I comment again only to quibble about a cultural allusion I believe to be erroneous.
Earnest Canuck said: “(I)t’s been almost 40 years since the Doors released “Back Door Man,” so it may behoove us to be a little less pucker-mouthed about the deceased’s enthusiasm for anal, dontcha think?”
Mr. Canuck uses “Back-Door Man” as the historical piton upon which to hang the assertion that discussions about and/or preferences for anal sex were mainstreamed in American culture at least by the time of that Doors song. (I wonder why buggery is limited in his comment to the heterosexual variety, inasmuch as Mailer certainly didn’t.) I’m sure the comment was delivered with a dismissive chuckle at the rigid and frigid upon whom Mailer’s invigorating sexual liberation is so obviously wasted.
Well, it may be that discussions of that love which historically dared not mention its path had been pushed into the mainstream of American popular culture by the time of the 1968 Democratic Convention (although I don’t recall it that way), but Mr. Canuck’s evidence does nothing to prove it.
The term “back-door man” has been used in American blues for almost a century, and has nothing to do with human geography. Rather, it refers to a lover of married women, who sneaks unseen into the marital house through the back door. Indeed, the song isn’t even a Morrison “poem”: it was written in 1961 by blues icon Willie Dixon, who without question was describing a man who was a most successful secret seducer of married women.
Even in today’s blues and popular music, the term retains its original meaning. Modern paens to off-road love employ a vast array of different picturesque words and phrases to describe anal sex. Yes, “backdoor” is used as an adjective describing buggery, but the term “backdoor man” is not.
So I think Mr. Canuck is in need of another example as support for his implicit claim that those readers bemused by Mailer’s fascination with the colon as sexual object are but Menckenian booboisie hopelessly ignorant of modern sexual practices. But I’d stay away from “Ancient Evenings”.
