Dirty Danny

An interview by Lernert Engelberts
Butt Magazine #19, 2007


After an unsuccessful evening of barhopping on Amsterdam’s Warmoesstraat, I stumbled back to my computer at three-thirty in the morning. On GayRomeo I came across the profile of Dirty Danny, who proudly refers to himself there as the filthiest gay man on earth, a man who hasn’t bathed in 30 years. Stunned by the thought of it, I immediately took a shower and then quickly fell asleep. But I couldn’t get him out of my mind. Dirty Danny looks like a hobo and finds sexual pleasure in being unkempt. He lives in a relatively nice place in Amsterdam, but he warned me on the telephone that his house was a bit of a mess and that I’d have to be able to deal with that. I told him that I was no sissy. Little did I know...

When I go to meet up with someone, I often make myself look a little nicer or even – but this may be hard for you to imagine – cleaner. I was just wondering, did you happen to make yourself just a little filthier for this interview? So that you’d look your best?

No, not at all. I always look the way I look now.

So how exactly does one not wash himself for 30 years? How does that work?

The nice thing is that you don’t have to do anything special for that at all. That’s the whole idea. You just have to let everything go.

So do you cut your fingernails for example?

Sometimes. Once my toenails got so long that they started growing around my toes. Which meant I was actually walking on my nails. So at that point you really need to clip them.

Your GayRomeo profile has photos of you sitting on the toilet with your pants around your ankles. You can see a sort of rash on the skin of your lower legs. What is that?

That’s dead skin. Every so often I start molting, let’s put it that way, and then it just falls off. Most people would wash or scrub it off, but on me the dead skin just stays on there.

What happens if you don’t wash your crotch for so long?

You gradually develop a kind of crotch cheese. In between your groin and your balls. It’s not the same as smegma; it smells different, too. It’s sort of slimy and yellowish-white.

I know that smegma sort of melts when your foreskin moves back and forth, making it a natural lubricant. Does crotch cheese have a function?

Eh, no, not that I know of. I just like the smell of it. Every place on your body has its own scent, and each one also differs from day to day. Scents change; it’s like they have moods. I often find myself looking at websites of other non-washers and some of them will say that they suddenly smell like onions and the next day like fish. I have that too.

When you stopped washing yourself 30 years ago, didn’t you start having all sorts of practical problems?

No. I had decided: ‘I’m just not going to do it anymore’. I had taken a sort of oath for myself. No more washing. I’d always had the idea that bathing wasn’t really right for me and so one day I basically just stopped doing it.

I heard somewhere that your body will ultimately start cleansing itself.

Yeah, that’s what I always say, that I’m self-cleansing.

And is that really the case?

Yeah, I think it is.

So then has all your work been for nothing?

No, you get a sort of balance from it all.

I read something about a project by an artist from Mexico, Horacio Cadzco, who wore the same suit for a year without ever bathing. During that year he developed a fungal culture I think it was, which made it really hard for him to continue the project.

But he kept the suit on 24 hours a day?

Yes. Don’t you keep your clothes on 24 hours a day?

I always wear the same clothes. I keep them on until they wear out. On average a shirt lasts two years, a pair of pants about a year. Socks last 3, 4, 5 months. But by then the material is threadbare. In the winter I usually wear two shirts on top of each other. I sleep about three or four nights a week without pants on. If I sleep with my shoes on, I take them off on the third night, because otherwise I’ll get 'boot rot'. The longest I’ve ever gone without ever taking anything off was three months. If I ever happen to get lice, I freeze my clothes for a couple of days and wear old clothes in the meantime, but I haven’t had lice for over 12 years now. I know soon enough whether or not a street person I’ve taken home with me has lice, and then I’ll keep a distance of at least a few feet from him. You can actually see lice crawling around, and if someone is doing a lot of scratching and itching, that’s usually a pretty good sign that he’s got them.

Do you ever change or wash your sheets?

No, I haven’t changed my sheets since ’96. It hasn’t happened since my ex moved out.

Do you at least wash your dishes?

No.

But you do cook and eat at home?

Yes, every day.

So you just put new food on dirty plates?

Yes, and it’s never given me any problems.

So, you would pour orange juice into a cup that had coffee in it without washing it first?

Well, that would be a bit gross. I just have a cup for coffee and another cup for orange juice.

As I look around your living room where we are now, I wonder how all the birds you keep in these little cages could possibly survive in this dusty mess and stench?

Yeah, you might be right that it’s gotten a little out of hand. I was so busy with work that I just never got around to cleaning my house anymore. And when my mother died a few years ago, all the stuff from her house came here too. My house has been in this state of neglect for about five years now. Before that I still had it pretty much under control.

I think you must be like the king of filth. Or do you think you could take it even further?

Well, yes, as far as I’m concerned. For example, I’m jealous of guys with really neglected, rotten teeth. I think that’s incredibly sexy. I try to neglect mine too, but it just gives me painfully infected gums.

You look like someone who lives on the street, but you have a house. Do you see yourself as a fetishized hobo? Just like there are also gay men who walk around in a police uniform.

I always call myself a gentleman tramp. But I don’t think you’ll find another person who will stick with it as long as I have. Even as a small child there was nothing I would rather do than get filthy. In those days, Monday was still everyone’s ‘washing day’. There were hardly any washing machines yet, and once in a while if my mother didn’t have time, she would just skip washing day, so then I would get to go around in the same clothes for another week. I loved that. I also took fake showers back then. I was really good at that. I would turn on the shower and make a lot of noise, but I wouldn’t go stand under the water.

Is being dirty a social taboo?

A couple of years ago I had a coming-out in my circle of friends – they know better now. In the beginning it was really hard. Filth really is taboo. You also need to break through something in yourself. Before the coming out I would try to hide it a little, for example by putting on clean clothes when I’d arrange to meet up with friends or go to work. It was kind of a double life. ’Cause as soon as I’d get home, I’d put on my dirty clothes again.

So what kind of work do you do?

I’ve been working my whole life in the cultural sector. I’ve always had temporary contracts and then those end and I go looking for new work. But I’m only getting older, you know, so it’s getting harder and harder to find it. Steady jobs are real difficult to come by these days.

Do you ever actually open a window here every so often, just to air the place out?

Um, we have automatic ventilation in the apartment complex.

Does it often happen that people say: ‘Let’s not meet at your house’?

No.

That’s never happened?

No, the people who come here are people I know, and they’re already used to it. You are wearing perfume for example, and that’s something I find really repulsive.

How do you know that I’m wearing perfume?

I can smell it. I can simply smell a scent that shouldn’t be there.

It’s Comme des Garcons and I put it on two days ago, so it can’t really be that penetrating anymore.

Well in any case I find it really sickening.

Would you mind if we’d go outside? The stench here is so strong that I’d really prefer sitting outside in the cold to staying here.

(Somewhat offended) That’s fine with me.

We leave Dirty Danny’s apartment and take the stairs down to the street level. We end up sitting in the little park in front of his house. It looks like a typical place where street people would hang out. There are empty beer cans all around the benches and cigarette butts everywhere. No doubt Danny often sits here.

Do you at least use toilet paper when you take a crap?

Yes. I do know someone who never does that. But he is always in his car, so you’re less likely to have problems from it. But I walk around a lot and then it would start irritating. It’ll give you a kind of diaper rash.

Then one of those moist towelettes afterwards might be an option for you.

You must be joking! Look, lots of those people who are into dirty sex are actually really clean. They’re just into doing something really dirty for a little while, and then they quickly pop under the shower. But for me, I want to be in the highest state of filth at all times, but I’ll do a little extra on top of that during sex. But that’s not always practical.

Because you don’t clean yourself afterwards, of course.

No, so practical considerations keep me from doing certain things. For example I sometimes do scat sex. That means you’re going to smell like someone else’s shit for a long time after that. It just takes a long time before it’s completely gone from my beard. Most people who are into scat think I’m really gross. I never understand that, because they like nothing better than to be covered from head to toe in shit, and they eat it and everything, but then they think I’m dirty!

Is it hard for you to find men who want to have sex with you?

No, that’s not hard. At least it never used to be. Now that I’m a bit older it’s a little more difficult. But often it’s me that doesn’t want it, because it’s someone who’s clean. I think men these days are a bunch of pansies. Gays are completely ridiculous. It used to be different.

You’re not going to tell me that gays used to not wash themselves?

I may be an extreme case, but it was a bit more common in those days. And in Germany, by the way, the men are generally dirtier anyway. There are a lot of people there who don’t bathe.

They say about the English: ‘Hide your money under the soap’. That way you’ll know for sure that they’ll never find it.

Oh really? My feeling is that the English are usually much too clean. They are apt to be really into soap.

So do you pay attention to how tramps look. Like do you think: ‘That one looks good’?

Absolutely. When I was going to art school in Utrecht, I always had to pass through the Hoog-Catherijne shopping mall on my way to the train station. Hoog-Catherijne is the Mecca of Dutch tramps. And this one really shaggy-looking guy was always sitting near the escalator with a bottle of hard liquor and a beard that was yellow from nicotine. You really could smell that guy when you walked by. Well, half an hour later I’d still be walking around with a hard-on. It was around that time that I started paying more attention to how that kind of tramp looked. When I saw that guy I honestly thought: ‘That’s what I want to be like. And what I would really like is to have sex with that kind of guy.’ But, you know, that’s often complicated.

But do you actually have sex with hobos?

Yeah, once in a while. But then it’s not even so much about the sexual act with a guy like that but more about being together. I think that’s true for every fetishist. The fetish is already so exciting, so titillating, that it doesn’t really matter what else you do. In my last house I had a single bed, so it’s like I had an excuse for crawling into bed with some street person I’d brought home. I often lay completely wiped out from horniness with the guy, and then finally I would start touching him a little. But I’m real careful with people and I would never get someone to do something he didn’t want to do. There are these American sites on the Internet for men who want to have sex with hobos. And they go driving around in their car, looking for a tramp and then they get the guy to come over and offer him ten dollars if he’ll let them give him a blowjob. Or lick his ass.

And then it’s like: the filthier the better?

Also, yes. And the guys that do that are very neat and tidy in real life. For me it’s something personal. I have real friendships with guys who live on the street. And with those men from that site it’s only about the sex.

And do you ever get approached by men who want to sniff your dirty underwear, for ten bucks?

I get enough attention, believe me. I very often get messages from men abroad who want to come visit, but in the end they never come. I had one guy visit me for a couple of weeks from New York. That was five years ago. He was more into motor oil. He’d get all excited from being covered in oil. And he also liked to wear a very smart suit with a tie, but then to get it really dirty and to walk around in it for days. He was a designer. He was quite a handsomish man, a Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx.

Have you ever been in a long-term relationship?

Yes. I’ve even lived together with someone for years. And we had two kids living with us too.

I hope your house was less filthy in those days than it is now!

Yes, but he was always the one who did the cleaning. And I cooked. He was the father of the two kids. But the relationship just ended. It didn’t work anymore. I’ve had a number of relationships, but none since ’96. That also due to me, because my last boyfriend wasn’t dirty, and I just don’t want that anymore.

So how often did he take a shower?

I don’t know. He never took them at home.

You mean you don’t have a shower in your house?

Yeah, I do, but I had it disconnected. I think he showered at the gym.
Those who want to know more about filthy homos
can have a look at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/missionunwashable