Anatole Gribsby

My year of living pseudonymously

Between 2006 and 2011 I did a lot of work with the pioneering German bodywork group Gay Love Spirit. They are a spiritual and sexual self-development group for gay men, who use an eclectic mix of techniques and disciplines, with an emphasis on the somatic. That is, they take the concept of holism very seriously and treat the body-mind as one single thing. The focus of their work is the marriage of body and mind.

A friend once asked me, “So do you sit around talking about sex all the time?” and when I thought how to answer that question, I realised how non-verbal Gay Love Spirit’s practice is. Everything is brought back to the body; sexuality, the body’s most enthusiastic interest, is honoured as a sacred life-force. You don’t sit around and talk about it. You do it. By which I don't mean that the workshops are orgies; it's more a matter of examining issues of touch and intimacy.

One of the side-effects of Gay Love Spirit’s work is that you become committed to sexuality, to sorting it out, developing and exploring it. And you acquire certain skills along the way. I quickly noticed during the workshops that I was a naturally talented erotic masseur, and so when it came to signing on for GLS’s rather pricy two-year training I decided to go professional in order to pay their fees.

I had often thought about documenting the GLS work, but had never been able to get a handle on it. How do you write about something so important and yet so non-verbal? Then it occurred to me that perhaps the answer was simply to describe the result of the work, ie, the person that GLS had turned me into. Accordingly I set up a blog and wrote about my experiences as a Sacred Intimate, a term coined by the Body Electric School in an attempt to re-brand sex-work.

The blog was called Diary Of An Erotic Masseur and ran for nine months. It started in June 2010, at the end of the first year of the GLS course, after I had just had a life-changing experience at their Nature workshop in the Swiss alps. Something had happened to my body-mind, with the result that, after twenty years of songwriting silence, words and music started coming to me in my sleep.

So my Diary of An Erotic Masseur, which was conceived as an anarchic Belle de Jour exercise (complete with pseudonym and carefully hidden identity) became also a record of a period of intense transition, in which I adjusted to the idea that I was going to be a musician again, as the songs poured out of me like a bubbling jaccuzzi. By October I had met Dominik Strutzenberger and by December we had formed a band. Ironically, my erotic massage practise ended up as the less important strand of this period, although it afforded many a picaresque adventure.

I had so much creative energy that I didn’t know what to do with it, so I quite naturally decided to do everything. I would be not only a writer and a musician, I would also be an artist. I would, in fact, be a brand.

I needed to produce some art, so I contacted an Italian porn-comic illustrator and asked him to do a picture of Prince William and Kate Middleton having sex, and with this I produced an alternative (in fact, anal-ternative) Royal Wedding souvenir plate in time for the happy day in April 2011. I set up shop online and sold my wares to Americans and Australians. I was hoping to cause a scandal and become a towering but incognito figure in the art-world like Banksy; I didn’t get quite that far, but I placed my plates in my local street-art gallery, which was endorsement enough. I was—I am—an artist.

By the summer of 2011 my music project with Dominik was beginning to find its feet, and I was feeling sufficiently confident not to need elaborate marketing ploys to launch it. Why run round in circles trying to be Banksy when you are already a decent songwriter with a perfectly good history as a signed artist? I decided to go back into pop as myself rather than as Anatole Gribsby, my pseudonym.

Yet the spectre of Mr Gribsby still hovers around me. Perhaps he is my Ziggy Stardust, my alter-ego, my excuse to do things that the old Robert Farrar might not have done.

I am keeping the Gribsby brand alive for now, as a cute nom-de-plume that I can pull out from time to time, rather than an impenetrable mask to hide behind. My new general blog is called Anatole Gribsby’s Hi Class Blog.

If I ever open a tea-room it will of course be called Gribsby’s. My book of short stories will be called Gribsby’s Fairy Tales.

Diary of an Erotic Masseur is here

Anatole Gribsby's Hi Class Blog is here

The Gribsby Plate—here seen against Cronenberg red—is available in 6-inch and 10-inch. The illustration is by Emanuele Caponera.

For more Gribsby nonsense, click here