Sunday, September 22, 2013

Sunday Morning Questions: Mix Tape Edition

Anyone remember mix tapes?

When I first started buying popular music, back in my late teens and early twenties, it became important for me not only to listen to the music I collected, but to share it with the people I cared about. My first real stereo was a system I bought straight out of college, from Sears—I know, real top of the line audiophile stuff. It was affordable, though, and I bought it because it was perfect for my needs. Not only did it have a turntable for my burgeoning collection of LPs, but it had a dual cassette tape deck. With high-speed dubbing, no less. Double tape decks were rare in those days. The high-speed dubbing was almost unheard of.

I loved that system. During grad school I would spend entire nights in my apartment in my parents’ basement, sitting on the cold tile floor cross-legged while I made mix tapes for my friends. I’d choose songs that not only they’d like, but that I was pretty sure they’d never heard before—songs for which I had a lot of enthusiasm. On my electric typewriter I’d type up the names of the songs and the artists, and then I’d make some custom art. Usually it was a chunk of a New Yorker cover, which when snipped down to fit in the cassette case would be colorful but abstract. Then I’d lovingly send them off to my best friends and hope they loved the mixes as much as I.

Over the years the typed inserts became computer-printed; a couple of years later, I burned my first mix CD. Even the concept of ‘burning’ a CD was exotic at first. The phrase brought to mind images of a blacksmith’s forge, and using a pair of white-hot tongs to pull a shiny CD from the flames so I could hear the sizzle when I plunged it into a horse bucket of cool water. The last mix tape I made was for Spencer, shortly before we parted ways. It was a thumb drive with a dozen mp3s on it.

But the thing is, people remember those mix tapes. I have friends who mention long-forgotten songs I sent them decades ago, and who’ve talked about all the love I put into those gifts of music, from the thoughtfulness of the song choice to the New Yorker artwork in which they were wrapped. One of my oldest friends recently went through all the tapes I’d given him over the years, and bought digital copies of all the songs from either Amazon or iTunes, so he could keep them as playlists on his computer. Those little gifts mean something, years and years later. That makes me smile.

Spencer used to go to sleep to a set playlist of songs on his iPod. He’d chosen them to lull him gently into his dreams. During the year when I was living on my own, trying to sell my house in the midwest, he was spending most of his nights in my bed. After he’d taken his bedtime shower and slipped into bed, steaming and warm and wet, we’d make love and drift into slumber in each other’s arms. The last memory of would have, most of those nights before I nodded off, would be of his strong, muscular arm reaching over me to my clock radio, so he could turn on his iPod and start that playlist.

It lasted for nearly an hour and a half. I know the first four songs well. I wouldn’t recognize the latter hour if you played it for me. I’ve always been deeply asleep by the time it played. The last night before I left Michigan for good, at a going-away party thrown in my honor, Spencer sat next to me as my guest of honor. We held hands beneath the table. Before the night’s end, he slipped back to me the thumb drive I’d given him a few weeks before. It held his Sleepytime mix.

You know, I still listen to it. There are nights when I can’t sleep. I keep a pair of earbuds by the bed. I keep the Sleepytime mix on my phone. I’ll plug in, turn on, and listen to the songs Spencer cultivated, the songs to which we fell asleep month after month, night after night, holding each other.

And little by little, I drift off, comforted. I still haven’t heard the back end of that mix during my waking hours. I’m not sure I care to. But I do know it’s the mix tape that means the most to me. It always will.


Let’s get to some questions from readers before I start bawling. If you’d like to ask something, come on over to formspring.me and ask what you’d like. If you’d prefer to email me, just put ‘Sunday Morning Questions’ in the subject line of your email. My address is in the sidebar. I’ll answer anything, trivial or not, so long as it’s not too invasive of my privacy.


Do you ever fantasize about being forced to "service" a dominant stranger?

I do. My twist on it, though, which I’ve shared several times, is the fantasy of being forced to service a dominant bottom, as a top.

I'm not convinced the bottom for that task exists in real life, though.


thanks for your blog, i'd never have the courage to be out there,too much catholic guilt, your blog is my guilty pleasure, thank you sir

If you are so burdened that even reading about someone else having sex makes you feel guilty, my friend, I think it's time to do something about it.

I never look at my sex writings as prescriptive. I don't set words to paper as a recommendation of how anyone else should live his life. My acts are my own, and that's how they should remain. No one should push themselves past their own natural levels of comfort with any sexual exploration.

However, sex is a blessing. If you're religious, I don't know how you can justify to yourself that God made such an abundantly beautiful world with so many wonderful things . . . and yet believe that sex is supposed to be an awful act, a torture, a torment, or something that only a man and a woman approved by a representative of the church may do solely for procreational purposes. That's just not the way this world works. Religion might try to regulate sex in order to keep its adherents in line, but sex was given to us for pleasure, and for us to make connections with each other. It's a true gift. Not a source of guilt.

So if reading a sex blog brings you pleasure . . . enjoy it without guilt. Start with that leniency, and move on to others. You'll be a happier person in the end.


What's the last fun thing you bought for yourself?

A rice cooker. Does that count? If not, I buy myself video games on a fairly regular basis. The last one I purchased was Game & Wario, I think. Oh, and I bought some nice dress boots for myself last week. They’re classy.


Some of your fans (me included) lust after you, do you lust after anyone in the world?

Hmm. I think all my readers know I’ve had some pretty serious (and by serious, I mean goofy) crushes on various pretty bartenders. Long-term readers might remember I had a serious case of hotpants for my backyard neighbor, back in Michigan. (No, that’s not a euphemism. I wish it were.) I manage to work out my lusts on available asses on a pretty regular basis, so instead of burning with lust for various people, I just get schoolgirl crushes on random guys who delight my eyes.


What's the dumbest thing you’ve ever done to impress somebody and what's the dumbest thing anyone's ever done to impress you?

I once bought a rose a day for someone I wanted to woo, when I was in college. I thought it was beautiful and romantic as a gesture, but after about three days I realized it was coming across as creepy and stalkerish.

Most of the stupid things people have done to impress me have also leaked over into stalker territory—guys who follow me around the city, or who bombard me with hand-written notes—or who send me frantic instant messages the minute I get online, or who keep calling many times repeatedly over the course of a day—say they're doing it to show their devotion, but it's the kind of behavior these days that makes me wish I had a restraining order.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Sink or Swim?

I’ve mentioned before I occasionally see a friend of mine I’ve known at this point for nearly a quarter-century. He’s a glum personality; I’m afraid that in a couple of past entries in which he made appearances, I assigned him the unfortunate soubriquet of “Eeyore.”

But it’s fitting. He’s a sweet guy. I genuinely believe he’d give to me the shirt off his back if I complained I was chilly. In all the time I’ve known him, though, he’s always been a bit of a downer. Not a whirlwind of drama, mind you. More like a powerful but silent magnetic force that can walk into a room full of the most upbeat and high-spirited folk around—a real Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby of a party with hot jazz and hotcha flappers sipping bathtub gin and doing the hot new sensation called the Charleston—and without really meaning to, can suck up all the fun until there’s nothing left in the room but some limp crepe paper streamers and a sad, tattered print hanging on the wall of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Within minutes he can have every single person in a five-room radius moping, contemplating the futility of his existence, and reaching for the extra Ambien.

Come to think, I’m pretty sure I saw that exact situation on an episode of Fringe.

I went out on the town with Eeyore and another friend of mine not so long ago. As a trio we bar-hopped our way across Manhattan, pretty basically. We had drinks at a few establishments along Christopher Street. We stopped off for happy-hour $3 Long Island iced teas and drag queen fun before dinner. (I drank bottles of water.) We decided to have dinner before heading off to the Eagle, which involved me, the sober one, guiding them up Seventh Avenue and restraining them at intersections by planting my hands on their chests, so my two extremely inebriated friends wouldn’t blunder out into oncoming traffic. For all of those three hours we were together before dinner, the entire time Eeyore kept talking about the guy he’d taken home the night before.

I hadn’t paid much mind to the story, because all the guys Eeyore takes home are strippers. Dancers, I mean. (When I fuck dancers, they’re ballet dancers or former contestants on So You Think You Can Dance. When Eeyore gets with a dancer, it’s a stripper.) You know those newly-engaged women who, when you’re trying to relate your father’s medical issues and your own recent work woes, lean forward and flash the rock on their fingers and manage to turn every conversation into OMG your diamond is so BIG! ? Well, it was like that with Eeyore and the stripp . . . er, dancer.

I was trying to recap the plot of Blue Jasmine for someone and it would trigger Eeyore into saying, “That reminds me of something my dancer said last night after I took him home. . . .” Or I’d ask Eeyore how was his vacation in Chicago, and he’d reply, “Oh, it was fine. I found out the dancer I took home last night was from Bushwick. That’s not very far. Do you think it’s too far?”

It wasn’t really until we were sitting down at dinner and Eeyore picked up the menu and said, “I think the dancer I took home last night would really like this place. They have hamburgers,” that I turned to him in surprise. Here I’d been kind of politely ignoring his dancer stories in the same way I might have overlooked a big old booger hanging from his nostril. I’d been thinking, Oh my god, how many times can he bring up the fact AGAIN that he had sex last night? And when a sex blogger who’s constantly parading his tricks in front of an international audience of thousands is getting annoyed with with someone exhibitionistically talking about fucking, you know it’s got to be excessive.

But over the hamburger menu I realized that for the first time in I didn’t know how long, Eeyore actually seemed kind of happy. I commented on it. “Well yeah,” he said. “Of course. I mean, I almost got laid for the first time last night in twenty years.”

And I shouted, “WHAT?!

He repeated it for me. “I said, last night was the first time in twenty years that I was close to getting laid.”

“Twenty years,” I said.

He nodded.

“Two decades.”

He nodded again.

“Since 1993.”

By now he was looking at me like I was a blithering idiot. “Well, yeah.”

I stared at him for a moment and then, with outrage, demanded to know, “WHAT THE FUCK?!”

I have a tendency to think of myself as unfairly deprived if I have to go for five days without sex. Twenty years, to me, sounded like the stuff of science fiction. I’d known that Eeyore’s track record wasn’t stellar. All of his stories tend to end with the dancer (stripper) stealing his wallet, or leading him on, over the course of weeks or months, for lap dance money and then leaving him high and dry. Or else they involve the mercenary cleaning out his bank account and moving on to the next john.

But jeez. I assumed that from time to time in there, there’d been some actual nookie.

“There are just things in play that prevent me. . . .” he started to say.

I wanted to know what.

“My job. . . .”

“. . . . doesn’t involve a vow of celibacy and allows you plenty of hook-up time,” I countered.

“It’s a crazy city. . . .”

“. . . . where I manage to have sex several times a week.”

“I just wasn’t raised that way. My parents. . . .”

And here’s where I lost my patience.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had people—friends, lovers, readers of my blog who’ll write in to me or engage me in social media—tell me that they want to experience sexual joy, but that they can’t because of outside factors. I’ve had men tell me that they want to let go and play with whom they choose, but they can’t do it because they were raised in a religious household. I’ve had dozens and dozens of guys tell me they want to play with men, but they can’t because they’re married. They’ll tell me they were raised in the South and their upbringing prevents them from seeking sex with men. Or any number of other factors—all external, all allegedly beyond their control.

When a guy tells me that he wants to be more sexually adventurous (or, you know, to have sex more than nearly once every twenty years), but then rattles off a number of outside forces preventing him from achieving his goal, I know it’s not any of those externals that truly restrain him. Religion can be overcome. There are pigs worldwide from every ethnicity, nationality, and regional background. Not every relationship comes with a lock and key. No, what I hear is a man telling me that his inaction is a result of a mysterious societal conspiracy. Other people, vague and undefined, are making his choices for him. What I hear is a man telling me that he’s too frightened to make his own choices.

Look. I grew up in a family with no less than four ordained and practicing ministers, all Southern Baptist. It doesn’t get much more religious than that. I’m married. I was raised in the very same South. I know I’m not everyone’s touchstone, but none of those things keeps me from being a total whore. I don't allow any of those factors to keep me from pursuing sexual adventure any more than they I would allow them to keep me from reading what I want, watching the television shows that interest me, or listening to that demon rock and roll. I don’t allow external, invisible forces, up to and including God himself, to dictate my day-to-day happiness.

If Eeyore had, in answer to my question of why he’d been celibate for two decades, replied, Well, I’ve decided that it’s important to me to wait for a special someone, I would’ve thought about it, probably privately decided that his response wouldn’t be mine, and then given him a pat on the back and some words of support. That would’ve been a choice he’d made, based on a philosophy he believed in. If a married reader tells me that he wishes he could fuck around, but that he’s made a choice to stay true to his marriage vows because it makes him a more honest and committed person—fuck yes, more power to him. I admire anyone who makes a choice and owns that choice and isn’t afraid to stick to it.

For me it all boils down to whether a person is an active protagonist in his own life, or whether he’s passive and adrift and allowing invisible forces to carry him downstream. An invisible god shouldn’t be making choices for you. Kowtowing to the a disapproving, inchoate society or the thought of frowning and unhappy parents (who, in Eeyore’s case, have both been deceased for years) means you’ve taken the passive route. Thinking about your choices, and making the ones that are right for you—even if you’ve been told that they’ll make Baby Jesus cry—make you a warrior in your own life.

It really doesn’t take a lot to move from passive floater to an active leader of your own life. Mindfulness helps. Reflection. Learning to recognize when you’re allowing fear and commonplace external forces to dictate your direction. I truly believe it’s important to take as much control of our own lives as possible, because every one of us one day will find ourselves facing external obstacles that will throw the triviality of everything else into sharp relief. I’m talking about illness, and accidents, and irreplaceable losses of love and family. It’s when those roll around—and they always do—that we realize that we had happiness within reach all the time.

Whether or not you grasp it, or at least chase it, is up to you.

All of us are living on borrowed time. Every single one of us. One day it all comes due. Trust me, I know from experience that it’s possible to drift for long periods of time on tides that seem beyond our control. But some day we wake up and realize that a year has passed—five years, twenty years—and we’ll never again have that time or the opportunities it presented. I know that I’d rather face that moment knowing I threw myself into those waters and relished the sport and challenge of them. I’d rather splash and make noise and make a goddamned mess than drift quietly and apologetically through life. I’d rather regret the choices I made for myself, crazy as they may be, while I can make them, rather than regret fearing everything, making no choices at all, and blaming it all on forces beyond my control.

Again: I know my choices are my own. I don't expect anyone to follow in my exact footsteps. I just want people—I want you—to be the person at the helm of your own life. I want you to conquer those fears holding you back, whatever they may be.

For Eeyore, breaking a twenty-year dry spell is a first step. Learning that it’s not too late to quench his thirst is up to him.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Lips Together, Teeth Apart

So this guy’s sexy. Latin. Short—maybe five-three, five-four. Twenty-five. He’s got thick black hair that’s been swept in a wave up over his forehead. It glistens with pomade. Thick coal smudges for eyebrows. Dark eyes that bore into me when he opens the door of his third-floor walk-up. “Hi,” he says, with a thick accent.

“‘Lo,” I tell him, as I step into the kitchen.

“You’re hotter than your photos,” he tells me.

I smile and accept the compliment. Then I reach down, tilt up his jaw, and hold it in my hand as I kiss him deeply. The guy’s a hot kisser. His lips are loose, and soft, and wet; his tongue dips eagerly into my mouth. Mine slithers deep into his, invading his tiny lips and reaching to the very depths. A taste of things to come.

The apartment is immaculate. He’s not one of these guys who expects me to fuck in a shithole. The sofa’s white leather. The chair’s white leather. The rug on the living room floor is white and furry. The bed’s the only furniture in the room beyond. It’s fussily made with a half-dozen pillows at the top. There’s a crucifix hanging over the wrought iron headboard.

He lets me lower him to the mattress. I press my knees on either side of his hips. Straddle him. Let the weight of my chest press down. Crush him, a little. He’s breathless and purring with desire. His hands are everywhere—on my hair, running down the sides of my beard. His legs reach up and wrap around my waist, pulling me into him. We roll, entwined, until he’s on top of me. His fingers fumble to undo the buttons of my shirt. Once my skin is exposed, he covers me with soft little kisses.

I lift his head, pull his face to mine. Again we kiss deeply. My dick is rock hard from making out with this sexy little fucker, and it’s straining in my shorts. He knows it, too; he’s grinding his hips against me. Making me want him. I intend to have him. Make him mine. He’s bringing out the conqueror in me. I’m going to plant my flag at his summit. Make my mark on him.

Down he goes, sliding down my torso and off the bed. I feel hot breath through layers of fabric. There’s pressure as he unbuttons my shorts. I lift my hips for him, so he can pull them down. He yanks at the elastic of my shorts. My dick—thick, full, already beaded with precum—flops out. I hear the percussive sound it makes as it strikes my abdomen.

“Oh, papi,” he croons as his hands clasp around the shaft. “So sexy. I want this big dick so bad.”

“It’s yours, son,” I say, as I softly stroke his hair. “All yours.” I lift up my chin to encourage him. “Suck it.”

Then I lay back to enjoy.

I feel the heat of his mouth. The softness of his lips. The velvet wetness of his mouth as he closes it around my inches.

And then I feel some of the worst pain I’ve experienced on this side of the kidney stone I had a few years back. I mean, seriously. It feels like fucking razors on my shaft. Or like I’ve stuck my dick into a warm tankful of hungry fucking piranhas. It takes a second or two for my brain to realize that my dick’s being subjected to rough treatment, but once I’ve made that connection, I’m springing up from the bed and trying to get my dick out of that house of horrors. “What what what?” I yell. He looks up in surprise. “What the fuck are you doing?” I shout.

“I want your dick, papi,” he says.

“You want it, what, to be a bloody stump? Chrrrrrrist!” I examine my dick. It’s still hard, though wilting slightly from the torture it’s been through. His teeth have really done a number right underneath the crown. I can actually see the scrapes his incisors have left. The skin’s broken; there are dark ovals of a darker purple than the angry red of my arousal. “Holy fuck,” I say.

“I’ll kiss it better,” he says, trying to grab my dick back.

“The hell you will,” I say, annoyed. I try to modulate my anger, though. I’m not normally so pissy. But this is my dick in question. The fuck? Who gives the kind of blow job that feels like thrusting one’s meat into a sprung bear trap, and then expects the guy to like it? Who chews on a guy’s dick? That’s not just bad technique. That’s a crime against the good will of tops everywhere. I wore clunky metal braces for two and a half years in my teens, sucked hundreds of dicks with them on, and never once nicked a guy. “Just get out,” I tell him, waving my hands and shooing him away.

It takes me a minute, as I pull my pants back up and put on my shirt again, to realize that I’ve sent the guy packing from his own bedroom. And even more surprisingly, he’s let me. He cowers back a little as I limp out of the bedroom. The motherfucker between my legs stings.

“Maybe you’ll come back sometime?” he asks, as he lets me out.

“Maybe,” I say. But it’s in the same probability range as maybe someday I’d like to bend over and let Pat Robertson from The 700 Club sodomize me with a spiked baseball bat.

It’s been four days and my dick’s still out of commission. It’ll get there, with some ointment and time.

But damn, boys. God gave you lips for a reason: to shut up and wrap around your teeth when you suck so that nobody gets hurt.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Faculty Handbook

“Truth: Any faculty member who tells you he hasn’t had a student come on to him is either a liar or in the math department.” That’s what a faculty fuckbuddy of mine said to me the first year I taught at the college level. He happened to be nuts-deep in a female sophomore at the time. I remembered the lesson through all my teaching years.

I’ve noticed in the past decade that more and more people assume a teacher/student relationship—and by relationship here I mean fucking—is a taboo. I’ve noticed that men and women alike seem to assume that colleges ban it. (A few do, but most don’t. Why should they? Their students are adults.), They assume that it’s the kind of thing that happens only in porn scripts and maybe Kentucky.

If you look at popular culture of the last century, though, you’ll see find a preponderance of novels and movies and even stage musicals (hi, On Your Toes) in which female students basically treat college like a pre-internet match.com where they expect to land a tweedy faculty husband. During my college years it was easier to figure out which faculty member I hadn’t slept with, than name the ones who’d bent me over their desks. Without thinking much I could probably tick off between a dozen and a score of names of my professors who’d ended up marrying female students. And if you think those relationships were chaste before the wedding vows, I’ve got a bridge built by Foucault to sell you.

No, throw a bunch of horny post-teenagers into an environment with authority figures like faculty, isolate them in a small campus town in which there’s no other form of entertainment, and the fucking is sure to follow. Is sleeping with students ethical? Depends on who you’re asking. Of the ones who’ve talked about it with me, I’ve known professors who would consider a dalliance with students who weren’t currently enrolled in any of their classes—but who would draw the line at slipping it to a current student, just to steer clear of charges of harassment. I’ve known faculty who’d push that line a little further—who’d fuck a current student as long as it was clear between them that the student’s grade wouldn’t be affected either way.

And I’ve known professors like my old fuckbuddy who had no problems fucking students in exchange for better grades. To him it was simply a transaction, plain and simple, in which each party had something the other wanted. If everyone agreed to the transaction, there was no need for anyone to bring up ethics.

Joel was his name. He was a full professor in his late forties who taught in the business school; I met him when I was cruising in the restrooms, back in the nineteen-eighties. I was in my mid-twenties, the fresh and proud possessor of a master’s degree, and newly hired as an adjunct by the university where my parents taught. Joel and I had exchanged blow jobs below the stalls of the cruisiest bathroom on campus and had enjoyed each other enough that we spent a few minutes talking outside. When he discovered I wasn’t an undergraduate (or a high school student, as he’d assumed—I’ve always had a tendency to look about a decade younger than I am), he took me under his wing.

Joel was one of those faculty who fucked students for sport. Male, female. Enrolled in his class or not. Bright shining stars or barely-lit bulbs. He didn’t care, so long as they’d strip down for him, spread their legs, and open up a hole. Once they’d consented, he enjoyed pushing their limits as much as possible. He’d keep a Polaroid camera and packs of instant film in his desk drawers, so he could take fuck photos in his office. If the kids were in one of his classes at the time, he’d tell them where to sit and what to wear to the next class—and what not to wear underneath. And he especially got off on sharing holes with another guy.

I was good for that. I liked Joel. He was an open-minded pig during a time that most people were pretending they didn’t have sex at all, especially the variety not carrying the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. He got me laid. And he taught me lessons I never picked up in the faculty handbook. (Mostly because there was no faculty handbook.)

“Don’t you go chasing after them,” Joel told me. “They’ll come looking for you. They’ll come up to your office and hang around, trying to shoot the shit with you. If they’ve got no reason to be there, that’s the reason they’re there. Trust me.”

I remembered those words my second semester, with a former student named Allan. He’d been in the very first class I ever taught. It met at the ungodly hour of eight in the morning, three times a week. The class was mostly freshmen, and even though the average age of the new admissions at the university skewed way upward from the standard eighteen, the genuine adults knew better than to register for an eight a.m. seminar. In a class of young and very sleepy faces, Allan was a standout. He was twenty-two or twenty-three and just starting college; he was tall and handsome. He wore a neatly-groomed beard in a time when very few men who weren’t aging hippies wore beards. He was intelligent, and wrote well. He easily earned the A I ended up giving him.

During the semester he was in my class I’d found myself hugely attracted to Allan, but I’d never shown him any special favoritism. I did cheat a little with him, though. One of my assignments through the semester was to ask students to keep a creative journal; I assigned a weekly number of pages they needed to scrawl out, and told them I wouldn’t be reading them but would only be checking the journals to see that they’d made the page count. Every couple of weeks I’d collect their notebooks, hand out a test, and sit in the hallway where I’d count pages to make sure they were keeping up.

I never read any of the journals, save Allan’s. I felt dirty doing it—like I was stealing his soiled underpants from his gym bag, or something. I’d save his notebook for last. I read about his car problems. I read about the ho-hum details of his everyday life. I read about his job at a body shop, where he’d worked since high school to help support his single mom. He never divulged any details about his sexual or romantic exploits, but the entire time I dipped my toes into his personal life, I’d be erect.

It’s probably a good thing he excelled at his work, because I had such a boner for the guy that I probably would’ve given him an A regardless.

He showed up in my office the semester after. I was sharing a small enclosure with two other adjuncts at the time. I’d never seen them; we all kept different office hours. I looked up from whatever I was doing to see his handsome, bearded face as he lounged in the door. “Hey,” he said.

“Well, hey,” I replied, gesturing him in. “What’s going on?”

I expected that he’d come to ask about a recommendation or something. But no. He was there just to hang. We made small talk about other students for a few minutes, and then came a point when the small talk ran out. I started to wonder exactly why he'd stopped in. Then Joel’s words came back to me. Allan had no fucking reason to be there. If he was there, his reason was fucking. And my heart began to pound.

What followed formed the basic template for every student come-on since. Allan cleared his throat, screwed up his courage, and nervously asked, “So . . . in your spare time, where do you hang out?”

My throat was dry. “Hang out?”

“You know. When you’re not working.” I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t had much experience with a student coming onto me on my own. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. “Bars, that kind of thing.” He started rattling off a list of Richmond hot spots. It was Richmond in the nineteen-eighties. There weren’t that many. And the very last one, which he pronounced at a softer volume than the others, before letting his words trail off, was Richmond’s only gay bar at the time.

I’ve had so many former male students do that exact same thing in the years since. They think they’re being clever and coy, casually dropping the name of a gay bar in the conversation to see if there’s that spark of surprise or recognition in my eyes. They think it’s never been done before. Little do they know that Allan beat them all to it, in my timeline. And little do they suspect that my poker face is better than theirs. Pulling a stunt like only leads to me standing up from my desk, pushing shut the door, and then shoving them against the wall. It’s not my eyes that are sparking with surprise, at that point.

But I didn’t have the confidence then I have now. I wasn’t the aggressor then that I’ve become since. So I simply stared at Allan, wet my dry lips, and finally said in the blandest tones possible, “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “I just thought if you wanted to grab a beer sometime. . . .”

I was still frozen by the opportunity. Simply put, I lacked the experience to know how to deal with it. So I blinked over and over again for a few seconds, probably looked as uncomfortable as I was, until at last Allan stood up, mumbled some vague goodbye, and made a speedy getaway.

“You’re a fucking fool,” is what Joel told me when I reported the incident to him later that week. “That kid wanted you, and you blew it.”

His words only confirmed the way I felt about myself. I was a failure, and I’d managed to let an opportunity slip through my fingers that would likely never repeat itself. (It never did.)

Joel slapped me on the back, though, as if my fumble were only a temporary setback. “There’ll be other chances,” he told me. “Just you wait. There’ll be others.”

And he was right. There were others, and plenty of them.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Sunday Morning Questions: L and R Edition

I have a tendency to meet people and make new friends, when I go out. I also have a tendency—perhaps you’ve noticed—to accumulate new stories all the time. Sometimes the two things go hand in hand. And I guess sometimes they work against each other.

Through another friend, over the summer I made acquaintances with a sexy Asian banker in Manhattan. He’s a nice, down-to-earth guy with a dry sense of humor that matches mine. I’d kind of guessed, from a couple of dropped hints he’d made on our first meeting about slings and leather, that he was perhaps sexually attracted to me. The explicit text bombs he made to my phone, later on, confirmed it. But for whatever reason, we haven’t done anything about it. (Yet.)

We were sitting at a midtown bar last week when he expressed the wish—one I’ve heard many times before from gay guys—that he could sleep with one porn star, once in his life. I suggested it’d be easy enough to pick up a copy of Next and riffle through the escort ads in the back, as they’re nothing but porn actors selling sex, but apparently the notion of having to pay for it didn’t appeal to him. He wanted the porn star to want him for himself. Kind of the way that guys who love strippers and prostitutes and other sex workers want them, but want it to be a freebie.

So I told him that I suspected even with porn actors, he’d find the whole spectrum of sex from good to bad, and that just because they’d fucked on film didn’t make them super-lovers or even spectacular human beings. “You don’t even know any porn stars,” he told me, scornfully.

Oh-ho-ho, but I do. I pulled out my phone and opened up my contacts, which has its own ‘Porn Actors’ section. (Not because I’m bragging, mind you, but because I’m anal about classification.) “Oh my god,” he exclaimed, over the first name alphabetically on the list. “I’ve seen all his movies! How do you know him?”

I didn’t want to say that I write a sex blog and the man in question was a fan, so I just mumbled something about how I’d known him for years. My acquaintance had already pulled out his phone, though, and was looking up some of the other names. “Oh my god!” he’d say after each once, once he’d Googled some photos. “Oh my god! You’ve had sex with all of these guys?”

“No, no,” I said, laughing. “I haven’t had sex with any of them. Well. Almost, with this one.” I pointed to the last name in the list.

“But I know who that one is! I love him! How do you know him?!”

The him in question was a kid who’s been in a lot of scenes lately. I’d met him over the summer at another bar near Grand Central, when he’d been out celebrating his twenty-first birthday. He’s a short, muscular little thing. I’d taken a pee break and he’d followed me into the single-person bathroom. We didn’t have sex (I thought he was too drunk for it, and I do have ethics), but we did make out against the slate walls of the restroom for a good ten minutes (my ethics only go so far). And then I had to listen to him talk to me about what cars he liked for an hour afterward.

Truth be told, I didn’t know he was a porn actor until later in the night when one of the bartenders told me. Then I, like my friend, looked him on my phone and realized that yeah, I’d made out with a porn actor. A twenty-one-year-old-that-night porn actor. I’d thought he was just some dumb kid who liked cars. “And I’m not saying he’s dumb,” I said, with the implication that I was saying exactly that. “But he does have an L and an R tattooed on his feet.”

“Liar,” he snarled.

“No really.” I brought out my phone, googled a couple of images, and sure enough, on a couple of them you could see the fancy L on the kid’s left foot. The shot was of him with his legs over his head, but the right foot was out of frame.

My acquaintance stared at me for a moment. “I think I fucking hate you now,” he said. Then he stood up and stalked away.

I’m still trying to figure out whether or not he was serious.

Let’s get to some questions from readers, courtesy of formspring.me. And if you have questions, please feel free either to ask them through that service, or via the email in the sidebar. (Don’t be offended if I don’t get to yours immediately. I put them in a big backlog and choose them at whim. But I’ll get to them!)

Have you taken part in a "naughty librarian" fantasy/role-play? Would you like to?

No, I've never engaged in that particular kind of roleplay.

One of my grandmothers was a librarian. (Hence my anal tendencies about keeping contacts rigidly classified.) I had a severe crush on a librarian once, and I actually had fun with a naughty librarian several times. Sadly though, with the latter, it was never actually in his library.


What movie is better than the book from which it was made?

The English Patient. Good god, that book is a terrible read. And I usually love that arty literary crap.
Also, the Emma Thompson Sense & Sensibility is a hell of a lot better than the original Jane Austen book. Hey, I’m a Jane Austen lover who picks up Mansfield Park every other year for fun, but Sense & Sensibility is a tiny bit underbaked and a whole lot overwrought.


Did you have a favorite store to visit to buy snacks and pop when you were in grade four?

Johnson's Hardware was the name of the store, and it was a dinky little mom and pop hardware store in Richmond's north side that had what I felt was the most amazing nickel candy display in the world. I bought Wacky Packages and Bottle Caps there almost nightly, after a long bike ride from home. Additionally, the store had a soda machine outside that sold both Grape Nehi (which was my favorite) and Brownie (which Wikipedia describes as a 'whey-based chocolate drink', making it sound as unappetizing as it probably really was).

Plus, two doors down was Willey's Drug Store, where I could buy a chocolate or vanilla cone for a dime.

My, I was a little glutton.


What are (in your opinion) the oddest search terms that have brought people to your blog?

Most of the search phrases that people use to find my blog are pretty straightforward: things like "mrsteed's blog" or "a breeder's blog" or "mr steed sex journal." Those I understand.

What mystifies me every time are the phrases that seem to be very, very specific. So specific, in fact, I can't fathom why or how my blog came up in the Google search. Phrases like "depraved tops who bang out six loads in a row" (well, maybe that one I can figure out!), or "African violet use during sex." I also tend to get a lot of Justin Bieber sex-related searches as well.

However, I think my two oddest search phrases have been "photos of young men having sex in poses of the zodiac", and "spongebob squarepants sucking dick." If I actually had written about those things, my life would be a whole lot more interesting.


How many times do you think your parents have had sex?

My parents had a lot of sex. My parents had a LOT of sex.

They were not shy about it. If they were cuddling on the sofa watching TV, and the cuddling turned into making out, and the making out got them hot and heavy, they would have absolutely no qualms about leading each other to the bedroom and shutting the door. They made absolutely no attempt to pretend they were doing anything other than what they were doing, either.

Growing up I remember being barred from a couple of motel rooms for an hour or so while we were traveling, so they could fuck. Sometimes I was sent to the local store on errands on my bike so they could have the run of the house to themselves. They once did it in the back seat of my dad's 1963 Dodge Dart so that the windows fogged over.

I always accepted it as something natural—which it is, and should be. The only time it bothered me was the night before I moved to Michigan for graduate school, and my parents screwed with their bedroom door open, thinking I was asleep down the hall. That was loud and a little annoying. Not because it was my parents having sex, but because jeez, at least try to keep it down a little, folks!

Friday, September 6, 2013

Revenge #2

We’d fucked like dogs in heat two days before. It had been a session in which Rock Star blew an explosive five-day load all over my chest, face, and his pillows. After that, the pressure’s off for the week. Today’s supposed to be a cuddle day—one of those mornings when he and I get together with no particular sexual agenda.

Sometimes on a cuddle day we lay naked in bed beneath a thin blanket, letting the air conditioner roar over our bodies as we talk. Sometimes we drift into a morning nap that lasts until the noon sun breaks through the skylights above.

Sometimes, like this morning, we make out like kids in a split-level basement party after school. Our dicks grow hard as we hold and paw each other. He tries to climb on top of me; I push him down and suck on his long shaft as he studies me with dark eyes covered by even darker hair. Finally, he swings around to lay his head on my thigh. His mouth wraps around my dick. He comes that way, masturbating with my shaft in his throat while I fondle his balls and gently rub on his nipples.

We’re in a tangle afterward. Sweaty. Smelling of each other. The dog’s curled in furry beige lump at the bed’s head, protecting the toy he’s held in his mouth for the last two hours. “You know what I liked?” says Rock Star, from where he’s using my stomach as a pillow.

“What?” I rumble. My eyes are half-closed. It’s a sleepy, lazy, wonderful moment.

“I liked those photos of you sent to me. The ones of you in college.”

“Oh gawrsh,” I chuckle. I was camera-shy for my first four decades. Of the handful of photos I have from my college years, I only have a few digitized. I’d texted Rock Star three, one day, to lift him out of a bad mood after work. One was of me dancing with a female professor at a costume party. Another was of me on the Jamestown ferry, my eighties Paul Young mullet made even more poofy from the wind. The last is of me drenched and glistening and soaking wet from a storm, laughing like crazy from the exhilaration of the driving rain and the wind.

At the time I thought of myself as a hideous creature that should’ve been living under the bridge the Billy Goats Gruff traveled. Now, with time, I see why so many men wanted me. I’m fresh-faced, and sunny, and smooth-skinned. I was beautiful then, and never once gave myself the credit. “You look so . . . you in them,” he tells me.

And I know just what he means. My hair’s less crazy now, my face bearded—but my smile’s the same, as are my eyes. I still laugh in the same half-self-conscious way. Take a high-speed camera and capture shots of a speeding baseball at two points in its trajectory and you’ll see it from different angles; the markings vary, the stitching transform. But it’s still undeniably the same. “Thank you,” I say, feeling shy. Then, in a more assertive tone, I add, “But I was all bottom then. You wouldn’t have been as crazy about me.”

Re-ally,” he says, intrigued. I tell him in brief about what a slut I was in college and before, and how it wasn’t until I’d graduated and begun graduate school that I was introduced to topping. He listens with amusement, as if I’m spinning some unlikely fiction. He sits up in the bed and props himself on my naked chest. “Does that mean you want me to fuck that hole of yours?”

“Oh yeah,” I say, snickering a little. “That’s what it means, all right.”

“You want me to flip you over and show you my sex-ay top moves?”

He’s teasing, but I play right along. “Yes sir,” I tell him. “I want you to show me your sex-ay top moves right now.”

He’s shot only a few moments before; there’s no chance he’ll be hard enough actually to do anything. I’m amused, though, as he roughly grabs me by the shoulders and flips me onto my stomach. He straddles my ass and flops his cock against my crack. It’s not turgid, but it still has enough residual blood in it to make it hefty. It spreads my cheeks as he pushes his weight into me. “Well first,” he says into my ear. “I’d make love to you, all sweet and gentle.” His long, long hair hangs down and tickles my bare back. I feel the heat of his breath on my spine, followed by the wet lick of a tongue. He plants kisses on my shoulders that make me sigh. “And then. . . .”

Rock Star gives one of my buttocks a heavy wallop. He waits for my reaction. It’s been years, but I’ve been spanked and paddled by pros. That spank I barely felt. I look over my shoulder and peer at him with one of my eyes. “Was that it?” I ask.

Without warning he grabs the top of my skull. Shoves my head into the pillows so roughly that I exhale and lose my breath. Begins pounding my ass with his pelvis. He’s giving it a real battering, too. His dick flops around heavily, bludgeoning my ass. “Then I say, Take it, little bitch!” He jackhammers me into the mattress while he wrenches my head back and forth by the hair. The dog looks up mournfully from his pillow.

I can barely breathe, but I start laughing. I can’t stop, either. The hilarity of it hits a chord deep inside, and once struck, it won’t stop jangling. “You are crazy,” I tell him.

“Then I’ll pull out and give you some relief,” he says. He pulls his pelvis away from my body. I feel the tip of his dick dangling just above my hole. The air conditioner pushes coolness over our sticky skins. My laughter has subsided into giggles, but they keep on coming. I know it’s not over.

Sure enough, he starts mock-pounding me again. Every thrust brings stars to my eyes. His hipbones are so pronounced and sharp that they have to be bruising my backside as he slams into me, but can’t stop laughing. Full-force, now. I’ve got tears in my eyes. “Yeah, rippin’ into your daddy ass,” he growls. “Your boy gettin’ his own back. Turning daddy into my bitch, bitch!” His mouth is next to my ear, just as mine is when I plow into him. “Maybe I’ll shove you up against the wall, lift up a leg, make you chew on the plaster to muffle your yells while I pound the shit out of your daddy ass!”

“Okay!” I say amenably.

“It’s going to be a fuckin’ bloodbath!

He pushes himself off and rolls me over. I’m still chuckling, deep from the gut. I can’t tell if I’m breathless from his weight, or from my amusement. “You are a deeply, deeply silly man,” I tell him, trying to sound grave.

“Then I’ll take those sheets, all covered with blood from your daddy hymen, and sell them to a New York art gallery for a buttload of money,” he says. “It’ll be my art installation. I’ll call it. . . .” He pauses to think.

Revenge,” I suggest. “No, Revenge #2.”

Revenge #2,” he agrees. “By Daddyfucker.”

He can’t help himself either. A single snort rips through his rough, tough would-be top’s facade. He collapses next to me on the mattress, and tickles my ribs. We both erupt into renewed giggles.

Our arms entwine around each other. Our lips meet. We kiss, still laughing like little kids, and disappear beneath the blanket to enjoy each other while there’s still time.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Runt . . . Cunt

So he’s lying on his mattress, staring at me with those big, helpless eyes, hands clawing at the sheets, feet paddling the air like a kitten. I’m straddling his chest, sitting on his rib cage. My weight’s holding him down, making him breathless. One of my hands is clamped over his mouth, muffling the whimpers and pleas. The other is reaching back to work on his sloppy butt. I’ve got four fingers plugging that gape; my first load has already seeped out onto the rumpled sheets, and into the palm of my hand. My fingers stink of semen and boyhole.

“That hurt?” I ask the Runt. To get the answer I want, I add my thumb to the cone I’m making and jab it in. Harder. Deeper. His eyes widen. His lashes are already fringed with moisture bordering on tears. “I said, does that hurt?”

The sound he makes is smothered by my hand, pushing down so hard on his mouth that his head is disappearing into the pillow. “What?” I snarl. “I can’t fucking understand you. Does it hurt?”

He tries to speak again, then realizes that I’m not going to let up on my grip on his face. Runt looks up at me and nods as best he can. His panicked eyes telling me all I really need to know.

It hurts.

His dick tells me the rest of the tale. He’s shot already during the first fuck, and not that long ago, but it’s hard again and red and glistening across the gentle downward slope of his abdomen. There’s a pool of precum sliding out of his dick’s tip. Sure, it hurts. But the little fucker loves it.

My eyes drill into his as my hand insistently probes his hole. His legs paddle helplessly. As he begins to accept the sensation of being opened wide, their fruitless motions lessen, then cease. His dick leaps up and points to the headboard. I feel breath on the side of my head from his nose, as he sighs deeply. He fucking loves what I do to him. He settles into the mattress and open his legs wider, inviting me in.

The Runt lives with his folks still. His room’s still a boy’s room. There’s a pile of laundry in a corner that carries the vaguely goat-like stink of boys his age. His desk is covered with video game discs and electronic equipment. His closet looks like it’s been used to contain the explosion of a hoodie factory. He doesn’t have an adult’s artwork on the walls; he’s got posters. I don’t fuck him at his home much. I drill his little hole in cars. I bring him to my place and ram the shit out of him. Anyplace I can get the little fuck on his knees, spread his cheeks, wet him up, and slam it deep.

Because when it comes down to it, the penetration is what he craves. Penetration is the defining moment of sex for him. It’s the point of fucking, to be put in his place, spread wide, and violated. There hasn’t been a time we’ve been together when he hasn’t let loose with his load, the moments I’m forcing myself into his hole. The rougher and more humiliating I make it, the harder this boy shoots. Oh, he’s still in it for the fuck. He grinds his ass and begs for my load. He loves cock in his shitter.

But the penetration is what gets him off—that sensation of being ripped into, of being entered, of giving it up to a superior cock. The more painful it is, the harder he climaxes. So I play it up and make sure he fucking feels it, every time.

I let go of his mouth. There’s a red print on his face from the pressure. His lips tremble and work to bring the blood back. “Get up,” I order him, as I swing my knee over his body and release him from my weight. I flop back on his stinky bed, let my head dent the pillows. He scrambles to his feet. Reflexively, his hand touches the collar around his neck. It’s the dog collar we bought together. It’s a talisman for him. He’d wear it 24/7 if I let him. “Fuck, son,” I drawl, letting some of my Southern cadences color my voice. “You’re a sloppy mess.”

He looks up and down his body. He’s covered with silvery dry traces of his own juice. With lube. His moon-white skin is covered with my pawprints. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“You look like a fucking whore,” I tell him. “You look like you’re just a cunt. Is that all you are? Just a cunt?”

There’s a smile playing at the edge of his lips. He’s liking this. His skinny cock is still rock hard, and it’s projecting out in front of him. He nods.

“Go over to your desk,” I tell him. “Get one of those marking pens in that cup there.” He shuffles over his books and manga and pulls out a blue highlighter from the cup. “No,” I say, annoyed. “The black one. There.”

He comes back with a thick-tipped Sharpie, which he offers me.

“Uncap it.” He obeys, his eyes on me unwaveringly. I sit up, take the pen, and turn it so that the tip is facing him. “So you’re just a whore, huh? A little boy-whore?”

He nods. Another bead of pre-cum oozes from his dick and begins to hang down underneath the head. “Yes sir,” he says. It’s barely a murmur.

“Come here.” I reach up and pull him down by the collar. He thinks I’m going to kiss him. I do not. Instead, I hold him at a distance, so I can write on his chest with the Sharpie. His eyes widen as I scrawl a thick W over his right nipple. I put a H on his pectoral, and a O right in the middle of his sternum. An R follows, and then I finish off with an E over the left nipple.

When I release him, he staggers back and looks down at himself. It’s upside and backwards from his perspective, but I know he can read. “What’s that say?” I ask.

Whore,” he says, faintly. His face is red. He looks mortified that I’ve written the legend on him. But that dick doesn’t lie. He loves it. Loves it.

“Is that what you are?” I ask. He nods. “I didn’t hear you.”

This time, he asserts his answer a little more loudly. “Yes sir.”

“Turn around. Bend over.”

He thinks I’m going to eat his cummy hole. Or maybe shove my fingers back inside. I do neither. “And this,” I say, brandishing the Sharpie, “is what this is.”

On his left cheek I write a large, dark CU. On the right, NT. Right above the crack, I draw an arrow pointing down.

“Look in the mirror,” I tell him.

He turns, and looks at his creamy white butt in the full-length mirror on his door. His cock leaps as he realizes what it says. “What are you?” I ask.

“A cunt, sir,” he says.

“And?”

“A whore.”

“Fucking right. Put this away.” I throw the marker at him. He nearly misses grabbing at it, but he caps it and returns it to the desk. “Now get over here.”

I pull him down onto the bed using his collar. Put him face down. Pull the pillows so they’re under his hips. Yank his ankles apart so that little butthole is exposed. Drive in two fingers. He gasps, and groans. I’ve arranged his dick so that the pillows are pushing it between his thighs. It’s pointing straight down at the mattress, exposed, hard, angry red. “What are you?” I ask.

“A whore,” he moans, into the bed. “A cunt.”

“You’re a fucking cunt,” I tell him. Then I take my cock, aim it at his hole, and shove myself into that warm, tight boyflesh. No mercy. No kindness. I plow all the way in, and and land on the little nub that’s his prostate. I mash my dick’s head against it.

He cries out, loudly. His body shakes. It’s almost as if he’s trying to buck me off, his reaction is so strong. But it’s only the orgasm taking over. His semen squirts down onto the bedclothes . . . one, two, three jets of the thick and sloppy stuff.

“I’m a cunt,” he whimpers. He’s saying it more to himself than to me. It’s a mantra to him now. “I’m a cunt. I’m a fucking cunt. Just a fucking little cunt.”

“Good boy,” I say, letting him hear the pleasure in my voice. “Lesson learned.”

I wait until his body stops shaking. Then I withdraw a few inches, slide in, and begin the real fuck.