Masturbation

They say that for a drug addict, it's never as good as the first time.  Try being addicted to masturbation - it's always like the first time.

Everyone has a hobby.  I have a buddy, who, after a hard day of work, loves to come home to a bowl of popcorn and hours of taped TV shows.  Another friend takes her dog three times a week to the agility barn to watch Buster jump through hoops.  All very socially acceptable.  When I am asked what my hobbies are, it’s easy to spout out the usual – “I love to read!  I go to museums!  I play scrabble!”  But you, dear, lucky Reader, get to hear the truth.

I can out-masturbate anyone anytime anywhere.  I’ve got it down to an art, and Dear Reader, at present I’m finding that sex with another can’t compare.  My jack-off sessions are so fulfilling, that another person in the room would just be in my way.  And I need minimum three hours or else I won’t bother.  During sex with myself, I have no inhibitions, no qualms about what someone will think of me, I can be a total freak, I can be completely unselfconscious.  I can dance in the mirror for hours with my hands down my pants.  I can look in the mirror, one hand holding a Jack and Coke, the other a cigarette, and call myself a fuckin’ cum-lickin’ whore.  You know that pill bottle full of saved cum in the fridge?  Pour it on yourself.  Drink a glass of piss.  Sniff your pits. Spit on your chest.  Love the fact you’ve got a full bush when gay magazines say to trim it.  Be the cock of the block and do things you’re not sure you could really pull off with someone else watching.  Consume major amounts of porn.  All the while amazed at the gift that sexuality is.  There is a narcissistic element to this kind of self-love, but it makes up for all the times I doubted myself or felt inferior (or...does it stem from that?).  And it’s not a substitute for the “real thing”.  This is real. It always feels like the first time. It’s a date with myself, wherein I shower first, turn on the music, dim the lighting, set up any sex toys I might want to play with.  To me, it’s a valid as any other date I’ve ever been on.  Except I never get stood up this way.

Why can’t I just do this in private and shut up about it?  Why do I have to write about it for god’s sake? Why write this blog at all?  The answer is simple: Anger.  I’m angry that as a religious teenager, I used to masturbate for 10 minutes and then pray for forgiveness for half an hour afterwards.  The fear I had about sexuality in my youth was abominable.  Masturbation is not self-abuse, the needless guilt is.

I’m angry that some people would think a three-hour jack off is time wasted.  Is self-love a waste of time?  I think it beats Scrabble any day.

I’m angry that we all masturbate and can’t talk about it except through jokes.  But why must I share the dirty details?  Because we need to know that we’re not alone in our kinks.  Secrets lead to shame.  This blog is an attempt to shatter the hypocrisy around something that is a gift to be celebrated.  I’m also just plain curious – I like to know what gets other people off.  If it’s safe and sane and between consenting adults, how did it come to be that we can’t talk about it?  Why, after eating the apple in the garden of eden did Adam and Eve clothe themselves for shame?  I was not explicitly taught that masturbation was wrong, but as a teenager, I inferred it.  How did that happen, I wonder, just as I wonder where our fear of spiders, most of which are harmless, comes from?  And look at what repression does:  My adolescent guilt has spawned an adult that writes a sex blog.

But I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit that, after I cum, a touch of the old-brain guilt slips in.  And then I wonder if three hours jerking off isn’t excessive.  Am I addicted to jacking?  I’m a responsible person, working and caring for friends and family.  Can’t I have this without guilt?

Writing this blog entry is the last task of a long day for me.  It’s almost time to reward myself with my nightly jack-off ritual.  But a worrisome thought nags at me:  Why do I seem to believe that I can’t be as uninhibited sexually with another person as I am with myself?  What would it take to be that free with a man?  The joy with masturbating alone is that my happiness, fulfillment and self-esteem doesn’t depend on another.

After I post this, I will, in four hours, be a puddle of sweat, piss and cum.  What are YOU doing tonight?  Playing Scrabble?

New York Nights

I don’t know if it’s still there, but just before the turn of the millennium, there was a leather bar in New York called The Lure.  On Wednesday nights, usually a slow night for a bar, The Lure had the smarts to make that night their Pig Night.  You would see the ad in the gay magazines of a pig in fetish gear, underscored by the tagline “Men Are Pigs”.  Enough said.  Wednesday night is the new Saturday night.

Entering the Lure was like entering another universe – one filled with the smell of poppers and sweat, the sounds of thumping music, the feel of hot air, the sight of gorgeous leather men, and if you stayed a while, a taste of them too.  You could check all the clothes you wanted to check at the coatcheck (where do I put the coatcheck tag when I’m half naked?).  With all the bartenders dressed in leather and/or fetish gear, I decided to order from the one with huge muscles and nipple clamps.  Not intimidating in the slightest, he proved to be sweet and smiley. 

Two drinks later, I’m still not ready for a trip to the backroom, so I cruise the place.  So many dark corners.  In one, I chat with a guy who eventually moves behind me, wrapping his arms around my chest.  We keep talking and his hands slide slowly to my pants, and then in them.  And this is how I know that part of being a homophobic straight male comes down to jealousy, since this welcomed groping could never happen in a straight bar between a man and a woman (or could it? does it?).

This groper was the opening act, and now, I think I’m ready for the main act – the backroom.  An area of the bar is partitioned off, and almost dark, with just a few dim red lights to cast an appropriately sleazy glow.   What time is it?  It must be late, because the backroom is at its peak, packed shoulder to shoulder, cock to cock, with men touching each other as they squeeze by.  Along the walls, men are on their knees, servicing others, some of them being fucked.  I watched two men playing and they notice me and beckon me to join them.  They are standing, and I fall to my knees to worship both their cocks at once. When I glance up, they are either smiling at me, or kissing each other, both beautiful sights to behold.  This communion makes me cum.  I’m not sure if the two guys I’m servicing even know I have.  I release their cocks and smile and say thanks, and lead my dizzy self out of the darkroom towards the light of the bar, itself still so dim.  I’ve cum, I can still taste two men on my lips and am ordering another drink from the same nipple-clamped bartender.  He knows I’ve been around the world and back in the backroom.  He smiles knowingly at me.  Is he at that stage in his career as a bartender where he thinks this is heaven, this den of lust, or is he at that place where he’s seen it all before and longs to leave the bar and find romance rather than pigs?  I know both feelings are possible, and valid.  I too have been a bartender in a gay bar.

I get back what clothes I’ve left in the coat check and ready myself to leave the bar and enter the real world.  It’s dark still, and I leave a bit of my heart and soul in the bar.  I feel more naked in the real world, even though I’m fully clothed.  On the subway platform, waiting for the train to come, I steal glances at the few people around me.  Can they smell the sex of the night on me?  Can they sense it?  Being New Yorkers, they probably don’t care if I smell of sex.  At this hour, they probably do too.

I crumple into a seat on the subway and look up to see an attractive man across from me with eyes closed, sleeping.  It sounds like a good idea and I too close my eyes.  But when I open them again, he is eyeing me.  He grins slightly before closing his eyes again.  We pass this flirtatious ball back and forth until I realize that I’m coming to my stop.  At my stop, the door opens and I take a last look back at my sleeping beauty.  As I step off the train, he jumps up and leaps off the train just as the doors are closing shut.

Sleeping beauty is a dancer with an esteemed dance company, and he was heading home, but up for hanging out.  He follows me as I lead him up the steps from the subway into the street, and in the time it took to get home, a miracle has occurred.  The light has arisen on the city, and it is that holiest of moments in New York, when the streets and even many of the pigeons are still asleep at dawn and it’s just you and the City.  And in this case, a beautiful dancer.

In my single-room-occupancy room, the dancer undresses and lay on the bed.  His balls are hairy, a rare gift in this waxed age, and I cup them in my hand.  He breathes deeply and teasingly shows me how flexible he is by stretching a leg so far back that his heel nearly reaches his head.

My cock is done – what happened at the Lure was all it had the energy for, but I do have the energy to worship this dancer with my tongue, all over his body until I reach his cock and take it in.  When he cums, we lay together silently.  His energy is at peace and I instinctively sense that he is a nice person.  This is meaningful to me.

When he goes, I lay down, placing my head into the indentation on the pillow where the dancer had rested his head moments before.  My window is open, and I hear the sounds of civilians starting their Thursday.  As I lay there, I don’t worry that straight people, and many of my gay brethren, would think that I’m a stereotypical example of the promiscuous gay male.  I don’t worry whether I’ve got an STI.  I can worry about that tomorrow – and I probably will.  I don’t worry that I was seduced by men and booze.  Instead, as the machinery of capitalism begins to churn on the streets below, I simply fall asleep.