Felching

Sucking or licking cum out of a man's ass after bareback sex, sometimes sharing it with a kiss: a hardcore cum kink.

Felching is sucking or licking your own or another man's cum out of a guy's ass after he has been fucked bareback, and sometimes passing it on with a kiss. It is the ultimate cleanup operation, and a word many gay men know mainly as the punchline of a dare: the thing you look up once and then wish you had not.

For the men who are into it, though, it is a real kink, close cousin of rimming and snowballing, and a natural follow-up to breeding. It lives at the pig end of the menu, where cum is the point rather than the byproduct.

Where it comes from

Nobody really knows. Green's Dictionary of Slang calls the origin uncertain and suggests the word might be echoic, mimicking the sound; it also notes a proposal by the linguist Laura Wright that felch and filch share an ancestor, filch having once meant to hook something out with a stick. Its first appearance in print is in Bruce Rodgers' 1972 dictionary of gay slang, The Queens' Vernacular, and a felch queen was listed in a 1970 article on homosexual slang in American Speech. Larry Kramer used felching in his 1978 novel Faggots, which made sure a lot of readers learned it.

The gerbil legend

Green's also records a second sense: putting small live animals, usually gerbils, into the ass. That one has all the marks of an urban legend and of homophobic rumor, the kind of story that is always about a friend of a friend. If someone uses felching to mean gerbils, he learned it from a joke, not from a gay man.

The health side

Felching combines two kinds of exposure: semen in the mouth, as in oral sex, and mouth-to-ass contact, as in rimming. That means the usual oral and anal STIs, gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, herpes, plus gut infections such as hepatitis A. The risk of HIV from oral contact is very low, and lower still if everyone involved is on PrEP or HIV-positive with an undetectable viral load, as in U=U. Men who play this way usually test every few months, including throat and rectal swabs, and get vaccinated against hepatitis A and B at a sexual health clinic.

Related terms