Jonah Falcon OUT magazine article
jonah...@mindspring.com
THERE’S JUST ONE THING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JONAH FALCON
13.5 INCHES
(AND NOW YOU DO.)
By Guy Trebay
The man with the biggest dick in New York is bummed. No one seems to
want him for his mind. Although Jonah Falcon has a number of fine
qualities and is a complex person and has clear green eyes and a
slightly goofy but winning smile and an IQ, he is quick to inform you,
that rates well above the national average, there are very few people
who notice much about him north of his waistband. The eyes of most
people who meet Jonah Falcon are inevitably and almost hypnotically
drawn to what’s inside his pants.
It is true that he does very little to deflect attention. The first
time I met Jonah Falcon he came charging down a street in lower
Manhattan wearing Lycra bike shorts. Jonah was heading south; all the
people heading north seemed to have their heads inclined at a strange
angle. I understood why as soon as he came into view. Hyperbole comes
naturally when describing Jonah Falcon’s endowment. I’ve heard some
people refer to him as a human tripod and others say that his clothed
genitals resemble a shrink-wrapped courtesy basket of room-service
fruit and once was told by a former sex partner of his that "it" was
bigger than a loaf of Wonder bread. Very few of the slang terms
customarily used to refer to the male member can even begin to
characterize Jonah’s dimensions—not one-eyed trouser mouse, or heat-
seeking love missile, or pocket pistol, or even anaconda.
When filmmaker Meema Spadola was shooting Private Dicks, her 1999 HBO
documentary about male genitals, she and coproducer Thom Powers
arranged to have Jonah Falcon’s penis measured on camera. The
calculation was made using a method standardized by a 1979 Kinsey
Institute survey, from which measurements of a group of college men’s
penises produced the widely invoked statistic that a majority (23.9
percent) of American men have six-inch dicks. Kinsey researchers
measured from the point where the penile shaft meets the pubic bone to
the tip of the glans, and, where necessary, retracted foreskins to
avoid giving the uncircumcised any unfair advantage. What’s interesting
about the results of this landmark study isn’t that famously reassuring
midrange figure but the numbers at either end: If I read my bar graph
correctly, an average American college man is twice as likely to have
an erect penis of 3.75 inches than to have one measuring nine, the
point at which Kinsey stopped counting. I should note that the
measurements were made while the subjects were erect. Nine inches was
the size of Jonah Falcon’s erection the year he entered eighth grade.
Spadola’s documentary confirms that Jonah Falcon’s penis currently
measures 9.5 inches flaccid. Hard, it is 13.5 inches in length and
eight inches in circumference. For purposes of comparison it might help
to consider that this is larger than the penises of 99.99 percent of
all living males, probably including Milton Berle; larger than the
mythical penis of gangster John Dillinger (so legendary that FBI agents
were reputed to have amputated it and kept it preserved in a jar);
larger even than the penis of almost every porn star, with the possible
exception of Long Dong Silver, whose rarely erect 18-inch penis figured
so prominently in the congressional hearings on the confirmation of
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Unlike the penises of many adult-film actors and many men of outsized
endowment, Jonah’s is said to be fully operational. In the 15 years
that the 29-year-old has been sexually active, he claims to have had
over 3,000 sexual partners, or roughly one sexual encounter every other
day since puberty. He has penetrated women and men and also himself,
just because he can. Even those who cannot anatomically accommodate it
will ask (and sometimes pay) to see Jonah Falcon’s penis. Even those
with no particular preference for members of their own sex will
publicly request that he whip it out. Jonah Falcon’s penis may not have
a life of its own, but is has a reality separate from the rest of him.
It is either a gift or a curse or a cosmic joke, but whatever it is, it
defines him.
Everyone knows that size matters, but it doesn’t always matter in the
ways you’d imagine. "The humongous penis, like the idealized female
body, is a cultural fantasy," claims cultural critic Susan Bordo in her
book The Male Body. That having one may or may not add to anyone’s
sexual potency or pleasure is beside the point. "Appearing as a ‘big
man’ to other men is an important aspect of men’s preoccupation with
size," says Bordo. There are very few men whose dicks would not appear
insignificant when compared with Jonah’s. "Jonah is the biggest by far
in the documentary," says Spadola. "But with Jonah it’s kind of
poignant. It’s not a matter of, ‘This has been great.’ It’s more, ‘This
has been a problem for me.’ When I did my documentary Breasts, these
women with really big breasts would say, ‘You have no idea what it’s
like carrying these things around.’ And it’s the same with him and his
dick."
This is brought home to me one evening at the 10th annual reunion of
the 1988 class of the Bronx High School of Science, one of several
elite New York City public high schools whose students compete
vigorously for admission. When Jonah attended Bronx Science, he was
introverted and uncool, obsessed with computer games and baseball stats
and so morbidly self-conscious about his penis that he wore enormous
sweatshirts and jeans all the time. The "high point" of Jonah’s high
school career was a meeting with the science fiction writer Issac
Asimov, patron saint of nerds. "I was miserable all the time,"
he says. Jonah’s quotation in the senior yearbook suggests that at the
time he was either reading too much Beckett or contemplating suicide.
"Some people think this is the beginning," he wrote. "Some people say
it’s the end. I say goodbye."
The reunion party is being held at Joey’s Paesano, a pasta joint in
midtown Manhattan. When I arrive Jonah is sitting alone at a white
Yamaha piano picking out an Elvis Costello tune. With his green wire-
rimmed glasses, button-down shirt, and hair a little too neatly combed,
he seems a lot younger than most of his former classmates. In at least
one way he hasn’t changed since high school: He’s got on loose-fitting
corduroys. Concealment isn’t always Jonah’s first priority, however.
I first encountered Jonah Falcon one day while channel surfing. He was
serving as the butt of one of Howard Stern’s humiliating jokes. The
shock jock’s size obsession is so much a part of his shtick that it
didn’t require strenuous thinking to guess that the surprise guest
recruited to play "What’s Up With My Secret?" might be "hiding"
something extra in his drawers. Jonah appeared on the show wearing
baggy gym shorts. Once Stern "guessed" the secret, he stripped them off
to reveal bike shorts and a penis so clearly outlined that the
producers blocked it out with pixels. Undeterred, Jonah turned his back
to the camera and arranged himself so the bulging glans was still
visible in profile. "I don’t consider you big if you can’t wrap it
around your hip," he later remarked.
In a room full of tipsy overachievers Jonah barely stands out. Or he
wouldn’t, if not for his response to the alumni questionnaire. Along
with a $35 check for dinner, graduates of the class of 1988 were asked
to submit a description of the craziest thing they’d done since high
school. The responses were transcribed onto huge sheets of kraft paper
and posted on the windows of Joey’s Paesano. One alumnus wrote that
he’d hand-fed a hawk in Tanzania. Another had moved to the most
isolated island chain in the world. One ran for Congress. One got
married twice in the same day. One flipped over a moving truck
somewhere in the Nevada desert. One upholstered a sofa in
green plaid. Near the bottom of the sheet was the name Jonah Falcon and
an entry, which anyone who didn’t know better might have assumed was a
particularly juvenile gag: "Appeared on national television," he wrote,
"to display my 13.5-inch erect penis."
"What are you doing here?" A man’s voice shrills in my ear. It emanated
from Mr. Schweidel, a balding, pear-shaped homeroom-teacher archetype
with Coke-bottle glasses. Back in 1987, Mr. Schweidel taught Jonah’s
11th-grade history class. "What are you doing here?" he now demands.
For the past 20 minutes, we’ve been sitting inconspicuously in a corner
near the bar, Jonah sipping a Coke while I take notes. Jonah has been
explaining to me some of the practical considerations of having a penis
bigger than a stadium hot dog, using the same tone of matter-of-fact
resignation a basketball player might employ when telling you that he’s
forced to buy his suits at Rochester Big & Tall. Jonah’s anatomical
situation carries with it a number of logistical dilemmas. He is
obliged, he says, to wear baggy clothes to any kind of "important"
function and, less obviously, to hold his penis up out of the water
when "doing number two." He tends to avoid making a spectacle of
himself at public urinals and populated areas of beaches and at
the gym, although he is not averse to wearing skin-tight silver vinyl
trousers at clubs. He has trouble meeting people who can "take all of
me," he claims, and problems finding a condom to use with those who
can. "I can’t just buy any size condom," Jonah says. "They only fit
half my cock. I don’t care what they do to test them on cucumbers.
Those are not living organs."
When I explain to Mr. Schweidel that I’m here to interview Jonah about
his dick for a magazine article, he gives me a withering look. "You’re
writing a story about a penis?" he asks in a tone loud enough to stop
nearby conversations. Why not? "Everyone should find out what it’s like
to have a penis in this culture," as Meema Spadola once told me, "even
if you have one yourself."
In a postfeminist world, everybody is expected to know that enormous
cultural privilege attaches to the mere fact of owning a penis. "It
sometimes seems as though popular culture has gone directly from near
censorship to blatant sexual fetishization—even idolatry—of the male
organ," writes Susan Bordo, although history is cluttered with examples
of cultures fetishizing and adoring and glorifying and customizing and
decorating and enhancing and inscribing the penis, especially the
oversized kind, with all manner of nutty and portentous meanings. It
is, after, all, a magical organ, one capable of "miraculous
transformation," as Maggie Paley points out in The Book of the
Penis. Not every guy, however, feels as though evolution (penis size is
genetic) has dealt him a miracle. "Most men know what size penis they
have," asserts Paley, "because they’ve measured their erections. Some
are happy with their size, but the majority would rather be bigger."
There’s nothing particularly modern about that. Evidence is abundant
that men in early societies were worked up about dick size and did what
they could to improve on it. Their reasons may have had to do with
sexual advertising for the purpose of procreation or may have had to do
with social dominance or may have just been a matter of aesthetic
preference. Among the ancients, only the Greeks considered big dicks
undesirable evidence of coarse animal nature. In the art of most other
cultures, the preferred look for penises was pumped. When the actual
organs failed to meet socially instituted ideals, people enhanced them.
Their methods weren’t so different from those in used today.
A rock tied to a thong looped around the glans may strike some people
as primitive and painful, but how about the patented English
PeniStretcher, or the MegaTrac, or the P.U.D. Tugger, to name just a
few of the augmenters advertised in the back pages of men’s magazines?
Each of these devices essentially uses an updated version of thongs and
rocks to distend the consumer’s penis on a more or less permanent
basis. One model, the JES Extender, resembles a miniature torture rack
with surgical-steel turnbuckles that have to be cranked several times
daily for optimal effect. After four months of self-induced distress,
the customer can hope for an average extension of 2.8 centimeters
erect. This negligible increase is roughly the same as what has been
achieved by the estimated 15,000 men who’ve signed up for costly penile-
enlargement surgery since it was introduced in 1991. "Results vary,"
says Luis Cenedese, a New York surgeon who specializes in penis
enhancement, or phalloplasty. "Usually, you get about one to two inches
in length." By transplanting fat cells or fat cut in strips from below
the buttocks, surgeons can also add "about an inch to an inch and a
half in width." Yet there’s no way to "guarantee the big dick you’ve
always wanted," says Cenedese.
Mr. Schweidel is back. Jonah and I have ducked to an isolated table on
an indoor terrace. Schweidel has tracked us down so he can display to
his wife the former student and the journalist weirdo who’s writing the
story. Mrs. Schweidel takes a moment to process what Mr. Schweidel has
told her and then says, in a thoughtful voice, "Well, if you’re a guy
and you have to have a ift, then that’s the one."
Jonah Adam Julio Cardeli Falcon was born on July 29, 1970, in
Greenpoint Hospital in Brooklyn to an accounting clerk and a sailor.
His name, which can mean prophet and also dove, was taken from a book
of baby names, and any obvious Biblical echoes were certainly
unforeseen. Although Jonah shares the surname of Joe Falcon, his
mother’s husband, he insists that his real father was the porn star
John Holmes. Jonah never offers any particular proof of this assertion,
beyond the most obvious one. "People who knew him say we have the same
dick," is what Jonah says. Joe Falcon died when Jonah was two; after
that, his mother raised him alone. From the time he was six, Jonah was
sent to stay with his mother’s family in Puerto Rico for part of each
year. At eight, for a variety of reasons he’s secretive about, he was
placed in a facility in Brooklyn for emotionally disturbed children. "I
think my mom just couldn’t afford to keep me at home. But, believe me,
I didn’t have the kinds of problems other people in that place had."
Pictures from that time show Jonah as a round-faced adolescent with the
beginnings of a fuzzy mustache. He looks geeky. He looks younger than
his age. He still does, and some people have trouble believing that he
is nearly 30. Jonah left the treatment facility at 12 and was admitted
to a series of public schools, where, he says, he "got into computers"
and baseball and was "very much a wallflower." Hacking and shagging
flies with his buddies were the extent of his social life. "I never did
any of that comparing stuff. By high school there were guys in class
who were big and beefy and muscular and looked like they were 30." Even
in his high school graduation picture Jonah looks 13. "I was not very
muscular and I always had this huge dick." Jonah first measured his
penis at age 12, using a "cloth tape, one of those things people use
when they’re sewing," and continued to track its unusual growth through
the years. He insists that he has never had any form of augmentation
or used weights or vacuum pumps, "although I masturbated every possible
minute and maybe that contributed to my size."
This may be the place to mention what an odd-looking organ Jonah
possesses. Although I’ve declined his frequent offers of a personal
inspection, he appears nude in Spadola’s documentary and has posted
naked pictures of himself on a website dedicated to people with a
special interest in oversized breasts and dicks. I’ve also found myself
in the peculiar position of discussing his penis with a number of
people who’ve experienced it intimately. The consensus is that Jonah
Falcon’s dick bears less resemblance to the average organ than to a
prize-winning vegetable at a county fair.
A famous French fashion designer, whose own penis, I’m told, measures
over 10 inches, calls Jonah’s a "kielbasa." A German actor whose
endowment is said to be nearly equal to Jonah’s terms it "grotesque."
One New York AIDS activist, who carried on an intermittent relationship
with Jonah, remarks that, "It’s strange because, for a gay man
especially, there’s this fascination with dick and big dick—like you
want it both in the sense of having one like that yourself and in the
sense of having that particular one to play with." As it turned out,
the possibilities for play were "kind of limited," this man says.
"I mean, it’s something you might fantasize about, but logistically
it’s so unwieldy that your basic, average-size cock starts looking
really good."
Joey Arias, a New York drag performer celebrated for channeling Billie
Holiday, once related a story to me about picking up Jonah at a club.
The place was Squeeze Box, one of the bars Jonah tends to haunt,
wearing the silver vinyl pants and permanently needy expression that
moved a downtown columnist to characterize him as one of the ubiquitous
"nightmares in New York." Arias, however, found Jonah a "kind of nerdy,
cute kid with glasses. I didn’t realize about the thing until we were
in the cab. When I saw it I said, ‘Is that for real?’ And he said,
‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Omigod, it’s like a giant yam.’ And honey, when it
gets hard it’s not like a lot of these guys with that kind of equipment
where it never really does anything. It gets big—a bigger yam, if you
can believe that."
It was in the summer of 1988 that Jonah had what was probably his
sexual awakening, while attending Rich Martin’s Baseball Camp in
Trenton, New Jersey. One day at practice a fellow camper asked Jonah if
he was wearing an athletic cup. Jonah said no. "The kid went, like,
‘Holy shit, this guy’s hung like a horse,’ and after that people
started treating me like a god," says Jonah. During the years that
followed, Jonah exploited his special status by sleeping with
classmates and strangers, men and women, people encountered in bars and
on the street and on the Internet. He fucked nobodies, he claims,
pumped-up gym boys, and any number of good-looking women and big-name
movie stars. After high school, he hopped around from one college to
another and wound up at the State University of New York at Oneonta,
where he discovered that theater was what he like best. Jonah considers
himself an actor, though according to his résumé, he has also worked as
a concierge at the headquarters of the company that manufactures
Viagra and as busboy at Ruby Tuesday in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and can
type 70 words per minute. Hardly anybody hires Jonah to type.
"Well," Jonah says, "I try not to do it." He’s talking not about temp
work, of course, but about hiring out as an escort, which he justifies
as a "chance to meet my fans and get really personal with them." This
is the kind of semidelusional statement Jonah is inclined to make,
although it’s true that one of his fans makes regular visits from Tokyo
for a chance to get personal, and that another regularly flies him to
Los Angeles, and that still another has promised Jonah an introduction
to an obscenely wealthy Hollywood mogul whose rectal appetites more
typically require the services of amputees. "It get me places where I
wouldn’t go," says Jonah, who, as it happens, isn’t going anywhere much
today.
This is downtime. Jonah’s been having a lot of it lately. The temp jobs
usually go to women first, he remarks, and the occasional checks he
picks up for reviewing computer sports games for a techie magazine
don’t stretch very far. As for the legitimate acting gigs, well…they
haven’t exactly been panning out. At 29, Jonah shares a modest, cramped
two-bedroom apartment with his mom in a low-income housing project.
He’s still waiting for a big break. He’s waiting for some kind of
recognition. He’s waiting for someone to take his measure not as "a
penis with arms and legs attached" or as "this vascular event," but as
a man. Maybe things will change, he suggests, if he gets a Screen
Actors Guild card. Maybe they’ll change when Mercury comes out of
retrograde.
"I couldn’t really make it if I didn’t live at home," Jonah explains,
although he’s aware of the money that could be his, whenever he wants
it, in porn. "There’s always use for a guy like me in porn," he says.
"It’s not like I’m unaware that there a lot of guys who dream of having
an eight-inch dick." Adult-film producers have been hounding Jonah for
years. But he won’t do porn, he says, because it would wreck any chance
at a potential legitimate acting career—never mind that this career so
far amounts to little more than a couple of bit parts in regional
theaters.
Even among porn actors, Dirk Digglers are not easy to find. And the
kind of attention that accrues to those whom Mother Nature has endowed
in the way she did the fictitious Diggler and the real-life Falcon
tends to make the recipient feel not anatomically unique and valued but
freakish—not desirable in any legitimate way but isolated and abstract.
Being the focus of what theorists call the "objectified gaze" wouldn’t
exactly come as a shock to a well-built woman, of course. It’s one of
the many paradoxes of Jonah’s situation that he embodies a kind of
hypermasculinity and yet gets treated like a girl. In a culture that
prizes monster trucks and kiddie-pool cocktails and XXXL clothes,
there’ll always be a fascination with someone who’s genetically
supersized. But beneath the desire to possess the most and the biggest
lurks a puritan ambivalence and distrust of excess. Jonah has something
everyone wants. No one seems too interested in the rest of him. "I’ve
spent my life doing whatever people wanted sexually to get them to
notice me," says Jonah. "I’m desired and I’m wanted, but I’m also
invisible. Most people really don’t see me at all."
Guy Trebay is a columnist for THE VILLAGE VOICE and has written for THE
NEW YORKER and DETAILS
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smith#3
Who is this guy anyway? I mean - what does he do for a living?
The URL .... the URL.... POST THE URL!!!!!!
He sounds yuuuumy.
Although I’ve declined his frequent offers of a personal
inspection, he appears nude in Spadola’s documentary and has ***posted
naked pictures of himself on a website ****dedicated to people with a
Jjparterre
of his dick. He spams newsgroups with news about his dick. He gives interviews
with his dick. He shows his dick to gay guys for money.
But, he says, nobody seems to like him for himself.
Strange how a guy like that could be so misunderstood.
james jorden
jjo...@ix.netcom.com
latest opera gossip: http://www.parterre.com/lacieca.htm
David Migicovsky
<19990921235859...@ng-cg1.aol.com>...
> The only thing he ever talks about is his dick. He has a webpage with
pictures
> of his dick. He spams newsgroups with news about his dick. He gives
interviews
> with his dick. He shows his dick to gay guys for money.
>
> But, he says, nobody seems to like him for himself.
>
Gee, sounds just like Gladnick. Although at least Falcon has something
people are willing to pay to see.
--
| What's David Watching? http://www.members.tripod.com/dmigicov
| Looking for a flame-war free *FUN* newsgroup? Try alt.culture.fabulous
| E-mail: d m i g i c o v at a l t dot n e t
smith#3
O.k. well the guy sounds like a dick so forget about posting the url.
My hubby has a big one so I'll just keep staring at his =)
I did look at your web page and you Mr. Jordan are Deeeeelish!
I mean - oooooh you are so handsome!
TGIAF...
Shannon
Jjparterre wrote:
> The only thing he ever talks about is his dick. He has a webpage with pictures
> of his dick. He spams newsgroups with news about his dick. He gives interviews
> with his dick. He shows his dick to gay guys for money.
>
> But, he says, nobody seems to like him for himself.
>
Gregory
Jjparterre wrote in message
<19990921235859...@ng-cg1.aol.com>...
>The only thing he ever talks about is his dick. He has a webpage with
pictures
>of his dick. He spams newsgroups with news about his dick. He gives
interviews
>with his dick. He shows his dick to gay guys for money.
>
>But, he says, nobody seems to like him for himself.
>
>Strange how a guy like that could be so misunderstood.
I could not have said it better. I am certain that he is more than his
dick, but despite his claims to the contrary, he does not seem convinced of
this.
He is one of the most pathetic personalities on the net.
Worshiped,
but not Gregory
Loved
jonah...@mindspring.com
Try looking Jonah Falcon up at www.imdb.com :)
Or www.mindspring.com/~jonahnynla/jonah.html at Oct. 1st.
Jonah
>
> >
> > The URL .... the URL.... POST THE URL!!!!!!
> >
>
> Who is this guy anyway? I mean - what does he do for a living?
> He sounds yuuuumy.
>
> > Although Iíve declined his frequent offers of a personal
> > inspection, he appears nude in Spadolaís documentary and has
***posted
> > naked pictures of himself on a website ****dedicated to people with
a
> > special interest in oversized breasts and dicks.
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