Monday 25 June 2012

"Straight" Rick


When you are on a gay sex web site, and are chatting with a guy who says he is straight, you don’t challenge it.  But the guy becomes a challenge, and this challenge can 1) be hot, or 2) indicate that you are a masochist.  But you don’t have time to analyze yourself too much when he asks to cam with you.  You’re already at the computer naked (save for a ballcap), so you take a deep breath and turn the cam on, never knowing what the reaction will be.

This is how I met Rick.  The reason he became interested was that I mentioned that I liked piss play.  The invitation to cam was almost immediate.  On cam, he was gorgeous.  Too gorgeous.  Dangerous gorgeous.  He was cocky, arrogant, and proud.  He said he’d done some piss play with women, but not with a guy.  A date for Saturday night was set.

I didn’t expect him to show up.  Likely, he was a poseur, and got off on the chat alone.  But I’ll be damned if he didn’t show up on time.   He strode in with a sense of entitlement and proceeded to start undressing before I had opened his beer.  I think the only thing he said to me was “Let’s go.” 

We headed to my bed and laid on it and chatted a bit and drank our beer, and he said that that was a first.  What was a first? I asked.  He said usually, when he went to a guy’s home, there was no chit-chat.  It was clothes off, sex, clothes on, out the door.  I believe in het circles it’s called Wham, Bam, Thankyou Ma’am.  He didn’t seem displeased that we were chatting, but a little confused about how to negotiate it.  He told me he had a girlfriend at home.  Dear Reader, I do have rules about online hook-ups, and being with someone with a partner (in a closed relationship that is) is a deal breaker.  What got broken instead was my rule.  I couldn’t not proceed.  He had me at “Let’s go”.

And then, within moments, another rule of mine was broken.  He took the liberty of lubing up my cock, and proceeded to impale himself on it like a pro – without a condom.  It all happened so fast, with no negotiation.  And I didn’t stop it.  My mind was a crazy mess of conflicting thoughts, but I couldn’t resist the notion of having the best possible sexual experience with this stud like no other.  And I ashamedly didn’t want to disappoint Rick or slow down his momentum.  He was having fun and so was I, on two levels: the pure sexual bliss and the idea that I was fucking a “straight” stud.  These were heady feelings and I was licked.

After coming, he didn’t rush right out the door, as I had expected.  We finished our drinks, and I brought up the rule I had broken about unsafe sex.  I told him the truth: I was HIV negative but always used condoms.  “I wouldn’t care if you had AIDS.  But we can use a condom next time if you want”.  Oh Dear Reader.  He didn’t care if I was HIV positive or not?  Bottoming, with a girlfriend at home?  All my alarm bells went off.  This was not a good scene.  But he said something that silenced the alarm bells – “next time”.  He dangled his carrot from a stick, and I, like a stupid mule horse, thought “yes”.  He gave me his number and a few days later I called it.  On the voice mail was a woman’s voice telling me to leave a message.  Was that his girlfriend’s voice?  Was this a shared cell?  Why in hell would he give me that number?  I hung up before the beep.

We met three or four times again.  The electricity of that first encounter became replaced by my bottomless need for his approbation and by confusion.  He never gave me a straight answer as to why he shared a phone number with me that his girlfriend obviously used.  He told me that he could never love a guy, and didn’t think about them sexually a whole lot.  He didn’t feel he was cheating, he was simply scratching an itch.  But he also said that our first encounter was the best sex he’d ever had, male or female.  He said it without bravado, but as a quiet fact.   And before leaving, he did something so intimate, so gentle – so unlike him.  He hugged me goodbye.  The hug undid me.

On a subsequent night that we planned to get together, he stood me up.  The next morning at work, I was feeling so emotionally volatile that I feigned sickness and went home to punch the pillows.  I could handle it all as long as he showed up, and when he didn’t, I mentally ended it for the sake of my sanity.  He left a message again eventually, and I in turn left him one.  I played it as cool as possible but expressed that I’d been disappointed that he didn’t call if he was not going to be able to keep our date.

The story ends there, Dear Reader.  By telling him how I truly felt, I must have become too much for him to handle, because I never heard from him again, and he deleted me from his MSN.  And I was left asking myself these questions:  Is that as good as it’s ever going to get?  The high I felt with Rick was Mount Olympus.  But was it because he was unattainable that the high felt so extraordinary?  I allowed him to use me like a hooker, and I liked it.  It was clandestine.  How had I sunk so low, how had I come to expect so little?  But at that time, I believed to have felt my heart stir, and was so relieved to know that it still beat.  I wasn’t numb yet, even in spite of my many encounters and my casual approach to sex.   Months later, I would wonder in retrospect if my heart wasn’t just being pushed further into a pit of loneliness by the experience.  And I feared terribly that if he had been less of a challenge, I might not have been as attracted.  If that was true, I was truly fucked.

During one of our post-coital talks, he had said that I was the only person on the planet to whom he could talk to about his same-sex encounters.  In saying so, he looked vulnerable.  Where is he now?  And does he think of me in any way?  I’m writing an essay about him, but realize that he may have tucked me away into a hidden corner of his mind.  This is not a man who reads much, and certainly not gay essays, so I don’t expect he’ll ever read this and recognize himself in these pages.  But if he wrote an essay about our few encounters, how would it read?  What would he reveal?  Has any straight-identified male ever written in depth about his same-sex encounters?  That’s a tale I would like hear.










Thursday 14 June 2012

The Final On-line Hook-up?


Note to Reader:  I wrote the essay below some time ago, before I opened this blog.  In it, I recount a hook-up at my home that went awry.  Only recently, the world learned of the horrific murder of Jun Lin, allegedly at the hands of Luka Rocco Magnotta.  Facts seem hazy, but it appears that the two men knew each other for some time before the murder, a murder that was filmed and posted on a gore website.  I and my friends who have welcomed strangers into our homes for hook-ups wondered how we had avoided inviting over a psychotic like this Magnotta character.  The story I relate below is of an experience that is nearly comical in contrast to Jun Lin’s killing, and yet it still had me thinking about the dangers of hook-ups.  The question I pose to readers is:  Did the Luka Rocco Magnotta crime make anyone out there skittish about inviting a guy over for a hook-up?  Is it the end of hook-ups?

How is it that one knows they’ve reached the end of an era?  How is it that you wake up and find that what used to work for you no longer works?  Is that just a part of getting older?  I had always loved hook-ups.  Hunting a guy online and having him come over.  Or going over to his place.  The thrill of the hunt, the thrill of the unknown.  So often, though, I was disappointed with what I found in reality once he arrived at my door.  I rarely, if ever, thought of the dangers – how did I know that a psycho killer wasn’t going to enter my apartment?  That is the power of sex.  And the down low, illicit nature of an online hook-up was part of the thrill.  Sexual adventurism at its height.  Some would say sexual stupidity at its height.  But there is something undeniably hot about a guy showing up at your door, as if you had ordered a pizza, and willing to drop his pants and have sex without the preamble of dinner and a movie.  Without the effort of even going to a bar.  A guy who, like you, needs sex and will go sight unseen (except for pics seen online) and go clear across town to be with another horny guy. 

Like drinking, when does it stop being a fun lark and start being an addiction?  I always thought I was in control, when in reality, an online hook-up steals your control – you don’t know if you’ll really like what shows up, you don’t know if they’re mentally balanced, etc.  After a long while, after years of this, I had to ask – Was the dog wagging the tail, or was the tail wagging the dog?

Don’t get me wrong – some of the hook-ups I’ve had have been fantastic, wherein I lucked out and had a great time.  But that great time was often followed by a hollowness that I would seek to fill in with more hook-ups.  But recently, I had a hook-up that beat all hook-ups.  And the utter surreal nature of it had me questioning whether I could continue to let unknown men into my home.

Let’s call him Greg.  On a Friday night, I was on Manhunt.net and he was the only guy online that night that caught my eye, so I messaged him.  I’d like to start now by mentioning one of the red flags that cropped up, red flags that I chose to downplay.  In one of his two pics, his eyes were closed.  An odd picture to put up, but eyes open or closed, he looked cute.  He looked street tough, with shaggy hair topped with a ball-cap, a few days growth of stubble, wearing a hoodie, approximately 25 to 28 years old.  He didn’t message back right away, but when he did, I was somewhat taken aback when he alluded to coming over and playing right away.  Some nights while hunting men online, that was exactly what I wanted – zero small talk bullshit, just a plan to meet and screw.  But on this night, I wasn`t there yet – perhaps I needed a few more drinks to get me to that point.  On this night in particular, I wasn’t looking for an immediate hook-up.  I think I was already wearying of them, so I asked if he’d like to grab a beer the next day, the next day being a Saturday.  He agreed.

The next day, I called him, and he was still on for meeting.  Turns out that he lived with his parents quite far out in the suburbs, but no problem – his dad would drive him to the nearest subway stop so he could get downtown to my place.  “Um,” I stammered, “does your dad know that he’s driving you to a hook-up with a guy you’ve never met in person?”  “ Oh sure,” he replied, “Mom and Dad both know.  Mom gave me a condom.”  Hippie parents?  Negligent parents?  He was a full-fledged adult, but this sounded ridiculous.  But I let the red flag go.  Just because my parents would have had a coronary at the thought of me going to meet a stranger for sex didn’t mean all parents thought this way, did it?

We sexted a bit, and he phoned to say he’d cut his cock shaving.  “It’s all your fault,” he told me.  “I want you so bad, that I couldn’t concentrate on shaving.  Hey, why don’t we just skip the beer and I’ll just come to your place.  If we don’t click I’ll just leave.” Dear Reader, you know I said “ok”, don’t you?   I told him that I had previously arranged to hang out with my sister at about 9:30, so could he be here by 7?  He said no problem – he had other friends that he could hang out with in the Village after.  But if we clicked, would I like to get together after I was through at my sister’s?  Could he crash at my place, since it would be too late to get the metro back to the burbs?  We hadn’t even met yet, and already he was arranging a sleep over.  I, who don’t know how to say no when I should sometimes, said “sure”.

He arrived and knocked on the door, and I took a deep breath.  When I opened the door, I would see the real deal, and that would make all the difference.  I stealed myself and opened the door, and was disappointed.  It was him, the guy in the pictures I’d seen online, but it wasn’t him, you know?  I had endowed his two pictures with qualities that didn’t exist in reality.  But I smiled and let him in.  He was wearing a ball cap, a t-shirt and torn jeans.  I was wearing a black tank to show off the muscles, and jeans and a ball cap too.  He kissed me right away, and the kiss did not taste good.  There was no chemistry, right from the get go.  Still, ever the host with the most, I let this stranger in and offered him a beer.

He drank like a fish, and finished the first beer in record time.  Why in hell did I feel the need to be so accommodating that I quickly offered him another?  I could tell that he was really attracted to me – he told me so.  I couldn’t bear to tell this guy who had come all the way from the suburbs that it wasn’t working.  Instead, I was going to make it work, putting my own needs and desires aside in a misguided attempt to be a nice guy to a fellow sexual traveller. 

Against my better judgement, we began to fool around and our tops came off.  His chest revealed a non-descript tattoo on the left pec.  He straddled me and we kissed, rubbing each other’s crotches through our jeans.  He was out of shape and said he was working to get rid of the winter fat.  At this point, I was on automatic.  I’d been down this road so many times that, like a housewife doing her conjugal duty, I just wanted him to get off and go.  And so he lay down on the couch, and I struggled to undo his belt.  Finally getting that off, I slowly undid the zipper on his jeans, and began to pulling the jeans aside to release his cock and start sucking it.  And that’s when I noticed the red blotch.

“Dude,” I said, “I think your cock in bleeding.”  “No,” he answered, “I cut myself shaving, but it should be scabbed over by now.”  Was he implying that I should go ahead and suck a scabby cock?  Had all of this sunk so low that it was now going to be about sucking a scab?  Did he really believe that I would do it?  It was an epiphany.  Ten years of hook-ups had led to this moment, and I took note.  At what point would I say to myself that enough was enough?

But the cut had not scabbed over, not at all.  He was bleeding, and I told him so.  He stood up and looked and saw that I was right.  The blood began to drip on his jeans and narrowly missed my carpet.  I told him to head to the bathroom, and luckily, only when he hit the tile that led to the bathroom did his blood hit the floor.  Carpet saved.  I got him a wet cloth, followed the trail of blood to the bathroom, and found him trying in vain to stop the bleeding with tissue.  Was this going to need stitches?  But the wet cloth stopped it, and he deposited the bloody cloth in my sink.  A present for me?  How thoughtful.

He pulled up his jeans, which showed a large blood stain on the crotch.  I assumed that he was mortified that this was happening in a stranger’s home – wouldn’t anyone be?  But he wasn’t apoplectic with apologies – he was quite cool about it, at least outwardly.  Lord in Heaven, why I didn’t tell him to leave and go home?  I gave him a pair of my underwear since he had been commando, and put a towel on my leather couch for us to sit on and actually offered him another beer.  I wanted to appear to be the guy who could handle crazy situations like this and put him at ease, feeling that if the tables were reversed, I would hope my host would not freak out.

I had to wipe the blood off the floor.  He said, “I’m negative, just in case you’re worried about the blood.”  I didn’t answer him, I just wiped the blood spots as carefully as possible.  I humourously asked him how mortified he was feeling, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst.  He, surprisingly, because of his apparent ease with the situation, answered a 9.  Secretly, I was thrilled that something had intervened to prevent me from having unwanted sex with him.  Instead we chatted for a while, and he had a fourth beer.  I said that I needed to get going to my sister’s – would he be going home to change his pants and see how his cock was healing? “No, I’m gonna text my friends and hang out in the village while you’re at your sister’s.  But hey, I grabbed the wrong wallet on the way out the door and this one is empty.  Could you spare me $20?”  I gave it to him so I could be absolved of all responsibility.  What I worried about was how much he was wobbling after the four beers I had served him.  “I’m really feeling it because I had a few beers with my dad this afternoon while watching the game. “

He left and quickly texted me to say that I was attractive.  I texted back asking where he was going.  He wrote, “Dunno.  Maybe to the baths for a few hours?”  He was going to go to a bath house with a bleeding cock.   And he seemed to expect that we would see each other again later and that he could still crash at my place for the night.  Lord help us all.

Shortly thereafter, I texted him to say that I would be hanging with my sister for the rest of the evening and that he wouldn’t be able to stay at my place for the night.  I did this early enough so that he could still catch the subway home if he was so inclined.  and for the first time in ten years of actively having hook-ups, I looked in the mirror and asked myself what the fuck I was looking for that I would open my home to this kind of experience.  What bleeding wound did I possess inside that made me create a space in my life where such things could happen?  The experience would almost be funny if it weren’t so damn tragic.  I’m a slow learner, but it finally dawned on me that I had reached an impasse.

Greg texted me the next day, apologizing for his bleeding and hoping it didn’t freak me out too much.  I was glad that he was ok – I had, after all, sent him out of my apartment drunk and bleeding.  I played it cool and texted that I was glad he was alright.  And neither of us communicated again.  I, however, began communicating with my higher self.  The idea of letting a stranger in the sanctity of my home became anathema to me.  Sexually, I would need to find other ways to satisfy myself because online hook-ups were seemingly more and more discordant with what I needed.  The song was ending, and I needed to learn a new melody.




Monday 4 June 2012

Smokin' Hot Sex


I just bought “the patch”.  I’m a smoker and I’m dreading the idea of giving up cigarettes.  So, in fact, right before filling my prescription for the patch, I bought a pack of smokes – one last hurrah.  The reason that I dread the idea of quitting smoking is that my smoking is directly tied to sex.  I didn’t start smoking until I was about 33 years old.  So I didn’t start because of peer pressure in high school.  I didn’t start due to stress.  I started because I happened upon videos on youtube of men smoking.  Hot men, putting dick-substitutes in their mouths and then blowing the smoke at me through the camera lense.  For all purposes, this could very well have been a turn off (“ew, gross!  Get rid of that cancer stick, your mouth probably tastes like an ashtray!”).  But for me, the phallic symbolism hit me right where I live.  And then, I found nastier videos of smoking men on xtube.  Here’s the strange part:  In my twenties, I dated a smoker, and it didn’t once turn me on sexually.  I never once considered trying one of his cigarettes.  If there are any psychologists out there who can explain my sudden conversion in my thirties, I’d be interested to know what happened to me.

At first, I didn’t know what brand of cigarette to buy, and I didn’t know how to smoke.  I learned and for about 3 years, I only smoked while jerking off or having sex, if my partner was so inclined.  So I felt I had it under control – I never smoked otherwise, and never even craved it outside of a sexual situation.  In 2010, on a sunny day in March, I had an enormously stressful day.  I had just moved to a new city, and when registering for a class at a local college took so long that I was nearly late for a coveted job interview, my nerves were raw.  I had cigarettes on me and thought what the hell - I deserve something that will calm me.  That was all it took to transition from being a part-time smoker to a full-time addict.

This year however, I began a thrilling ride into the world of stand-up comedy.  Even if others couldn’t tell, I knew my voice was being affected by the smoke.  And my coughing was beginning to annoy and worry people.   A trip to the dentist got me alarmed, when the dentist said she noticed white patches in my mouth, certainly caused by smoking.  She suggested I see a specialist to confirm whether it was anything serious.  I have yet to contact the specialist, as I feel frozen by fear.  I’m eager to quit smoking for both a better performing voice and to avoid any physical illness.  But, dear reader, I’m totally afraid that my connection between smoking and sex will derail my efforts at quitting.  (Excuse me while I go get a cigarette from this last pack I bought today before starting the patch!)

I can’t light up a cigarette without being made aware of my dick – it goes hand in hand (dick in hand?).  Allow me to get a little graphic with you.  There was a guy I saw for a while, another smoker, and it was with him that I first smoked DURING sex (not just after sex like we always see in the movies).  We’d light up, with me on my back, and he’d impale himself on me, and we’d grab our smokes.  I’d have one arm behind my head, watching this stud ride me, and we’d both be inhaling and blowing smoke at each other.  A little like doing poppers, it was a mutual event that was visually and physiologically a turn on.  On my first encounter with this guy, I remember us stumbling to the kitchen to refill our drinks.  I entered him from behind while pouring us whiskies, and he lit cigarettes for us both, all while he was being fucked.  Who says men can’t multitask?

My experience with cigars is limited, but who among us hasn’t turned to jelly at the sight of a muscle bear in leather chomping on a cigar.  It represents power and strength - a dom top who is going to fuck you hard.

They say that to end a bad habit, you need to replace it with another (hopefully good) habit.  What will this be for me, during sex in particular?  I had a hook up with an out-of-towner over the Christmas holidays, and he said that he only smoked during sex, much like me when I started smoking.  Can I return to that?  Or am I now so addicted that I can’t have any leeway?  There is nothing quite as good as enjoying a cigar or a cigarette while a bud goes down on you for half an hour.  Quite honestly, it gives you something to do other than just lying there.  It adds a different dimension to the blow job, both for the sucker and the suckee.

Ultimately, if I’m playing Russian roulette with my health, I have to stop smoking.  Why is it that the things that give us so much pleasure are often so bad for us?  Apples are good for you and I hate apples.  Apple pie is not so good for you and I love apple pie.  I hear that in spite of the patch, I may still undergo some mood swings linked to withdrawal.  I’m already in a bad mood over this – how much worse can it get?  Wish me luck...


Sunday 3 June 2012