Exclusive: How One Poet Turns Gay Sex Into Art

Poet Josh Tvrdy partners with photographer Cody Perry for a visual narrative in this Gayety Exclusive. “Compulsory Sex Choka” combines poetry and erotic images that will ignite your mind and body.

My name is Josh Tvrdy, an award-winning poet and author of Smut Psalm, and I love writing about gay sex. There’s just something about it. Thrilling. Sultry. Taboo. Dense with meaning, and deliciously contradictory. In other words: a fertile poetic subject.

Four years ago, when I was a budding content creator, I met Cody Perry, a talented photographer. After working together on a few shoots, Cody approached me with an innovative idea: what if we visually recreated one of my poems through an erotic photo series?

Poetry and photography, entangled like lovers?

The project was incredibly rewarding — both my poem and Cody’s photos were enriched by their interplay. This is our second collaboration of this kind, and we’re excited to share it.

The poem you’ll find below, “Compulsory Sex Choka,” was born from my on-the-ground, decades-long participation in a grand gay tradition: hooking up.

I’ve had great casual sex. I’ve had terrible casual sex. But mostly, I’ve had something harder to define, a hazy in-between. Sex that’s good and bad, hot and awkward, nourishing and demeaning. We tried to capture this contradiction visually. Shots that oscillate between decadent sensuality and basement-bar grime. Shots that spotlight bodies, followed by shots that spotlight objects — the couch, the jockstrap, the solitary bulb.

Like lovers, the poem and the photo series are autonomous entities, whole without each other. But also like lovers, when they’re together, rolling around in sweaty sheets, something else — something beautiful and distinctive — emerges. We want this project to feel triumphant and fatigued, sexy and rough, lonely and intimate, because most human moments are filled with more than one feeling.

We often forget how complicated we are. Art (and sex, too) helps us remember.

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“Compulsory Sex Choka”

He’s pounding the couch
I hate—nasueau-green, stolen
from a straightish man
who never once cleaned his long
curly beard-trimmings
from the bathroom sink we shared—
slackly submissive.

I feel the arm, each thrust, un-
jawing from the back.

He’s rough, which is what I seem
to like. Slapping ass,
yanking hair so he can spit
in my mouth. I found
him on the dance floor, shirtless
and sharking for young
meat. My meat was young enough

to lure him here. Mold-
stink. Useless insulation.
No overhead lighting—
a sad Target lamp the sole
thing letting us see
our sex. The couch releases
a creaturely sound.

The man releases a rumbling
burp. I’ve learned it’s this
or death. Let’s go to your bed,
he says, which isn’t
a bed—a lumpy mattress
on the floor. He takes
a mid-fuck piss. I unscrew
the one and only
bulb I own, still hot with left-

over light, so I
can screw it into the blue
bedside lamp I bought
for cheap, at Goodwill. The glass
burns my skin, but skin
be damned. I need him to see
the hole in my wall,

the belly-up roach, the cum-
stiff Nasty Pig jock-
strap crumpled on a pillow,
the greased anal plugs,

and this—the raw, time-ravaged
rectum he’s willing to wreck.

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Josh Tvrdy (he/him) is a writer, editor, and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. Winner of Button Poetry’s 2023 Chapbook contest, his chapbook, Smut Psalm, is available now. Winner of a 2021 Pushcart Prize, his work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, POETRY, Image Journal, and elsewhere. He teaches virtual poetry classes online, and he lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

For more from Josh, be sure to follow him on Instagram, X, and TikTok! Or you can check out his website! To see more of Cody’s fantastic work, check him out on X. And to see more from Matt, the model featured in “Compulsory Sex Choka,” follow him on Instagram now!