystic fibrosis into art. Before they met—at a Halloween party in 1981, both dressed up dead—Flanagan had been a poet. Rose was a middle-aged divorcée, a housewife-cum-punk; her partner-to-be was 10 years her junior, with two years to live.
Bob Flanagan.
Photo Sheree Rose. Courtesy ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries.
Or so he thought. Instead, Flanagan lived until 1996, by which time collaborations with Mike Kelley and the Nine Inch Nails—as well as Visiting Hours (1994), a touring installation that combined chronic illness and sadomasochism—launched him into fame. Both Kelley and NIN discovered the artist after he nailed his penis to a wooden board for an infamous performance titled Nailed (1989), and the band subsequently hired him to star in a video that was soon widely banned. In it, a mechanical device tugs Flanagan’s nipples and genitals as he reclines in a wheelchair, eventually pretending to die.
When Flanagan died for real, at the age of 43, it was the longest recorded life anyone with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder, had ever lived. And it’s tempting to wonder whether his longevity had something to do with the way he embraced the facts of his body—its limits and its pains—instead of fighting or hiding them.
But back to Fuck Journal. It was first printed in 1987 in India by Kalakshetra Press, a publisher of religious tomes. When a shipment of Flanagan’s books eventually made its way to customs, officials glimpsed the title and, apparently offended, dumped them into the sea.
So writes Rose in her foreword to a new edition of the book. Fuck Journal has been something of a cult favorite—widely storied, hard to find, with only 300 copies having been smuggled out of India. But that stands to change thanks to Hanuman Editions, whose reissue, out in May, boasts a memorable introduction by Johanna Hedva, Flanagan’s fellow disabled artist and writer.
Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose.
Courtesy ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries.
The book is smut, and it is matter-of-fact. “Like a grocery list,” Rose writes. Flanagan’s entries are short, scrawled out in a state of bleary bliss, ranging from the banal (“Valentine’s day fuck in spite of being tired”) to the transcendent (“I wonder if I’m still alive”). It gets a lot kinkier than that.
Keep in mind that all the while the man was dying, his body becoming undone in less recreational ways; he was enjoying a bunch of little deaths before the final big one. He was finding pleasure in the pain, surrendering corporeal control, submitting to Rose. Life was going to turn his body inside out whether he liked it or not. So he found a way to like it—which seems wise.