Stag-Felation

I was at a party one night in the back room of Studio 54 watching iconic 1970s movie star Steve McQueen do a line of coke off Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten's breasts. I said to him “Ya know, I can’t help but wonder if all this 70s hedonism isn’t just a desperate attempt by guilt-stricken Americans to forget about the tragedy of Vietnam.”

Steve said, “Hey, if Nixon had gotten laid and LBJ had gotten high, we never would have stayed in Vietnam. ‘Course, then the Soviets would have invaded, we’d all be too high to notice and you and I would be in a reeducation camp right now. But besides, that’s what Jimmy Carter is for. With a devout Christian as president—one who believes in God and human rights and never lies—the rest of the country can fuck its brains out and not feel guilty.”

Back then everyone found a way to defend any kind of decadence. That night the Studio screened an underground bestiality film that claimed to have a social message. It was called Stag-Felation and involved someone in a Spiro Agnew mask with a shirt that said “Will Natter Your Nabob for Hey” attempting to felate an unbroken stallion while interstitials of swirling newspaper headlines blared “Wages and Employment Drop!” Thus a cheap animal exploitation act became an economic metaphor for the times.

At the end of the decade, Steve got cancer and went down to Mexico to try and cure it with coffee enemas. Imagine, the star of Bullitt taking a cappuccino up the ass. Dorothy was soon killed by her estranged husband—a guy so obsessed with celebrity and nightlife he couldn’t stand the idea of being left off the list. She was only 20. But hey, at least for a couple years in her brief, tragic life she was really stacked. And who knows, there may be no finer existentialist gesture.

Keep on truckin'.