Savage Love
    Dan Savage
    ...and most infamously, a man dies in Washington State after having sex with a horse. The first reports about the death by horse didn't include the exact cause of death, and like many people, I assumed the man had been fatally kicked in the head when he attempted to mount the killer horse. This was not the case. The man died, a horrified world soon learned, of a perforated colon. A perforated colon could mean only one thing: The horse was the active partner, and the dead man, a 45-year-old resident of Seattle, had literally been fucked to death.

    After the news broke, hundreds of distressed Savage Love readers wrote in to ask me why anyone would want to be fucked by a horse, how that would work exactly, and how a perforated colon kills you. (A perforated colon leaks like Karl Rove on a bender, which in this case led to a fatal case of acute peritonitis.) A few people wrote in to ask if the farm was still open for business. I was away when you needed me most, dear readers, drinking my way through Glasgow and Copenhagen when I should have been here comforting and consoling you. And by the time I returned to work this week, every angle of this story—the ethics, etiquette, and mechanics of getting fucked by a horse—had already been covered by Miss Manners, Garrison Keillor, and Bob Novak, so there's really nothing left for me to add.

    Except this: The dead man videotaped the fatal encounter, a tape the police seized, reviewed, and apparently leaked, as the videotape is now on the Web. Of all the troubling aspects of this incident, it's the existence of this videotape that has me scratching my head. One would think that getting fucked in the ass by a horse would be an experience so memorable that you wouldn't need a videotape to recall it. ("Hey, remember that time you got fucked by a horse?" "No, I can't say that I do. Hand me that box of Depends, would you?") But the man made a video, and now it's out there for all to see, which is a tragedy for the dead man, his family, and the killer horse.