Apology

Dear (Unknown Name):  I was sitting on the edge of the pool table at the Eagle and I was in full hunting mode.  I was horny, and feeling aggressive about it – I wanted to get laid.  You saw me and recognized me from a fetish event a while back and reintroduced Yourself.  And I wasn’t interested.  And because I sometimes think the world revolves around me, I assumed You wanted to sleep with me.  Because I was thinking only with my dick, it didn’t dawn on me that You were genuinely just trying to be friendly.  And friendly You were.  You were kind, witty and had a gentle aura about You.  And because You are a sensitive human being, You sensed my reticence, looked at the floor, and quietly said “Well, have a good night” and walked away.

Then Paul walked into the Eagle.  Paul, my dream man, popular in the community.  I had met him at his fortieth birthday celebration a year earlier and we had kissed.  Subsequently, when running into each other at the Eagle, we would find ourselves in a dark corner.  He would spit on my chest and we’d kiss and swap horny energy.  But he was always somewhat out of reach – he never came home with me, no matter how much I tried to get it to happen.

Paul entered and I walked up to him and hugged him and the flirting dance began yet again.  But Paul noticed a friend behind me and said “Hey (Forgotten Name), how the hell are you?”  I turned around and it was You, the kind, polite man I’d just rebuffed moments earlier.  This time, You did not acknowledge my presence, and rightly so.  A group of men formed at the bar, with Paul the center.  We joked and talked, and I looked at You and smiled.  We were all friends, weren’t we?  But You looked down and away.  You had seen me preen my peacock feathers in front of Paul.  When you avoided my smile, I felt hot with shame.  My flirtatious dance with Paul now seemed pathetic and sad in light of how I’d treated You, Paul’s friend, so indifferently a few minutes ago.  You had class.  I had none, and I left the bar, without saying goodbye to anybody, not even Paul.  I was not worthy of Paul, and certainly not worthy of You.  I am sorry that still can’t remember Your name and I am so very sorry for my arrogance.

Dear Manuel:  Who says you can’t meet a great person at an orgy?  We met at 6 am at the end of an orgy on a Saturday night/Sunday morning.  When the party at the hotel dispersed, I took you home.  You were a stunning example of male beauty – latino, gorgeous muscles, an ass that wouldn’t quit, nipple piercings and a tattoo on your right hip.  Days later you emailed me pictures of yourself that you’d sent to PlayGirl Magazine.  There was no doubt in my mind that you would get a response from them.

I began to learn about you.  I held your naked body in my arms as you cried about the painful relationship you had with your father.  I felt you melting into me.  I listened as you earnestly looked me in the face one night after making love and whispered “No more hunting men online, no more orgies – just you and me.”

But my heart couldn’t crack open.  For whatever goddamn fucking fucked-up reason, I couldn’t feel what you were feeling.  And I so wanted to.  On paper, you seemed perfect – gorgeous, sensitive, loyal.  What kind of fool would bolt from this?  Only a fool named Jason.

Again, like the man at the Eagle in the letter above, you were sensing my reticence.  I could see it in your eyes.  You even had the balls to ask me if you were causing me stress, and I lied and said “No, no, everything is fine, everything is good.”  One morning, you woke in my bed and gently nudged me.  “Jason, let’s get up, go get some coffee.”  “Five more minutes,” I mumbled.  A half an hour later you said “Jason, honey, it’s a beautiful day, let’s make something of it.”  Again, I waived you away for another “five minutes”.  I never heard you leave, you crept out of my apartment so quietly.  We never spoke again.

We saw each other weeks later at the club.  You were with a new lover.  We smiled at each other and waved, but you looked wistful and sad at seeing me.  Your new boyfriend is a very lucky man.  What was wrong with me?

Dear Alanis Morissette:  You sang the line “What was wrong with me” in your song “Unsent”, from which this essay is inspired by.  In the song, you wrote unsent letters to men with whom you had some unfinished business, or something you wished you could have said to them.

Alanis, your album Jagged Little Pill was a seminal record for my generation.  Everyone could relate to you, as you discussed how men had disappointed you, hurt you, misunderstood you, or took you for granted.  How awful then that I should admit to often relating more to the men of whom you sang about.  Men whose hearts were un-open, or worse, empty.  Men who couldn’t connect.  Men whose emotional maturation was stunted.  I’m the guy that everyone always refers to as a “nice” guy, but evidently, I fail myself sometimes.  To know that I’ve caused pain to another man, especially one who has allowed himself to be vulnerable with me, is a jagged little pill to swallow.  And an apology seems hollow.  But, an apology this essay is.

Tattoo

With this essay, I know there is no middle ground – a reader will find this experience I describe as soulless and sad, or else a sexy, dark gem.  Which is accurate?  You decide.

It was the early 2000’s.  I was on gay.com when a guy messaged me.  He had one picture, just his flank showing off a cool tribal tattoo.  He said he was straight, and wanted to get blown, pure and simple.  But without a face pic, I declined and that was the end of that.  Fast forward a year later.  I get a message from the same guy, and he has the same picture.  But this time he asks to send me a face pic by email.  I give him my email and get a face pic in my inbox.  A blond stud in a ball cap, late twenties, kind of rough, a hard-working guy.  I say yes and he gives me his address, saying the door will be open.  He lives not far from me and I hopped in the cab to get there.

I buzz him and he buzzes me in without saying anything on the apartment intercom.  As is the norm for me with regard to a hook up, my heart is in my throat.  I know I will soon have a dick in my mouth, but will that dick be connected to a psycho?  How will it start?  Will he chicken out at the last minute, being, as he says, straight?  I approach the door, and can’t bring myself to knock.  I hear the TV on inside, and nothing else.  Crossing myself, I remember he said the door would be open.  This is even more terrifying, to simply open the door to a stranger’s home.  But I do.

I get inside and he is sitting, fully clothed on the couch watching the TV, on a low volume.  He is in that ball cap, a flannel shirt and jeans and he’s got a beer in his hand. I say hello and he barely seems to register my arrival in his home – he keeps looking at the TV.  I remove my boots and wander over to the couch, where, almost as an afterthought, he unzips and pulls out a tremendously beautiful cock and balls.  Needing no further instructions, I kneel in front of him and take his cock in my mouth.  The thing about it was that he smelled like – nothing at all.  Very clean, well trimmed.  I watch him alternately watch me and watch the TV.  Out of the corners of my eyes, I take in the apartment.  Somewhat messy, but with a great, tribal looking piece of artwork above the TV.  He takes repeated swigs from the can of beer, and proceeds to unbutton his shirt.  And I see the tattoo that I witnessed for the first time a year before on gay.com.  And me?  I’m in heaven, devouring his cock to the base, wanting to give him the time of his life.  Emboldened, I ask if he’d like to fuck my face, and without a word, he moves off the couch to let me lay on it.  He straddles my face and begins facefucking me, but I can tell that he doesn’t really want to do any work.  And he wants to watch the TV.  So we go back to him sitting on the couch and I kneeling between his legs.  Being so quiet, he also fails to tell me that he is going to cum.  In those days, I didn’t swallow, so at the first shot of cum in my mouth, I relax my mouth on his dick to let the cum dribble back down his cock.  My instincts tell me that he wanted me to swallow, but this is just the way I rolled back then.  Spent, he grabs some paper towel and wipes off his dick, still saying nothing.  And he keeps watching the TV.  He doesn’t say to leave, he doesn’t say to stay, just watches the TV.  There’s not much more to do now than to put my boots on and go, and as I grab the door handle, I turn back for one last glimpse of this silent guy.  He doesn’t look my way, still staring at the TV, so I quietly let myself out, relieved that I wasn’t hacked into pieces or sold into white slavery.

So what happened here?  I am not interested in reading my own essay.  I know what was going on in my head.  For me, this was a bizarre, illicit, on-the-down-low experience.  Whether he was straight or not, his claiming so was an aphrodisiac and a challenge.  His trust at letting a stranger into his space was wild to me, as wild as it was to open the door to a stranger’s home.  His crude level of social skills, I’m afraid to admit, lent him an air of mystery.  He seemed unattached from what was happening, and that mystified me.  So no, I’m not interested in reading my own essay.  What I want to read is his essay about the same experience.  His dick stayed uniformly hard the whole time, so on that level, he was aroused.  But if he was going to be that seemingly uninvolved in his own experience, why not just jerk off?  Could it be as simple as liking a mouth on his cock, and women proving too hard to get it from?  Could it be that he was gay, but disliked the idea of being gay so much that he nearly disassociated from the experience?  Finally, I wonder if I didn’t turn him on, in the end.  I messaged him once after to say thanks for letting me over, but he did not respond, nor do I recall seeing him online again.

I have trouble remembering what he looked like, but the memory of his tattoo is clear as if it was yesterday.  I wonder what that tattoo on his slim flank meant, just like I wonder what the meaning of the tribal artwork above his TV meant.  I wonder if it would provide a clue into the mind and heart of this man. The two of us, completely of different universes, met and had an extremely close physical moment.  But mentally, he was miles away.  I did not feel slighted by this, but rather intrigued, marvelling at the many ways people seek sexual release, for a myriad of reasons.  And like an anthropologist coming up short, I have no answers, just questions.

The Strip Club

Here in the Village, we gay men are served by no less than 4 male strip clubs.  This blog is entitled Hunting for Sex, and at a strip club, it’s more like shooting fish in a barrel.  Sex gods everywhere, all contained under one roof.  Up until this week, I’d always gone to strip clubs by myself – to observe and give my attention fully to the experience and to how it made me feel.  Narcissistically, I want to look as good as I possibly can when I go to a strip club.  This means wearing a tank, to show off the muscles, as if to say that I could almost, possibly, if we stretched it, be a stripper myself.  And sometimes I can even pull it off.  There have been a few occasions where I’ve been cruised by the other customers, and even asked if I work there.  For someone else, being mistaken for a stripper would be embarrassing.  For me, the kindest thing you could say.  The other compliment comes when a stripper asks if you’d like a private dance in the back, and when you decline politely, they stick around and chat anyway.  And some of the chats I’ve had with strippers have been amazing, wherein they seemed comfortable to tell me tidbits about their work, whether they were really gay or straight, and some of their own sexual turns ons.  Were they being this open hoping that it would convince me to go for a lap dance, or did they just feel like chatting?  Probably the former, I wish the latter, and in the end, I will never know.

But Jason, didn’t you ever go for a lap dance, you ask?  I sure as hell did!  A handful of times.  But at $20 a song, it’s cost prohibitive, and there are limits to how far you can go.  Lick their pits, feel their chest, touch the cock, but no sucking.  And awkward moments can ensue.  My very first time, I zeroed in on who I thought was the hottest stripper in the bar – muscled, tattooed, shirtless (as they all are).  He came my way, I made sure our eyes connected so he could sense my desire, he did, and asked if I’d like a dance.  Hell yeah, and off we went.  But walking behind him towards the lap-dance area, it already felt false.  This was about my desire and his wallet.  Paying for it already felt like a mood killer and we hadn’t even started.  He was friendly and led me into a booth and closed the curtain.  I sat down and he began to dance suggestively, and encouraged me to touch his torso.  My hands moved up to his nipples which I grabbed and squeezed lightly and he winced.  I let go and he explained he’d just had surgery on his nipples and they were still tender.  What kind of surgery? I asked.  He replied that he had felt his nipples were too large and had had them reduced.  I bit my tongue, since the truth is, I actually prefer large nipples on a man.  To each his own.

But just this week, I went to a strip club with three others.  My sister, newly single, wanted to go for the first time, and so we went on a ladies night, along with my sister’s best friend (who had been on numerous occasions), and my gay friend Don (who’d also never been).

Here’s how things on the stage go:  The stripper comes out, dances and undresses a bit, teasing the crowd, then leaves the stage.  Five minutes later he returns, but with a full hard-on.  And to this, my sister said: “Is that it?  It’s so tame.  But I like the music.”  And tame it is.  But it’s all relative.  In 1950, it would be shocking no doubt, but now, when you can go to a bath house and watch a roomful of guys fisting each other, a mere hard-on by a bored looking, yet gorgeous, man doesn’t pack a lot of punch.  A camera videotaped what was happening on stage and was broadcast in real time on screens around the club, and it appeared that the dancers were watching themselves rather than connecting with the crowd.  My sister’s friend gave my neophyte buddy Don a play-by-play:  “Now he’s going to twirl around the pole three times...now he’s going to lift his arm above his head....now he’s going to slowly caress his crotch...”  She was right everytime.  It was a routine that they all had down, without deviation from said routine.  And Don and I were underserved.  We generally like our men hairy – pits, chest, face, and for me, even the pubes.  But dammit, these men were waxed within an inch of their lives.  Don, never one to keep his mouth shut, would alternately say, at full volume, “This is boring,” followed five minutes later with “God, I need to get laid!”  At first this frustrated me.  I thought, which one is it Don, do you like what you see or don’t you?  Because in spite of it all, I was transfixed.  “Earth to Jason,” I would hear my friends say.  I felt they were missing the one reason why strip clubs exist.

Strip clubs are where you go to worship the beauty of the human male.

These are men who will have surgery on their nipples to look perfect for you.  Beauty is a powerful thing.  The face of Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships.  But I couldn’t help but feel second-class amongst all that beauty.  I could never compete with these gods.  I could never have one of these gods, and if I could, would I even know what to do with him?  Like my friend Don, I vacillated between loving every man who stepped onto the stage, and resenting that he was not really within reach.  Loving his beauty, and wishing it were my own.

On this particular night, the strippers uncharacteristically chatted amongst themselves more than they seemed to chat with the patrons.  My only personal moment with a stripper happened on the way to the bathroom.  The men’s room door was adjacent to the door to the strippers’ backstage area, and as I passed, a stripper exited from backstage with a loud belch.  He then saw me and uttered a quick “Excuse me...”

I wonder if Helen of Troy also burped on occasion?

"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.

Nick the Trick

It’s Sunday night, I have to work tomorrow and it’s already 10pm, but I’m hunting men online.  There is one guy, Nick*, who has been trying to arrange a hook up with me for three weeks.  “You’re fuckin’ hot – I like your look man,” he tells me.  He gives me his phone number and I text him my address.  He responds by saying he entered me on his phone contacts list as “Stud”.

I moved to the big city from a small town to search for a connection, and I’d be lying if I said that the connection I sought wasn’t sexual.  Whether that connection was to be found with one man, or the whole crowd at the Eagle on a Saturday night, it didn’t matter.  I’m a self-professed sexual adventurer - a nice way of saying I’m a slut.  I never bought into the word “slut” as having a negative connotation.  Was I ever thrilled when those Slut Walks were happening in 2011 all over the world.  Should I condemn myself for seeking connection with others through sexual means?  The world at large would say yes.  But of course that world is all too often hypocritical.  Try looking at it this way: Sex often brings disparate people together in an intimate way, people who might otherwise never have met.

But any realist will tell you that sex, and the hunting for it, doesn’t always bring joy – that’s why this column is subtitled “Cautionary Tales from the Quest”.  First off, hunting for sex is time consuming.  For all the time I spend on line, I could easily do a part-time evening job,  and I sure could use that job to pay for the drinks I consume at the bars.  Whether online, at a bar, at a sauna or at the grocery store, hunting for sex is fun...and tiring...and exciting...and disappointing.  It’s hot.  It’s desperate.  It’s an affirmation of one’s sexuality, but the ego can be bruised faster than it takes to click “send”.  Hunting for sex is a game that has no end.  And would you want it to end?  It can be an addiction.  How far you spiral into that addiction depends on so many factors.  But my question, as I walk down the street and wonder about the sex lives of the non-descript people who pass by, is:  Aren’t we all touched by this addiction in some way, gay or straight?

Back to Nick the Trick.  He’d been eating away his time by cyber-chasing me for 3 weeks, as I mentioned. He suggested that we get to know each other – naked.  My pics are recent and are body and face, me in all my naked glory save for the black underwear (he didn`t request the naked ones).  But I waffled with Nick – was I really attracted to his pics?  But it was time to shit or get off the pot and not be an internet player.  Then he writes:  “Are you masc?”  It should be a rhetorical question, because how else can I answer but with “ Yeah man, masc here”.  I’m pretty built, have facial hair, and like to fuck to heavy metal.  And I think Liza Minnelli is grand.  This can go either way here, folks.  He says he’s on his way.

He buzzes, I let him up, open the door and see it right away.  It’s a look I’ve seen before, and a look I’ve no doubt given before when meeting a trick – disappointment.  Something right away isn’t living up to his expectations.  So before I can decide if I even like him, I am challenged to change the look on his face.  He comes in and I offer him a beer.  I grab one for myself – it’ll be my fourth drink that night (on a work night).  He steers towards my couch which is covered with clothes and newspapers, and says “So, you live in the gay Village”.  Strike one – he is one of those gay men who abhors the Village and what it represents to them.  Undaunted, I suggest that the bed might be more comfortable to chat on.  He doesn’t look convinced but follows me in, where my computer is playing some good ‘ol rock n’ roll.

And we talk.  Or he talks.  Once he gets going, I find it hard to get a word in edgewise.  More to the point, when I do speak he has a tendency to cut me off.  But I’m a pleaser, and so let him have the floor, showing a keen interest, hoping this makes him like me – sad, but true.  But an hour passes and finally – he yawns.  He says that he should probably get going.  In five minutes he is out the door and we both know that that is the end of that. 

The door closes and there is a deathly silence in my head, even as the metal continues to play.  I hold my head in my hands and think these thoughts:  What did I do to disappoint him?  Was I not masculine enough?  I wanted him to want me, but am acutely aware that that is my ego talking.  I was in truth only mildly attracted, but his distance made me want to pounce on him.

At this point, you have two options.  You can turn out the lights, go to bed, curl up like a fetus and feel sorry for yourself, but I chose something different.  After holding my head in my hands for 30 seconds, I decided to reclaim my bruised ego and my sexuality.  I poured myself another drink, opened up a porn site, and proceeded to jack off.  Pathetic you say?  Oh no, dear reader, it’s called reclaiming your sexuality.  If Nick didn’t want me and my sexuality, I would satisfy myself.  My self- worth and vision of my sexuality wouldn’t be extinguished by one guy saying no.  The lesson here was that my sexuality, my sense of pleasure, was in my hands, not Nick’s.  In my late thirties, I was no longer willing to hand over my sexual self-esteem to anybody.  And yet...I run into Nick on the streets of the Village from time to time (he, who apparently condescends about the Village, sure seems to be spending a lot of time in it).  And usually we ignore each other, or quickly nod.  Invariably, a feeling of shame, of being “less than”, creeps up the back of my neck. I valiantly try to resurrect my self-esteem.   Then, an act of God:  The next guy that passes by smiles flirtatiously at me.  I say a little prayer of thanks for this boost from an angel and continue down the street, on a chilly Fall day in the Village.

 *I don`t really remember his name.  How the hell am I supposed to keep track of names?e`sHehHHHHHHjjj