My Life as a Eunuch

Why would a man choose to have himself castrated? That's a question best answered by a fellow known as Gelding.

Comments (0) By Bob Whitby Thursday, Jun 29 2000

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The doctor did stitch his scrotum and assigned a nurse to sit with Gelding, to make sure he wouldn't kill himself. Then a psychiatrist showed up to see if he was crazy. “That's a typical reaction from medical professionals,” he says. “[The psychiatrist] certified that I was perfectly sane, and that this was an event that was unlikely to happen again.”

The psychiatrist was wrong.

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Three years later Gelding became a eunuch at the hands of a San Francisco cutter. He is uncharacteristically taciturn about the procedure. “I don't like to talk about that,” he says. “A lot of guys are like that. They will watch videos of other people getting castrated, but they won't discuss their own procedure.”

As with his previous attempt, there were problems. Once again Gelding wound up in an emergency room. This time, though, his testicles were gone by the time be got there. He made up a cover story about an S&M party gone terribly wrong. That sort of thing is plausible in San Francisco, he notes. The hospital staff bought his story and called a police officer to take a report. “There I was a victim,” he remembers.

Life as a eunuch has been good. Gelding controls his own sex drive with biweekly testosterone injections. He's patient, clear-headed, and doesn't get angry. Best of all he doesn't have to think about his balls anymore.On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon Gelding, in the nude, answers a knock on his front door. He just moved into a new house and is remodeling the bathroom. “This is my painting outfit,” he explains, stepping aside. “This way I don't get all sweaty.”From a pragmatic standpoint, painting in the buff makes sense. It's easier to wash paint off your skin, after all, than out of your clothes. But there's more than pragmatism at play here; there's good old American shock value. Although it seems incongruous that a man who cut off his testicles to control his emotions would seek such thrills, there's no denying that Gelding relishes the spotlight. Why else play such a prominent role in the world of eunuchs?

At the same time, he's uncomfortable with having too much of his own identity revealed, especially when it comes to his role as a cutter. Much of the concern is practical: Practicing medicine without a license is a third-degree felony in Florida, punishable by up to five years in prison. But there also is an undeniable sense that Gelding -- despite his exhibitionism -- is sometimes uneasy talking about himself.

His living room is still a jumble of boxes, papers, and furniture. Navigating through it, he stops in the hallway outside the bathroom and picks up a small plastic paint bucket. Then he hikes up the volume on a boombox, tuned to a classical station playing Wagner. Once back in the bathroom, he climbs a stepladder and gets to work, dipping just the tip of his brush in the bucket then applying paint to the wall in short, even strokes. He's methodical, working the same square foot until it glistens under a smooth, thick coat of off-white. Only then does he move on. Once in a while a minute flaw will catch his eye, and he'll mumble, rub the spot with his thumb, then go over it again and again. A small chain dangling at the end of his pierced penis sways to and fro with the rhythm of the work.

Gelding's piercing runs perpendicular to the natural urethral opening, so that there are three holes instead of one. This allows him to accessorize with his extensive collection of genital jewelry that includes a device known as a barbell, an inch-long, stainless-steel rod with pea-size knobs on each end that fits through his perpendicular piercings.

He also has four tattoos: an eagle on his right arm, a ram's head on his left butt cheek, and a tiger on his right butt cheek. On his right calf is a tattoo of a testicle speared by a sword over the word EUNUCH.

He paints, talks, listens to Wagner, pauses, and paints some more. In the course of the conversation, he offhandedly remarks that, yes, he is a cutter himself, a question he had dodged a few days earlier by noting, “Let's not go into that. It's illegal in all 50 states.”

Gelding says he acquired his skills by assisting other cutters, and with the help of a lover who happened to be a veterinarian. He performed his first procedure in 1978, his last one about three months ago. By now he's probably castrated 50 men, though he stopped counting at 35.

These days he's a reluctant cutter, because he doesn't trust his own motives. For him the act of cutting is half altruism, half sexual fantasy. In his book it's okay to help someone out. This is why he performs castrations for free -- notwithstanding small “gifts” that might help defray the cost of traveling. But if he cuts because it's a turn-on, he's crossed a line.

The distinction became clear for him a few years ago when he castrated an S&M slave at the behest of the slave's master. “Whose idea was it,” Gelding asks rhetorically, “the slave or the master? Is the slave fixing something and is it a good thing to do, or is this an idea that comes from the master? In this case it was the master's idea, and he had set up the whole scene, the whole situation. He explained in a logical, plausible manner that it was the boy's idea, that he wanted to make the ultimate sacrifice to bond their relationship.”