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Lube gives permission. It greases the hinges on pleasure's gates. It helps parts mesh like clockwork in ways no clockmaker intended. Lube makes everything slippery -- including preconceived ideas. A touch of Crisco turns a cucumber from foodstuff to plaything. And how many of us first learned the pleasures of our cocks and assholes by the slipperiness of soap?

"I still think lubes are the best kept secret," says Matt, a 50-year-old out gay man who teaches sex-ed at a large Eastern university -- and is surprised by his students' reticence on how they conquer sexual friction. "I still really wonder what straight men use for masturbation, whether it's alone or with someone else," he muses, even after years leading classroom discussions. Reaching for lube requires a spark of self-awareness about what one is doing. "That's how I'd present it to my students -- if you leave this course with one thing, leave knowing the value of lube, and that will improve your well-being and happiness." Smart young adults dumb about lube? Take Eddie, a graduate student outside Philadelphia, whose early encounter with a mohel (a Jewish circumciser) means that, for him, masturbation equals chafing. "I'd tried K-Y before but it always seemed to gum up and form little rubber balls," he says. "Lube didn't really make any sense." For a while last summer, Eddie spent days in bed avoiding his PhD thesis -- leaving his dry cock rubbed raw. The irritation prompted a fresh search for a masturbatory salve. But supplies were scanty in the vacation cabin where he'd sequestered himself. Poking into the medicine chest he considered Preparation H but settled on suntan lotion. Then a friend suggested virgin olive oil -- and it proved a soothing revelation. Now Eddie says he's exploring lubes of all sorts. "Indian hair oil is great," he reports, "though it's a little hard to get the smell out."

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b>LUBE LUBRICIOUS

If some people are slow to reach for liniments when they need relief, maybe that's partly from lube's long association with acts "unnatural." Heterosexuality, according to Judeo- Christian conceit, doesn't need help -- with penis ordained as precise key to vagina's lock. Lube is queer because it makes the "unnatural" easy. Cocks up assholes? Fists into cunts? Orifices too tight or too dry? Lube greases the way to sex acts about pleasure not procreation. Lube widens the horizons of physiological possibility like alcohol lubricates parties. So it's curious that K-Y -- perhaps the sexual lubricant enjoying greatest mindshare -- has a rep so heterosexual. Missionary-position fucking, evidently, sometimes needs a helping hand. Despite what it's best known for now, K-Y was introduced in 1904 as a surgical aid by Van Horn & Sawtell, a New York drug manufacturer and suture-maker. "Actually the letters do not stand for anything specific," says Matt Tumminello (who overlooks how nicely their pointiness resolves into lines). "Over the years," he says, "we've lost the story." Johnson & Johnson bought K-Y 90 years ago. Tumminello, a Manhattan PR man, is helping the firm give the brand a queerer valence. Through strategic forgetting and fudging, K-Y for more than a century has kept its status ambiguous. Clear and greaseless, the gel proved its worth for medical proddings, insertions and intubations. More recently, K-Y has been put to work as a conductive medium for measuring the skin's galvanic response. Mixed with color on Hollywood sets, K-Y is a stand- in for the blood of aliens and slimes of all kinds. Comprised essentially of water, glycerine and cellulose (think Metamucil), K-Y was always decorously multipurpose. Unlike the condoms you might buy it with at the drugstore, the lube admitted of completely unprurient uses -- think fevered babies and rectal thermometers. Actually, you couldn't buy K-Y over-the-counter in the US until 1980, and its prescription-only status heightened the lube's MD-approved heterosexual pedigree.

GREASE OF THE GODS

From the beginning, doctors and nurses regarded K-Y as superior to petroleum-based products that are much harder to wash off and clean up. Preeminent in that category is another storied lube, also with New York roots. "The Vaseline journey started in 1859, when a 22-year-old chemist from Brooklyn named Robert A Chesebrough went to Pennsylvania to investigate an oil well,"waxes the official history on Unilever's corporate website. Vaseline and cocks was a connection almost fated. "While Chesebrough was there," the story continues, "he discovered a gooey substance known as 'Rod Wax' that was causing the oil rig workers problems, as it stuck to the drilling rigs, causing them to seize up." How did Rod Wax get its name? How did rig workers pass the time while their drills sat stuck? Such questions await their graduate students. For his part, fascinated by Rod Wax, Cheesbrough repaired to his lab and after months of tinkering turned gunky into silky. By 1880, there were Vaseline factories across the British Empire. By the end of that decade, a bottle was sold in the US every minute. The translucent grease not only sat in bathrooms and workshops, but lodged in the cultural firmament. By the early decades of the 20th century, a quarter- mile stretch along New York's Central Park was dubbed Vaseline Alley -- a term that's since become monicker for any number of places men cruise. Vaseline isn't trendy, and today it's verboten for any sex requiring latex protection - - grease can degrade 90 percent of a rubber's strength in minutes. But the jelly still has fans. "It's just perfect as far as I'm concerned for masturbating," says Arthur, a 63-year- old Bostonian who's been dipping into the jar for nearly half a century. And not, if he can help it, jars of generic petroleum jelly. A Vaseline connoisseur, Arthur insists on the name-brand for what he considers its exquisite balance of grip and slip."It has the ability to go up and down easily -- just enough so that you've got firm contact." Vaseline's makers are only too happy to explain why, touting the product's "mixture of mineral oils, paraffin and microcrystalline waxes." With a melting point just above body temperature, the jelly "literally melts into skin, flowing into the spaces between cells and the gaps in our lipid barrier," says Unilever. "Once there, it re-solidifies, locking itself in place" Fuck with Vaseline (you can with a polyurethane condom) and from the stand point of your pores, Vaseline is fucking you.

If K-Y was your parents' sexual lubricant (perhaps even handmaiden at your conception) and Vaseline greased the busy pistons of pre-Stonewall cruising,the lubricant of gay liberation was another century-old triumph of industrial technology. Derived from the starting syllables of "crystallized cottonseedoil," Crisco was devised by a Proctor & Gamble chemist aiming to make --not slicken -- one sort of phallic object. Candles, actually, were what the company had in mind when it hired Edwin C Kayser to make vegetable oil hard at room temperature - - the idea being to find a cheap substitute for beef tallow. The rise of electric lighting put the kabosh on that project. So biz-plan B was repositioning Kayser's grease as human food. A huge marketing campaign followed to win the hearts of housewives.

From whispered gay lore, Crisco burst out of the closet in the 1970s, taking the crown for the most popular anal lube. Procter & Gamble's long-touted claims about Crisco going easy on tummies became setup for a punch-line. "Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant," declared the first edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, "since it is not only greasy but also digestible." Even if it boasted a shelf-life of two years, the scent of rancid Crisco became part of the olfactory background radiation of '70s bathhouses.

Crisco was so synonymous with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, notes Drew Sawyer, citing New York's Crisco Disco, a popular club during the 1970s and early '80s. At Club Z in Seattle, a mural from that time celebrating the lube now pays homage to it.

While some still swear by Crisco for dildo and fisting action, for gay men of a certain generation, the shortening is a haunted symbol. "I think people have a very emotional relationship to Crisco," contends Tristan Taormino, author of The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. "Crisco has a cultural significance that is unmatched. It's synonymous with an era of asses up in slings, underground clubs, red hankies and an alternative, sex-radical world still on the fringes of society."

Ironically, fucking with Crisco rather than cooking with it was perhaps the best use for Edwin Kayser's invention. The industrial hydrogenation of vegetable oil produced lipids otherwise alien to nature. The tummy, it turned out, doesn't know what to do with them. Laden with trans fats, Crisco might be fine for slickening rectums; eaten, however, it perilously clogged arteries.

If Crisco and Vaseline aren't what they used to be, their displacement has cleared the field for the new art and science of erotic lubrication. The need to keep condoms slick but intact helped grease the birth of silicone-based sex lubes. There are flavored lubes, hybrid water-silicone lubes, warming lubes,lubes fortified with pheromones and oil-based lubes just for spanking the monkey. With new polyurethane condoms that oil can't melt, even the storied greases of yore might make a comeback. With lubes on display not just at sexshops but also corner drug stores, maybe Professor Matt's students don't talk much about lube because they take it for granted. Their reticence shouldn't obscure the fact that now is the golden age of lubes. With their help, the gates of sexual pleasure can glide wider than ever.

There are hundreds of lubes on the market, so greasing your gun or wetting your whistle involves the challenge of choice. Depending on what you're lubricating for -- fucking, fisting, wrestling or plain-jane jerking-off -- at stake are questions of health and pleasure.

Despite the variety, today's lubes are based essentially on either water,oil or silicone.

For fucking with latex condoms, stick with water-based or silicone lubes.

Water-based lubes (such as ID Glide, Joe Lube and Wet) run the risk ofdrying with friction; adding water, spit, or more lube can bring slippery back. Water-based products don't stain, wash out easily and are safe to use with silicone sex toys. Wet equals cool? A new breed of "warming" lubes addchemically induced heat to the mix.

Silicone lubes (such as Eros Bodyglide, Gun Oil, ID Millennium and WetPlatinum) came on the market almost 20 years ago -- just in time for slicking the latex condoms vital to making fucking safer. Silicone lubes have real staying power -- they're not absorbed by skin or membrane. "It's kind of like blowing your nose -- your body just naturally gets rid of it," says Mason Nanceof Empowered Products, makers of Gun Oil. Silicone works even for underwater frolics -- but best not to use these lubes on silicone toys: in this case, like dissolves like.

"You have to really think about it to find a difference between different silicone lubes," asserts Christophe Pettus, president of sex-toy vendorBlowfish.com. "The basic formulation is pretty much the same across the board. Water-based lubes vary more." Check the label -- some water- based lubes, such as Liquid Silk, are fortified with silicone for extra longevity. It's a nice hybrid, Pettus says, but watch those toys.

As long as men take cocks in hands, a place remains for oil-based products(Jack Jelly, Stroke 29, Vaseline). For masturbation -- solo or mutual -- grease is still good. And with non-latex, polyurethane condoms (such as Durex Avanti Superthin and Trojan Supra) oily lubes are okay for fucking.

For fisting, many swear by J-Lube, a powder you mix with water that's marketed mostly to veterinarians. Powdered lubes also are popular for lube-wrestling. (Lube doesn't just make sex organs slippery, it turns whole bodies into sex organs!)

Some ingredients in lube are maybe best not there. Anesthetics (lidocaine orbenzocaine) may lessen the hurt but also keep your bottom from letting you know something's up. "Pay extra attention to your body's signals if you are using this type of lubricant," advises Dr Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco City Clinic.

LUBE TIMELINE

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com