Thought to have been written in 1948, the poem gleefully describes in graphic detail a homosexual encounter involving an act of fellatio.
[1] Auden mixes colloquial language with formal expression, using clever internal and external rhymes and half-rhymes.
Auden jokingly suggesting that Kallman write a similar poem about "the other Major Act" (anal sex) to be published together on "rubber paper for dirty old millionaires" with illustrations by Paul Cadmus.
He also wrote the poem to demonstrate his true nature to Professor Norman Holmes Pearson, with whom Auden was collaborating on a poetry anthology.
Copies were circulated to Auden's friends but it remained unpublished until 1965, when Ed Sanders obtained a copy from an employee of the Morgan Library and published it (without Auden's permission) in his New York counterculture magazine Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts (Vol 5 No 8) in March 1965, with a cover by Andy Warhol.