Quite some time ago I was contacted by a reporter named Benjamin E. Rosado, who said he was with El Mundo newspaper, Spain. (I mistakenly thought that meant he was writing for El Mundo, but as you shall see, I was wrong. No matter.)
He’d seen an old article about me on the UK site Unilad, which describes itself as “a major youth platform for breaking news and relatable viral content.” What I’m doing there, I’m not sure; I’ve been careful in my dialogues with individuals to make sure they are all 18+. But there’s no accounting for the tastes of editors, except to publishers. And I’m not rich enough to be one of those.
Back to Mr. Rosado. After some fumbling we managed to agree on a date for a Skype interview. His English was pretty good, better than my Spanish at least, and the interview lasted 1.5 hours, which is unusual. He was on a tight deadline so he wrote the story at once and sent it in to the newspaper Cronica, which it turns out is in Argentina! It ran in the Sunday edition as a feature, which figures, since it was what – 10 years old?
And it was a pretty good article despite a couple of errors, like one caused by a comment about time that made Rosado think I was living in Indiana (?). He also had me driving from Washington State to Mississippi to try to rescue Dolly, rather than from Philadelphia, where the car was — but never mind. I have fixed the errors in translation. Despite a certain Latin tendency to melodrama, Mr. Rosado’s article was mostly accurate and, thankfully, non-judgmental. He is to be commended for doing a good job. Muchas graçias, Señor Rosado!
TRANSLATION BY GOOGLE
My romance with a dolphin, of which I have written a book.
At first I rejected her, but I ended up falling in love.
The facts are not recent, they happened at the end of 1971, but they have taken on an unexpected meaning under the cover of the new animalistic creed. Let’s start at the end: Malcolm J. Brenner had sex with a dolphin. Then he was 20 years old and the world was not prepared to understand what was going through his mind every time he appeared Dolly, a flirtatious and seductive cetacean from Floridaland. In that natural reserve, now extinct, which occupied several hectares of Sarasota County, tourists could feel the warm embrace of nature. Let’s say, to synthesize, that Brenner was no exception.
It took him more than three decades to gather enough courage to tell his story in a book, Wet Goddess (Diosa Mosada), that in the absence of publishers who were not scandalized with the recreation of underwater scenes he self-published in 2010. Five years later, his romance with Dolly appeared in a short documentary, Dolphin Lover, which caused a sensation at the Slamdance alternative film festival. No one could believe what Brenner confirms to us on the phone from his home in Florida: “We do not practice sex, but in each encounter in the water we made love.” What follows is a confidence, as delusional as tenderly true, of a man marked by an unconventional love affair.
You have to go back to the summer of 1970 to date the crush. At that time, Brenner was a student at New College and accepted the proposal of a writer who prepared a book about Floridaland dolphins. “She asked me to take the pictures to illustrate the volume,” he recalls. “I dreamed of becoming a journalist and I didn’t hesitate for a second.” They rented a boat and toured the reserve until they reached the dolphinarium dock. “I’ve never been so close to a dolphin and I experienced an indescribable feeling.” What Brenner did not imagine is that the Dolly Pizpireta, who celebrated his entry into the water by shaking the fins, would eventually become his lover. “I started rubbing her back and belly, and she seemed to enjoy my touch.”
The courtship lasted several weeks. In the morning Dolly worked as an acrobat in the Floridaland family show in front of crowded crowds of children. She had been trained by the Navy to locate mines and transport spy equipment. Compared to military missions on the open sea, the trick of the hula hoop was a bicoca that provided generous buckets of sardines. In the afternoon, Brenner paid her a visit. “When I got into the water, she approached me without fear and asked for attention. I never fed her, but as time went by, our encounters became more vigorous and intense: when she saw me, she put a belly up to touch her genital cleft.”
At first Brenner resisted. “She reacted to my refusal violently. On one occasion, she tried to masturbate with my foot, but I rejected her proposal,” he confesses to CHRONICLE. “Then she pounced on me and sank me with full weight to the bottom of the dolphinarium. I made it clear that that tactic would not work with me, so she took pains on other types of erotic tricks that ended up conquering me.” As he relates in his book, Dolly was massaging his arms and legs with her fine and pointed teeth. “It was a way of telling me: I am strong but I will not harm you.” By then Brenner had already begun to ask himself some questions. “I suspected there was something different about my sexuality. And, although I was attracted to Dolly, I yearned with all my might to be a normal person.”
That club was not made for him. His parents, devoted followers of Wilhelm Reich and his esoteric theories about orgone, put him in the hands of a psychologist who ended up abusing him. “I don’t know if a zoophile is born or made, but something had to do with the vexations I suffered in the consultation.” His first erection was provided by a dog at the age of 5. “I had gone to the cinema to see The Shaggy Dog and I shuddered to see the effect that the character of Walt Disney caused me.” The defloration came five years later, coinciding with the estrous cycle of Miss Clavel, the family poodle. “She was in heat and I assumed that she wouldn’t mind having sex with me. But I was wrong. It was an embarrassing and unromantic incident. I felt dirty.”
Splashing in the water with Dolly helped him clear his bad conscience. “Zoophilia comes from Greek and means ‘animal lover.’ I am not a goat rapist farmer, but a person capable of experiencing tender and affectionate emotions with animals.” A cloudy morning in 1970 he approached the dolphinarium with the intention of having sex with Dolly. “I tried to penetrate her, but the water was too cold and I was terrified that they could discover us at any moment.”
It took a year for them to consummate their relationship. “I made love with Dolly on my last visit to the park, when their owners decided to sell the land to build homes.”
Brenner took pains in the preliminaries for half an hour. “We practice games and try different positions until finally I managed to break through. Dolly’s vagina was like a sucking valve that caused me a sense of fusion at all levels: emotionally, mentally, physically and even spiritually. I managed to climax almost at the same time that Dolly emitted three groans in increasing cadence, which led me to think that she also reached orgasm. Then she rested her snout on my shoulder and we held each other for several minutes while staring into each other’s eyes.”
Brenner, today single and father of a daughter, fruit of his first marriage, is still excited to remember the outcome of the story. “When I learned that Dolly had died, I drove from Philadelphia to Mississippi to visit the ocean where she spent her last days,” he recalls. “Her coach told me that she had not wanted to eat and that they found her faint at the bottom of one of the tanks. He explained that the dolphin’s breathing is voluntary and that she had let herself die … I think Dolly killed herself for love.” And he says goodbye to the other side of the line: “Please do not describe me as a disturbed or a sexual depraved (person). Talk about a man who fell in love with a non-human person and who only regrets not having spent more time with her.”
– BENJAMÍN G. ROSADO
Malcolm J. Brenner 