So. How are you guys doing? Anything going on? Anything new to report?
Yeah, me neither, I guess. Same old, same old, right?
In all seriousness: it’s been a rough year so far for just about everyone. Many of you have been reaching out to make sure I’m okay, what with being close to the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in this country. And I am okay. I haven’t been sick. I’d stocked up on toilet paper a month before things got serious; I’d purchased an armful of hand sanitizer when it was on sale at Target, right before I flew to Las Vegas in early February. I’d even grabbed a 5-pack of jumbo-sized disinfectant wipes at CostCo on a whim, two weeks before all hell broke loose.
When things started getting bad in late February, I started staying at home even though no one was demanding I should. I’d creep out to my class at night armed with a giant bottle of Purell and one of those monster tubs of disinfectant wipes I’d just bought, and before starting my instruction I’d demand my students basically run through a G-rated and less invasive version of the scene in Silkwood where the heroine is blasted down with a hose.
Then abruptly the schools shuttered. The parks were made off limits. City services closed. The world shut down. It’s been a month today that I’ve been in isolation.
I’m doing all right. I wake up and eat breakfast. I play video games. (Mostly Animal Crossing. Thanks to the couple of readers who keep letting me come to your towns and buy stuff from your shops!) I take a shower. I straighten my beard, because even in isolation, dad’s gotta look foxy. I eat lunch. I play more video games. I’ve been working on a project to get more people recording their experiences during this trying period of history—so that takes a chunk of my afternoon. I make dinner. Then I watch TV, because I need to find out what happens to this Joe Exotic dude.
Then I get up the next day and do the same thing all over again. All the while, I try with all my might not to think about the fact that I haven’t fucked in over a month and by this point I am going bat-shit crazy to the point that I would sink my dick into anything that looked even vaguely receptive. A photo of a Krispy Kreme donut makes me hard.
But no, I’m trying to do my part and stay socially-distanced.
So that brings me to my questions for you guys, on this Open Forum Friday. How’re you doing? Are you keep yourselves isolated? If so, are you breaking the recommendations and sneaking out to get some, or are you taking one for team and keeping it in your pants? If you’re staying home, how’re you coping with the horniness? Keeping busy? Sex with the person you’re isolated with? Masturbation? Copious amounts of porn? What good porn are you viewing? Nude pics from readers? (That’s more of a hint than a question. I’m always happy to get nude pics from readers.)
I’m seriously interested in your coping strategies during this rough time. It doesn’t look like things will be changing in the near future, and it seems most men I talk to are getting their pipes as thoroughly backed up as mine feel.
So for real now: what are you doing to get by, when it comes to sex? Let us know in the comments below.
Showing posts with label open forum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open forum. Show all posts
Friday, April 10, 2020
Monday, December 31, 2018
On Forgiveness
It’s the end of the year, and I’m a little thoughtful of late. So if you’ll allow it, I’d like to compose a couple of meditations on forgiveness.
1.
When I first moved to this part of the country, on Scruff I met a kid from Brooklyn that I liked very much. We’d had similar sexual awakenings growing up, and compatible tastes in the sack as adults. He liked to put his ass in the air for older men, and I’ve always had a taste for young men with daddy issues to work out. We hit it off online and made plans to meet, but as with so many encounters on the apps, it never seemed to happen.
He would be nearby and available when I was in a meeting. I’d be knocking around the city solo while he was at work. He once arrived when I available in my sleepy suburb for a work event, but he wouldn’t be free from that get-together until an hour when I’d be teaching. Both of us took these criss-crossed impasses with a good humor—but I think we both found them frustrating.
Finally came a time when we both seemed to be available. I was sitting in a coffee shop in the city with nothing to do for several hours; he had a day off work and was hinting heavily to me that he might be available. But as we were catching up with each other in chat, he shared with me that he’d had a brief relationship that ended badly when he’d discovered his boyfriend had concealing a trash heap of lies. I’d gone through my own travails with Cory the year before, so in commiseration I shared with the kid an abbreviated version of that mess—how I’d developed a relationship with Cory that he’d eroded with lies, and how Cory had vanished after leaving me with both a dire care of syphilis and a need for immediate medical attention.
I thought I was consoling this Brooklyn boy by sharing a tale similar to his, one of feeling foolish after wool had been pulled over my eyes. Instead, I freaked him the fuck out. I had syphilis, he wanted to know? And I wanted to sleep with him?
No, I told him. I’d had syphilis. Well over a year ago. I’d gone to the doctor. I’d had shots. I’d had several blood tests since. I didn’t have syphilis any more.
Nuh-uh, he told me repeatedly. That’s not the way syphilis worked. Once you had it, you had it for good.
I was kind of confused. This Brooklyn kid wasn’t stupid. I mean, he had a college degree. He worked for a company that attracts the best and the brightest. He should know better than to think syphilis was incurable. I mean, he was on PrEP, which at least showed some degree of sexual education. But nope. He kept insisting I was unclean—his word. That he couldn’t sleep with me, since I’d had (or, in his mind, since I had) syphilis.
I didn’t put up much of a fight. He was convinced. I was disappointed. I’d been called dirty. Confused and ashamed for no good reason, I wished him luck and tried to put him out of my mind for good.
Life’s too short, guys. Attempting to convince someone to want you, when it’s plain they won’t, is one of the biggest wastes ever of your time. Just don’t do it.
Still, I admit I had pangs. I’d see the kid online in the couple of years that followed. Each time, that flicker of recognition when my eyes landed on his smiling face would result in me sighing, remembering his insults, and moving on. I’d feel momentary anger whenever I saw him on. I’d wonder how could anyone so educated be so dumb, and hurtful. Whatever. It was just one more person against whom I’d have to harden my heart. What’s one more person. Right?
Something happened late last year, though. Out of the blue I got a message from this Brooklyn kid. He wanted my forgiveness. He said he’d been stupid and ignorant. He realized he’d hurt me with his words, and he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t expect me ever to respond to him, and he certainly didn’t expect me to want to get together with him after what had happened, but the guilt of how he’d surely made me feel weighed heavy on his mind. He was sorry, and he apologized for it.
For a moment I experienced a savage stab of satisfaction. I don’t mind admitting it. Who doesn’t enjoy a good told you so? Fucking right he’d made me feel badly. Go guilt! But you know, that feeling evaporated almost instantly, along with all the ill-will toward this kid I’d been building up over the years. He’d done the right thing. He’d apologized, and his apology was sincere and unmotivated by anything but a wish to put things right.
All is forgiven, I wrote back. Tapping out the words lightened my spirit. I laughed, even. It felt good to forgive. My heart felt lighter; all the sour feelings I’d worked up over this boy turned to sweet. They’ve stayed that way ever since.
Forgiving this kid—just letting it go—felt good. For a short period of time, after being weighed down by resentment and upset, forgiving him made me feel weightless. I don’t let go of resentments easily. Given a reason to, though . . . it was as if the incident had never happened.
2.
Earlier this year I wrote about Peter, a kid whose online life had been entangled with mine for years. The essay was one of my more depressive entries; I catalogued how Peter and I had planned to meet again and again, only to have something gum up the works. Earlier this year we’d finally made our first firm date, and then the day of, he rapidly canceled it, set it back on, canceled it again, changed his mind, then finally canceled. At the time, I tried to remain philosophical about the rejection, but when Peter disappeared for weeks immediately after, for the first time in all the years I’d known him, I felt used and abused.
A couple of months after that I saw Peter and his boyfriend together out on the town. The overwhelming sadness I felt I wrote about in the essay ‘Butterflies and Boners.’ I wrote the entry knowing that, as Peter had been reading my blog for years, he was likely to encounter it. Knowing he probably would kept me honest. I didn’t jiggle with the facts. I wrote what I thought was true, and fair; I wrote not meaning to be hurtful, but to reflect my own sense of hurt. I wrote, and poured out my heart, and in return I got a lot of very supportive comments from readers, and a very little bit of closure.
The incident soured me, though. For a very long time after that night in which I encountered Peter and his boyfriend, I didn’t feel like dealing with all the bullshit men were putting me through, just to get my rocks off. Furthermore, I didn’t feel like engaging in any social media at all. Boys were stupid. Men were stupid. People were stupid. I wanted none of it.
This mini-depressive episode didn’t last. Apparently I can only go without sex for so long. I was still in a sensitive place, though, when a month after I shared ‘Butterflies and Boners,’ I got a text from Peter. I would like to see if we have a connection still, he said. I don’t think I want to start with a sexual contact. I’d rather start over a drink, or coffee, or lunch.
What had been a mild depression instantly coalesced into a white-hot furnace. WELL WELL WELL, I raged internally. LOOK WHO’S COME CRAWLING BACK.
I’d read the text mere seconds after I’d received it, and all I could really think was that if Peter had been nervous about sex with me, he could’ve said so at any point in the previous five years. In fact, many times had I urged him to consider meeting me just to chat, only to have him drag me into his fisting, fucking, and breeding fantasies. I stared at the screen for a minute and tried to think of what to say. I wanted to reply with Guess you didn’t read my BLOG ENTRY, MOTHERFUCKER.
Only, you know. In a classy way.
I was still staring at the text when I got the follow-up. I suppose I should’ve read your blog before reaching out.
Mild understatement, that. Angrily I ground my teeth and read on.
Peter wrote, I also suppose I’m glad to read our history from your perspective. It’s not shocking in an “I had no idea I was treating you like that” way - I was very aware - but it’s shocking and different reading it laid out over the course of a few minutes than it is having done it over days and years.
Reading these words, part of me softened. I’d tried not to be harsh to Peter in that essay; I’d attempted to assign as much blame to myself for my lack of good sense as I did him for his youthful heedlessness.
I read on. I have not treated you with respect. Outside of the moments we’ve texted, I haven’t treated you with kindness either. I am sorry for how I yanked you around when it came to actually meeting, and for how I treated you by disappearing.
Oh. He was apologizing.
My skin had felt on fire, my heart had been pounding with a pent-up anger I hadn’t even been aware I was feeling, but his simple words cooled me down. Peter went on to say that he understood if I never wanted to see him, and if that were the case, he’d never bother me again.
My eyes skipped over his last offer. He’d apologized. Peter had apologized—and handsomely. It hadn’t been one of those ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you’ half-apologies. He’d owned up to what he’d done, and expressed his remorse.
And you know what? I felt better. I felt fucking amazing. And I knew in my heart that I couldn’t hold any animus against Peter any longer.
I was finally able to compose a response. I note and appreciate the apology of your last text. Please know that although I think about our relationship with sadness, I bear you no ill will. I meant the last part with all my heart. Hurt as I’d been, Peter’s attempt to make things right were just what I needed.
I forgave him there and then. I wasn’t ready to drop everything and run to meet him, not at that moment—and I told him so. But I thanked him sincerely for apologizing, and told him we’d talk again.
Peter did the right thing, that day. He’d wounded me more deeply than the kid from Brooklyn ever could. His apology, though, let me start healing. Once again I was able to drop a burden of resentment of which I wasn’t even aware I was carrying. The rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the year was happier and lighter because of it.
It takes a big man to make a sincere apology. I know when I try to be half the man Peter was that day and attempt to make amends with those I’ve wronged, it’s never easy, and rarely straight-forward. That he was able to do so after the shock of seeing his actions held up in my mirror speaks volumes to his integrity. Life manages to find endless fresh ways to make me hurt, I wrote in ‘Butterflies and Boners.’ But life manages to find endless ways to help me forgive, too.
It’s the last day of the year. Tomorrow begins a new slate. I ask these questions of you, if you’ve read this far.
To whom might you apologize?
And who in your life, without grudge, might you forgive?
1.
When I first moved to this part of the country, on Scruff I met a kid from Brooklyn that I liked very much. We’d had similar sexual awakenings growing up, and compatible tastes in the sack as adults. He liked to put his ass in the air for older men, and I’ve always had a taste for young men with daddy issues to work out. We hit it off online and made plans to meet, but as with so many encounters on the apps, it never seemed to happen.
He would be nearby and available when I was in a meeting. I’d be knocking around the city solo while he was at work. He once arrived when I available in my sleepy suburb for a work event, but he wouldn’t be free from that get-together until an hour when I’d be teaching. Both of us took these criss-crossed impasses with a good humor—but I think we both found them frustrating.
Finally came a time when we both seemed to be available. I was sitting in a coffee shop in the city with nothing to do for several hours; he had a day off work and was hinting heavily to me that he might be available. But as we were catching up with each other in chat, he shared with me that he’d had a brief relationship that ended badly when he’d discovered his boyfriend had concealing a trash heap of lies. I’d gone through my own travails with Cory the year before, so in commiseration I shared with the kid an abbreviated version of that mess—how I’d developed a relationship with Cory that he’d eroded with lies, and how Cory had vanished after leaving me with both a dire care of syphilis and a need for immediate medical attention.
I thought I was consoling this Brooklyn boy by sharing a tale similar to his, one of feeling foolish after wool had been pulled over my eyes. Instead, I freaked him the fuck out. I had syphilis, he wanted to know? And I wanted to sleep with him?
No, I told him. I’d had syphilis. Well over a year ago. I’d gone to the doctor. I’d had shots. I’d had several blood tests since. I didn’t have syphilis any more.
Nuh-uh, he told me repeatedly. That’s not the way syphilis worked. Once you had it, you had it for good.
I was kind of confused. This Brooklyn kid wasn’t stupid. I mean, he had a college degree. He worked for a company that attracts the best and the brightest. He should know better than to think syphilis was incurable. I mean, he was on PrEP, which at least showed some degree of sexual education. But nope. He kept insisting I was unclean—his word. That he couldn’t sleep with me, since I’d had (or, in his mind, since I had) syphilis.
I didn’t put up much of a fight. He was convinced. I was disappointed. I’d been called dirty. Confused and ashamed for no good reason, I wished him luck and tried to put him out of my mind for good.
Life’s too short, guys. Attempting to convince someone to want you, when it’s plain they won’t, is one of the biggest wastes ever of your time. Just don’t do it.
Still, I admit I had pangs. I’d see the kid online in the couple of years that followed. Each time, that flicker of recognition when my eyes landed on his smiling face would result in me sighing, remembering his insults, and moving on. I’d feel momentary anger whenever I saw him on. I’d wonder how could anyone so educated be so dumb, and hurtful. Whatever. It was just one more person against whom I’d have to harden my heart. What’s one more person. Right?
Something happened late last year, though. Out of the blue I got a message from this Brooklyn kid. He wanted my forgiveness. He said he’d been stupid and ignorant. He realized he’d hurt me with his words, and he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t expect me ever to respond to him, and he certainly didn’t expect me to want to get together with him after what had happened, but the guilt of how he’d surely made me feel weighed heavy on his mind. He was sorry, and he apologized for it.
For a moment I experienced a savage stab of satisfaction. I don’t mind admitting it. Who doesn’t enjoy a good told you so? Fucking right he’d made me feel badly. Go guilt! But you know, that feeling evaporated almost instantly, along with all the ill-will toward this kid I’d been building up over the years. He’d done the right thing. He’d apologized, and his apology was sincere and unmotivated by anything but a wish to put things right.
All is forgiven, I wrote back. Tapping out the words lightened my spirit. I laughed, even. It felt good to forgive. My heart felt lighter; all the sour feelings I’d worked up over this boy turned to sweet. They’ve stayed that way ever since.
Forgiving this kid—just letting it go—felt good. For a short period of time, after being weighed down by resentment and upset, forgiving him made me feel weightless. I don’t let go of resentments easily. Given a reason to, though . . . it was as if the incident had never happened.
2.
Earlier this year I wrote about Peter, a kid whose online life had been entangled with mine for years. The essay was one of my more depressive entries; I catalogued how Peter and I had planned to meet again and again, only to have something gum up the works. Earlier this year we’d finally made our first firm date, and then the day of, he rapidly canceled it, set it back on, canceled it again, changed his mind, then finally canceled. At the time, I tried to remain philosophical about the rejection, but when Peter disappeared for weeks immediately after, for the first time in all the years I’d known him, I felt used and abused.
A couple of months after that I saw Peter and his boyfriend together out on the town. The overwhelming sadness I felt I wrote about in the essay ‘Butterflies and Boners.’ I wrote the entry knowing that, as Peter had been reading my blog for years, he was likely to encounter it. Knowing he probably would kept me honest. I didn’t jiggle with the facts. I wrote what I thought was true, and fair; I wrote not meaning to be hurtful, but to reflect my own sense of hurt. I wrote, and poured out my heart, and in return I got a lot of very supportive comments from readers, and a very little bit of closure.
The incident soured me, though. For a very long time after that night in which I encountered Peter and his boyfriend, I didn’t feel like dealing with all the bullshit men were putting me through, just to get my rocks off. Furthermore, I didn’t feel like engaging in any social media at all. Boys were stupid. Men were stupid. People were stupid. I wanted none of it.
This mini-depressive episode didn’t last. Apparently I can only go without sex for so long. I was still in a sensitive place, though, when a month after I shared ‘Butterflies and Boners,’ I got a text from Peter. I would like to see if we have a connection still, he said. I don’t think I want to start with a sexual contact. I’d rather start over a drink, or coffee, or lunch.
What had been a mild depression instantly coalesced into a white-hot furnace. WELL WELL WELL, I raged internally. LOOK WHO’S COME CRAWLING BACK.
I’d read the text mere seconds after I’d received it, and all I could really think was that if Peter had been nervous about sex with me, he could’ve said so at any point in the previous five years. In fact, many times had I urged him to consider meeting me just to chat, only to have him drag me into his fisting, fucking, and breeding fantasies. I stared at the screen for a minute and tried to think of what to say. I wanted to reply with Guess you didn’t read my BLOG ENTRY, MOTHERFUCKER.
Only, you know. In a classy way.
I was still staring at the text when I got the follow-up. I suppose I should’ve read your blog before reaching out.
Mild understatement, that. Angrily I ground my teeth and read on.
Peter wrote, I also suppose I’m glad to read our history from your perspective. It’s not shocking in an “I had no idea I was treating you like that” way - I was very aware - but it’s shocking and different reading it laid out over the course of a few minutes than it is having done it over days and years.
Reading these words, part of me softened. I’d tried not to be harsh to Peter in that essay; I’d attempted to assign as much blame to myself for my lack of good sense as I did him for his youthful heedlessness.
I read on. I have not treated you with respect. Outside of the moments we’ve texted, I haven’t treated you with kindness either. I am sorry for how I yanked you around when it came to actually meeting, and for how I treated you by disappearing.
Oh. He was apologizing.
My skin had felt on fire, my heart had been pounding with a pent-up anger I hadn’t even been aware I was feeling, but his simple words cooled me down. Peter went on to say that he understood if I never wanted to see him, and if that were the case, he’d never bother me again.
My eyes skipped over his last offer. He’d apologized. Peter had apologized—and handsomely. It hadn’t been one of those ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you’ half-apologies. He’d owned up to what he’d done, and expressed his remorse.
And you know what? I felt better. I felt fucking amazing. And I knew in my heart that I couldn’t hold any animus against Peter any longer.
I was finally able to compose a response. I note and appreciate the apology of your last text. Please know that although I think about our relationship with sadness, I bear you no ill will. I meant the last part with all my heart. Hurt as I’d been, Peter’s attempt to make things right were just what I needed.
I forgave him there and then. I wasn’t ready to drop everything and run to meet him, not at that moment—and I told him so. But I thanked him sincerely for apologizing, and told him we’d talk again.
Peter did the right thing, that day. He’d wounded me more deeply than the kid from Brooklyn ever could. His apology, though, let me start healing. Once again I was able to drop a burden of resentment of which I wasn’t even aware I was carrying. The rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the year was happier and lighter because of it.
It takes a big man to make a sincere apology. I know when I try to be half the man Peter was that day and attempt to make amends with those I’ve wronged, it’s never easy, and rarely straight-forward. That he was able to do so after the shock of seeing his actions held up in my mirror speaks volumes to his integrity. Life manages to find endless fresh ways to make me hurt, I wrote in ‘Butterflies and Boners.’ But life manages to find endless ways to help me forgive, too.
It’s the last day of the year. Tomorrow begins a new slate. I ask these questions of you, if you’ve read this far.
To whom might you apologize?
And who in your life, without grudge, might you forgive?
Saturday, November 21, 2015
A Little Primer on Orgy Throwing
Not too long ago I was telling a friend of mine the reasons why I was no longer attending a semi-regular group sex session held at a motel local to me. “Do all orgies end in drama?” he asked, when I was done.
I was seriously taken aback by the question. “No!” I exclaimed, sure of myself. Then I had to think a bit.
First, a lot rests on one’s definition of drama. If my friend meant, did every group sex meetup end with slaps, recriminations, weeping, flouncing, and bitches pouring beer in each other’s weaves? Then no. There’s no drama. Have there been grudges and hurt feelings that were nursed quietly? Sure, occasionally. I’m not sure I’d call that drama, though. I’d classify it more under the day-to-day social stickiness that every adult has to deal with at one time or another.
There were actually two reasons I stopped attending this particular group. The first was a long-simmering resentment of the way the host was handling invites. He was in the habit of sending out a preliminary private email to the twenty-five or thirty guys who usually attended his parties, asking if they wished to attend on a date three or four weeks in the future. To the men who RSVPed to say that they’d like to join, he would send an email with a list of participants, so everybody could check each other out and send off emails indicating interest in hooking up at the party.
It’s a nice system, actually. I like and recommend it. The week of the party itself, the host would send out reminder emails with a final guest list and instructions of where to show up, what to bring, and all the usual information a good host provides. I had a problem, though, and it was that the host was including me every single time on the guest list that got emailed out to attendees, whether or not I was actually able to come to a particular get-together. He’d have an event in April, say, and I’d RSVP in March that I wasn’t going to be available. But then a few days later, on the roster of folks attending, there I’d be. When the finalized list went out only a few days before, there I’d be again . . . despite the fact I’d told the host I’d be out of town or busy or whatever.
I asked the host why he kept listing me and he tried to make it sound like a positive—as if I was always welcome to attend at the last minute if my plans changed or my flight was canceled or I had a change of heart. Besides, he said, attendance went up when my name was on the list, because guys would see my photos and decided they had to be there to get a piece of me.
That’s all well and good, I tried to explain to him multiple times, but putting my name on the list of attendees when I wasn’t actually going to be in attendance was really doing me a disservice; he was making guys think that I’d said “Yes! I’ll be there with bells on!” and then decided to bail at the last minute. I even forwarded him an email from one of the guys who wrote saying he’d attended twice specifically to meet me because I was on the list, and wondered why I’d been a no-show.
I might have been a giant carrot (pun intended) dangled in front of the guests’ faces to lure them to the party, I argued, but it was deceptive of him to do so when I wouldn’t be there. It gave my reputation a hit. Over and over again he attempted to assure me that wasn’t the case, but I wasn’t buying it.
Finally, I caved and went to one of his lunchtime parties at the local sleazy motel. In attendance was kind of a motley crew—a few regulars I liked a lot, a couple of new guys I had fun with, and two men I was trying to avoid at all costs. One of the guys was a married schlub I’d tricked with a year before and had such staggeringly mediocre sex that I’d had to do some unpleasant misdirection (involving jacking him to climax and then pretending I’d shot at the same time) in order to get the hell out of there. Him, I could stay away from easily enough. The other guy, though, was the host’s best friend. He’s always at every party. He’s always annoying. And at the last party I’d gone to, he’d done this, this thing with his hands on my dick that I really, really hated.
Let me digress ever so slightly here. When I was growing up, among the stacks of books my parents kept in their basement was a sex manual from the very early 1960s. I say sex manual, but this was before the sexual revolution, so my recollection is more that it had a title that never actually used the dirty word, sex. A manual for young marrieds, it was. My ten-year-old self read it with great amusement when I discovered it, marveling at the way it managed never actually to use the words penis or vagina, nor any of their synonyms. Late in the book was an entire chapter devoted to what a young wife should do when her husband failed to be in a romantic mood—or when he couldn’t get it up, I figured out. The blushing young bride, the text advised, should not at all be afraid to grasp her husband’s manhood in her hand (that’s about as close as they got to referencing actual genitalia), apply a modicum of moisture to the palm of her hand, and then rub the flat of her palm firmly and briskly in a circular motion against the glans of his manhood, thus producing an electrical sensation of such felicity that the husband would gladly meet his conjugal duties with enthusiasm and zest.
Wow, okay, my ten-year-old self thought. This sounded like hot stuff. I licked my palm and rubbed it on my cock head. OW. That shit HURT. I tried it again, just in case. FUCKING OW. Yeah, the technique produced an electrical sensation, but it felt like someone was channeling megawatts of that shit right into the most sensitive place on my body and DON’T TASE ME THERE, BRO.
And that’s exactly what the guy, the best friend, did at the party. He wet his palm up with spit or lube or something, and then while I was making out with someone and my boner was on display, he pressed his flattened palm down onto my glans and scrrrrrrrrrrrraped across it.
“JESUS CHRIST!” I yelled in pain while I leapt to my fee. “Don’t DO that.”
Scowling, I left the best friend on one double bed and went to join the dogpile on the other mattress. I’d just made my way in when suddenly I felt a searing jolt of pain on my dick again. “What are you DOING?” I snarled at the best friend. “Stop that shit. It hurts.”
“Aw, don’t be a pussy,” he said.
Now, I’m not sure whether he thought I was joking around with him (I wasn’t), or whether I was really aroused by his torturous form of foreplay and not letting on (I really was not), or whether he was some kind of freako sadist who just enjoyed hearing me yell, but the asshole followed me around the party for the rest of the time I was there and did that thing with his palm no less than three times more. Angry that I wasn’t able really to put any distance between the two of us in a small and cheap motel room, and angry that he wasn’t leaving me alone, I finally put on my clothes, said a polite farewell to the host, and made my way out into the sunlight and home.
Then I simply declined all his invitations from then on out. The mess with the host constantly not respecting my wishes about the attendance list were grumblings I might’ve lived with. But the best friend following me around and trying to get my goat by making my dick feel as miserable as possible was the straw that broke the camel’s orgy.
But was it dramatic? I don’t think so. I didn’t toss my brush cut and issue ultimatums as I stalked out the door. I didn’t write nasty emails after to either the host or the best friend and decree that they were no longer welcome in my lives. I just politely declined to return. If that’s drama, it’s the mildest and most yawn-inducing drama there is.
My friend’s question, though—do all orgies end in drama?—really got me thinking. I’ve been to some incredibly bad orgies in my lifetime. I’ve been to group sex parties in which I and some bottom were the only ones naked and fucking, while a bunch of slobs stood still clothed around the room’s perimeter doing nothing but watching and pushing away each other’s hands. I’ve been to hotel orgies that were promoted as if they’d be sybaritic pleasure domes, and ended up being only three guys staring at each other. I’ve been to a couple of parties in which those attending were shuffling around in a meth-induced haze, unable to perform on any level. So yeah. I’ve been to some pretty damned bad group sex parties.
However, I’ve been lucky enough to attend some really excellent ones as well—and they’ve been in the majority. It’s occurred to me that all of them have a solid base of common denominators.
A good group sex party has an organizer. That is, someone steps up to take the lead and to plan the damned thing. He has to arrange for the venue—a hotel, his own place, maybe the basement playroom of a buddy. He has to send out invitations. And he has to let everyone know where and when it will take place. If there’s a hotel room involved, he gets there a little early to rent it, and let guys know what the room number is. He stays last to do a little cleanup after, and to return the key.
The guy organizing the party is doing a considerable amount of administrative work. It’s not terribly time-consuming work, and it’s not something it takes a Ph.D. to accomplish—but it’s work nonetheless. If you’re attending the party, make sure to let the organizer know your gratitude. Tell him thank you. Spend some time paying attention to him. Respect the guy. He’s doing the job that no one else wanted to do.
The best group sex parties are carefully curated. The very best orgies I’ve attended—the ones I’ll go back to again and again—have always had an organizer who is very careful in his selection of men. In fact, I’ve never attended a truly awful orgy in which the guy who put it together took his time to hand-select the bunch of guys he thought would be compatible.
Careful selection is more than just putting an ad on Craigslist for a hotel gang-bang and then picking the guys with hot photos. (I’ve been to a couple of good parties that began in this way, but the un-fun groups with guys standing around clothed and doing nothing all fizzled from this approach.) Careful selection means knowing, to a certain extent, all the guys involved. It means exchanging a couple of emails with them, at the least, and getting an idea of whether or not they’ll fit in with your other guests.
One of the best parties I used to attend had a specialized bent. It was half bareback-fuck-free-for-all, and half fisting party. It took place in the host’s playroom, a soundproofed, specially-constructed basement enclosure that featured a large shower area, a double-wide padded fuck bench, a couple of sofas, and a pair of slings hanging side by side. On a massive pegboard at one end hung all kinds of dildos and other invasive toys; there was a trough-like sink with towels and soaps for clean-up. The host would be extremely choosy in selecting an exact ratio of tops to bottoms at these parties, and would pick men who were all compatible with each other.
More importantly, since he was very heavily into fisting, himself, he’d make sure the bottoms were equally hungry for a man’s paw in their butts, and that the tops were experienced at working an arm into an ass. The result was a party in which no bottom ever went unsatisfied, and by the time the evening moved from fucking to fisting, there’d be two bottoms in the slings, two kneeling on the fuck bench, and the others bent over the sofas—each with a top’s arm inside them.
Now, that’s not to say that a good host can’t give someone new a chance, or that it’s impossible to put together a decent party from random men online. I know what’s worked for me in the past, though, and it’s always involved a little bit of curation.
A good host always sets in advance the expectations, limitations, and requirements for the party. If it’s a condoms-only party, the host needs to let everyone know. If it’s a bareback party, likewise—with the reminder that everyone needs to be comfortable enough to accept the responsibilities involved with swapping raw fluids. If the host wants people to donate ten bucks to help cover the cost of the hotel room, that should be established well in advance. If it’s a drug-free environment, or poppers-only, the host needs to notify the guests well in advance. When the host expects people to bring something—their own water bottles, or condoms, or lube, or snacks—he needs to spell it out in all the communications leading up to the day of the party.
If a host communicates all these things, and chooses guests who are going to respect his wishes, no one is going to show up surprised. There are going to be very few bad guests, in fact.
The best sex parties have a set duration, and expect the attendees to arrive at the start time. The friend of mine who’d asked the question sparking the thoughts in this post had only attended the sessions of one group. It was hosted by a guy who would put out the word for it on Craigslist and host it at the local sleazepit motel. Guests were invited to drop by anytime between noon and ten-thirty at night.
“That is not a good way to run a party,” I told my friend.
“Yeah, but it worked out for me,” he said. “There were people there when I went.”
Yes, I reminded him, but my friend had spent hours—literal hours—agonizing and strategizing and asking my advice about the perfect time to arrive in order to guarantee that people were there, the first time. He’d had to contact other people who’d been to the party in the past and ask them what time he should plan on showing. Even when he got there, he’d been in suspense up until the moment that he knocked on that motel room door whether or not he’d be stuck by himself with the host. His first-time experience might have turned out all right, but what about those guys who had chosen to show up at eight-thirty in the evening to find that everyone had left by then? They arrived disappointed.
No, the best parties are set to last a handful of specific hours. Seven-thirty at night until ten-thirty. A lunchtime quickie from noon until two. Ten in the morning until eleven-thirty. I’ve been to great orgies during all those time periods. Everyone arrives knowing that other people are guaranteed to be there. Nobody has to do any guesswork or engage in endless speculation. The party can either begin when everyone who’s been invited arrives and the host invites everyone into the play space, or guys can simply shuck their clothing and start fucking the moment the door closes.
Sure, if a person or two invited has let the host know he’ll be arriving a half-hour late, that’s fine. Likewise, if everyone’s having such a good time that the party lasts past the originally-scheduled end point, great—so long as the host is good with it. The host can always be flexible.
But it’s kinder to guests, many of whom might be nervous about meeting so many new naked people at once, to placate the fear that they might be the only one sitting around for someone, anyone, to show up.
The best guests at a sex party are those who are there for the group experience—not for themselves. There’s usually an expectation at these parties that guys are expected to mingle and fuck around with multiple men. If you are invited to an orgy and your intention is to pick out the hottest guy there, monopolize his time to keep him for yourself, and to shun the other men who want to play either with him or with you, you really should just consider staying at home. If you attend a sex party intending to have all the tops for yourself and to make yourself the center of attention, you’re missing the point of the event. (I mean, it might happen that way, but you shouldn’t plan on it.)
Have fun at a sex party, by all means. Enjoy yourself. It’s supposed to be a blast. But know there there may be moments (and there may be many of them) in which it might be best to place the welfare of the group over your own personal desires.
I’m a top with good stamina who can fuck multiple holes over the course of the evening and squirt out multiple loads. When I attend a party, it gets me noticed. I get the attention of some incredibly good-looking guys. If I wanted to go in, pick the hottest bottom there (or, let’s be honest, I could equally easily pick the hottest top with the slightest versatile inclinations), and spend the entire evening fucking his brains out while other guys watched in envy, I totally could.
But I don’t. I’ll fuck an incredibly-desirable guy long enough to let him know how I feel about him, then against my dick’s urging I’ll disengage and let him play with other people at the party. I might make a promise to come back to him later. I might exchange numbers or emails with him so that I can savage his hole one-on-one at some point. For the group’s sake, however, it’s better to move on every now and then and give pleasure to men who’ve been waiting patiently on the side lines.
The best guests are those who go out of their way to make everybody at a gathering feel comfortable and welcome. Isn’t that true of any party, and not just those where the men are naked and looking for holes to fuck or cocks to service? A guy like me of modest looks who does his best to aid the host in getting guys to swap partners and mingle is doing more for the party than two good-looking studs who keep to themselves in a corner and reject the advances of anyone else. More importantly, I’m more likely than they to be invited to the next orgy.
Likewise, the best guests are those that respect the host’s wishes. They show up on time; they let the host know well in advance if they’re not going to be able to make it. They respect the rules on protected or bareback sex and substance use. They keep the apartment or hotel room as tidy as possible. They’re courteous and friendly.
The host is there to get the party started. He shouldn’t have to police the event the entire time. He really wants to have as much fun as the other guests, after all. Make yourself useful to the host by being a good and helpful guest, and you’ll find yourself being invited to more parties in the future.
But most of all, don’t do things to a top’s dick that they don’t enjoy. That shit is annoying.
Have any more tips that you think would contribute to someone throwing a successful, drama-free orgy? Leave them below in the comments section!
I was seriously taken aback by the question. “No!” I exclaimed, sure of myself. Then I had to think a bit.
First, a lot rests on one’s definition of drama. If my friend meant, did every group sex meetup end with slaps, recriminations, weeping, flouncing, and bitches pouring beer in each other’s weaves? Then no. There’s no drama. Have there been grudges and hurt feelings that were nursed quietly? Sure, occasionally. I’m not sure I’d call that drama, though. I’d classify it more under the day-to-day social stickiness that every adult has to deal with at one time or another.
There were actually two reasons I stopped attending this particular group. The first was a long-simmering resentment of the way the host was handling invites. He was in the habit of sending out a preliminary private email to the twenty-five or thirty guys who usually attended his parties, asking if they wished to attend on a date three or four weeks in the future. To the men who RSVPed to say that they’d like to join, he would send an email with a list of participants, so everybody could check each other out and send off emails indicating interest in hooking up at the party.
It’s a nice system, actually. I like and recommend it. The week of the party itself, the host would send out reminder emails with a final guest list and instructions of where to show up, what to bring, and all the usual information a good host provides. I had a problem, though, and it was that the host was including me every single time on the guest list that got emailed out to attendees, whether or not I was actually able to come to a particular get-together. He’d have an event in April, say, and I’d RSVP in March that I wasn’t going to be available. But then a few days later, on the roster of folks attending, there I’d be. When the finalized list went out only a few days before, there I’d be again . . . despite the fact I’d told the host I’d be out of town or busy or whatever.
I asked the host why he kept listing me and he tried to make it sound like a positive—as if I was always welcome to attend at the last minute if my plans changed or my flight was canceled or I had a change of heart. Besides, he said, attendance went up when my name was on the list, because guys would see my photos and decided they had to be there to get a piece of me.
That’s all well and good, I tried to explain to him multiple times, but putting my name on the list of attendees when I wasn’t actually going to be in attendance was really doing me a disservice; he was making guys think that I’d said “Yes! I’ll be there with bells on!” and then decided to bail at the last minute. I even forwarded him an email from one of the guys who wrote saying he’d attended twice specifically to meet me because I was on the list, and wondered why I’d been a no-show.
I might have been a giant carrot (pun intended) dangled in front of the guests’ faces to lure them to the party, I argued, but it was deceptive of him to do so when I wouldn’t be there. It gave my reputation a hit. Over and over again he attempted to assure me that wasn’t the case, but I wasn’t buying it.
Finally, I caved and went to one of his lunchtime parties at the local sleazy motel. In attendance was kind of a motley crew—a few regulars I liked a lot, a couple of new guys I had fun with, and two men I was trying to avoid at all costs. One of the guys was a married schlub I’d tricked with a year before and had such staggeringly mediocre sex that I’d had to do some unpleasant misdirection (involving jacking him to climax and then pretending I’d shot at the same time) in order to get the hell out of there. Him, I could stay away from easily enough. The other guy, though, was the host’s best friend. He’s always at every party. He’s always annoying. And at the last party I’d gone to, he’d done this, this thing with his hands on my dick that I really, really hated.
Let me digress ever so slightly here. When I was growing up, among the stacks of books my parents kept in their basement was a sex manual from the very early 1960s. I say sex manual, but this was before the sexual revolution, so my recollection is more that it had a title that never actually used the dirty word, sex. A manual for young marrieds, it was. My ten-year-old self read it with great amusement when I discovered it, marveling at the way it managed never actually to use the words penis or vagina, nor any of their synonyms. Late in the book was an entire chapter devoted to what a young wife should do when her husband failed to be in a romantic mood—or when he couldn’t get it up, I figured out. The blushing young bride, the text advised, should not at all be afraid to grasp her husband’s manhood in her hand (that’s about as close as they got to referencing actual genitalia), apply a modicum of moisture to the palm of her hand, and then rub the flat of her palm firmly and briskly in a circular motion against the glans of his manhood, thus producing an electrical sensation of such felicity that the husband would gladly meet his conjugal duties with enthusiasm and zest.
Wow, okay, my ten-year-old self thought. This sounded like hot stuff. I licked my palm and rubbed it on my cock head. OW. That shit HURT. I tried it again, just in case. FUCKING OW. Yeah, the technique produced an electrical sensation, but it felt like someone was channeling megawatts of that shit right into the most sensitive place on my body and DON’T TASE ME THERE, BRO.
And that’s exactly what the guy, the best friend, did at the party. He wet his palm up with spit or lube or something, and then while I was making out with someone and my boner was on display, he pressed his flattened palm down onto my glans and scrrrrrrrrrrrraped across it.
“JESUS CHRIST!” I yelled in pain while I leapt to my fee. “Don’t DO that.”
Scowling, I left the best friend on one double bed and went to join the dogpile on the other mattress. I’d just made my way in when suddenly I felt a searing jolt of pain on my dick again. “What are you DOING?” I snarled at the best friend. “Stop that shit. It hurts.”
“Aw, don’t be a pussy,” he said.
Now, I’m not sure whether he thought I was joking around with him (I wasn’t), or whether I was really aroused by his torturous form of foreplay and not letting on (I really was not), or whether he was some kind of freako sadist who just enjoyed hearing me yell, but the asshole followed me around the party for the rest of the time I was there and did that thing with his palm no less than three times more. Angry that I wasn’t able really to put any distance between the two of us in a small and cheap motel room, and angry that he wasn’t leaving me alone, I finally put on my clothes, said a polite farewell to the host, and made my way out into the sunlight and home.
Then I simply declined all his invitations from then on out. The mess with the host constantly not respecting my wishes about the attendance list were grumblings I might’ve lived with. But the best friend following me around and trying to get my goat by making my dick feel as miserable as possible was the straw that broke the camel’s orgy.
But was it dramatic? I don’t think so. I didn’t toss my brush cut and issue ultimatums as I stalked out the door. I didn’t write nasty emails after to either the host or the best friend and decree that they were no longer welcome in my lives. I just politely declined to return. If that’s drama, it’s the mildest and most yawn-inducing drama there is.
My friend’s question, though—do all orgies end in drama?—really got me thinking. I’ve been to some incredibly bad orgies in my lifetime. I’ve been to group sex parties in which I and some bottom were the only ones naked and fucking, while a bunch of slobs stood still clothed around the room’s perimeter doing nothing but watching and pushing away each other’s hands. I’ve been to hotel orgies that were promoted as if they’d be sybaritic pleasure domes, and ended up being only three guys staring at each other. I’ve been to a couple of parties in which those attending were shuffling around in a meth-induced haze, unable to perform on any level. So yeah. I’ve been to some pretty damned bad group sex parties.
However, I’ve been lucky enough to attend some really excellent ones as well—and they’ve been in the majority. It’s occurred to me that all of them have a solid base of common denominators.
A good group sex party has an organizer. That is, someone steps up to take the lead and to plan the damned thing. He has to arrange for the venue—a hotel, his own place, maybe the basement playroom of a buddy. He has to send out invitations. And he has to let everyone know where and when it will take place. If there’s a hotel room involved, he gets there a little early to rent it, and let guys know what the room number is. He stays last to do a little cleanup after, and to return the key.
The guy organizing the party is doing a considerable amount of administrative work. It’s not terribly time-consuming work, and it’s not something it takes a Ph.D. to accomplish—but it’s work nonetheless. If you’re attending the party, make sure to let the organizer know your gratitude. Tell him thank you. Spend some time paying attention to him. Respect the guy. He’s doing the job that no one else wanted to do.
The best group sex parties are carefully curated. The very best orgies I’ve attended—the ones I’ll go back to again and again—have always had an organizer who is very careful in his selection of men. In fact, I’ve never attended a truly awful orgy in which the guy who put it together took his time to hand-select the bunch of guys he thought would be compatible.
Careful selection is more than just putting an ad on Craigslist for a hotel gang-bang and then picking the guys with hot photos. (I’ve been to a couple of good parties that began in this way, but the un-fun groups with guys standing around clothed and doing nothing all fizzled from this approach.) Careful selection means knowing, to a certain extent, all the guys involved. It means exchanging a couple of emails with them, at the least, and getting an idea of whether or not they’ll fit in with your other guests.
One of the best parties I used to attend had a specialized bent. It was half bareback-fuck-free-for-all, and half fisting party. It took place in the host’s playroom, a soundproofed, specially-constructed basement enclosure that featured a large shower area, a double-wide padded fuck bench, a couple of sofas, and a pair of slings hanging side by side. On a massive pegboard at one end hung all kinds of dildos and other invasive toys; there was a trough-like sink with towels and soaps for clean-up. The host would be extremely choosy in selecting an exact ratio of tops to bottoms at these parties, and would pick men who were all compatible with each other.
More importantly, since he was very heavily into fisting, himself, he’d make sure the bottoms were equally hungry for a man’s paw in their butts, and that the tops were experienced at working an arm into an ass. The result was a party in which no bottom ever went unsatisfied, and by the time the evening moved from fucking to fisting, there’d be two bottoms in the slings, two kneeling on the fuck bench, and the others bent over the sofas—each with a top’s arm inside them.
Now, that’s not to say that a good host can’t give someone new a chance, or that it’s impossible to put together a decent party from random men online. I know what’s worked for me in the past, though, and it’s always involved a little bit of curation.
A good host always sets in advance the expectations, limitations, and requirements for the party. If it’s a condoms-only party, the host needs to let everyone know. If it’s a bareback party, likewise—with the reminder that everyone needs to be comfortable enough to accept the responsibilities involved with swapping raw fluids. If the host wants people to donate ten bucks to help cover the cost of the hotel room, that should be established well in advance. If it’s a drug-free environment, or poppers-only, the host needs to notify the guests well in advance. When the host expects people to bring something—their own water bottles, or condoms, or lube, or snacks—he needs to spell it out in all the communications leading up to the day of the party.
If a host communicates all these things, and chooses guests who are going to respect his wishes, no one is going to show up surprised. There are going to be very few bad guests, in fact.
The best sex parties have a set duration, and expect the attendees to arrive at the start time. The friend of mine who’d asked the question sparking the thoughts in this post had only attended the sessions of one group. It was hosted by a guy who would put out the word for it on Craigslist and host it at the local sleazepit motel. Guests were invited to drop by anytime between noon and ten-thirty at night.
“That is not a good way to run a party,” I told my friend.
“Yeah, but it worked out for me,” he said. “There were people there when I went.”
Yes, I reminded him, but my friend had spent hours—literal hours—agonizing and strategizing and asking my advice about the perfect time to arrive in order to guarantee that people were there, the first time. He’d had to contact other people who’d been to the party in the past and ask them what time he should plan on showing. Even when he got there, he’d been in suspense up until the moment that he knocked on that motel room door whether or not he’d be stuck by himself with the host. His first-time experience might have turned out all right, but what about those guys who had chosen to show up at eight-thirty in the evening to find that everyone had left by then? They arrived disappointed.
No, the best parties are set to last a handful of specific hours. Seven-thirty at night until ten-thirty. A lunchtime quickie from noon until two. Ten in the morning until eleven-thirty. I’ve been to great orgies during all those time periods. Everyone arrives knowing that other people are guaranteed to be there. Nobody has to do any guesswork or engage in endless speculation. The party can either begin when everyone who’s been invited arrives and the host invites everyone into the play space, or guys can simply shuck their clothing and start fucking the moment the door closes.
Sure, if a person or two invited has let the host know he’ll be arriving a half-hour late, that’s fine. Likewise, if everyone’s having such a good time that the party lasts past the originally-scheduled end point, great—so long as the host is good with it. The host can always be flexible.
But it’s kinder to guests, many of whom might be nervous about meeting so many new naked people at once, to placate the fear that they might be the only one sitting around for someone, anyone, to show up.
The best guests at a sex party are those who are there for the group experience—not for themselves. There’s usually an expectation at these parties that guys are expected to mingle and fuck around with multiple men. If you are invited to an orgy and your intention is to pick out the hottest guy there, monopolize his time to keep him for yourself, and to shun the other men who want to play either with him or with you, you really should just consider staying at home. If you attend a sex party intending to have all the tops for yourself and to make yourself the center of attention, you’re missing the point of the event. (I mean, it might happen that way, but you shouldn’t plan on it.)
Have fun at a sex party, by all means. Enjoy yourself. It’s supposed to be a blast. But know there there may be moments (and there may be many of them) in which it might be best to place the welfare of the group over your own personal desires.
I’m a top with good stamina who can fuck multiple holes over the course of the evening and squirt out multiple loads. When I attend a party, it gets me noticed. I get the attention of some incredibly good-looking guys. If I wanted to go in, pick the hottest bottom there (or, let’s be honest, I could equally easily pick the hottest top with the slightest versatile inclinations), and spend the entire evening fucking his brains out while other guys watched in envy, I totally could.
But I don’t. I’ll fuck an incredibly-desirable guy long enough to let him know how I feel about him, then against my dick’s urging I’ll disengage and let him play with other people at the party. I might make a promise to come back to him later. I might exchange numbers or emails with him so that I can savage his hole one-on-one at some point. For the group’s sake, however, it’s better to move on every now and then and give pleasure to men who’ve been waiting patiently on the side lines.
The best guests are those who go out of their way to make everybody at a gathering feel comfortable and welcome. Isn’t that true of any party, and not just those where the men are naked and looking for holes to fuck or cocks to service? A guy like me of modest looks who does his best to aid the host in getting guys to swap partners and mingle is doing more for the party than two good-looking studs who keep to themselves in a corner and reject the advances of anyone else. More importantly, I’m more likely than they to be invited to the next orgy.
Likewise, the best guests are those that respect the host’s wishes. They show up on time; they let the host know well in advance if they’re not going to be able to make it. They respect the rules on protected or bareback sex and substance use. They keep the apartment or hotel room as tidy as possible. They’re courteous and friendly.
The host is there to get the party started. He shouldn’t have to police the event the entire time. He really wants to have as much fun as the other guests, after all. Make yourself useful to the host by being a good and helpful guest, and you’ll find yourself being invited to more parties in the future.
But most of all, don’t do things to a top’s dick that they don’t enjoy. That shit is annoying.
Have any more tips that you think would contribute to someone throwing a successful, drama-free orgy? Leave them below in the comments section!
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Thursday Open Forum: Group Sex 101
Orgies. Group sex. To a lot of people, myself included, the terms are no big deal. To others, they’re fraught with anxiety.
Most of the sex I’ve had over the last six months, it seems, has either been in group situations, or with men I’ve met during big naked groups. I can’t say why this is, exactly—beyond, of course, the fact that I’m a top with a big dick, and big-docked tops are popular (and rare) in groups. Maybe there are more orgies in this part of the country? Maybe I’ve just stumbled into a handful of sex friends who are more inclined to throw groups when they know there’s a reliable top to invite? I don’t know.
What I do know is that of the mail I get from readers, the topic that gets addressed the most, the topic which has people fretting and worrying more than any other, has to do with the etiquette involved in attending group sex functions.
I’m not going to dismiss any of this anxiety as foolish or unwarranted. Meeting up with one stranger can be scary on its own. Walking into a group situation with a bunch of unknown strangers only multiplies whatever body anxieties and performance fears one might have; it’s enough to make a neurotic out of the most stable personality.
If you’re considering following in my footsteps and attempting group sex for the first time, however, I think there are a few general guidelines to follow.
1. Don’t be afraid to say yes to to a group sex invitation.
Group sex isn’t inherently deviant and perverted. Attending an orgy isn’t going to make you into an unredeemable slut or a bad person. Gay or straight, large group or small, it can be highly enjoyable and a great way to socialize. Yes, socialize. And network too, believe it or not.
Overwhelming as the prospect of getting naked in front of group might be for a first-timer, however, I think it’s important to remember that most of the men attending a group sex event are really all there for the same reason—to get off a time or two, and to have an enjoyable couple of hours doing it.
Chances are they’re all arriving with the same worries you might be feeling. Am I good looking enough? Am I hung enough? Will anybody want to fuck me? They’ll be worrying about whether or not they’ll have to make the first move, and how humiliated they’ll be when they try to reach out for some hot guy’s dick and the hot guy up and slaps away that filthy greasy paw. There might be some die-hard group sex aficionados in the mix like me, but chances are a lot (if not most) of the guys are new to it, just like you.
If you get the invite, or if you see an opportunity while you’re prowling online, first relax. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Think about it. Then accept. You might have more fun than you think, and you probably will even come away more confident than you went in.
2. Pick an event that’s right for you.
If you live in a big city, there are probably sex parties happening around you on a frequent basis. Some of them get advertised on sites such as Manhunt or Adam4Adam or BBRT, where it’s possible to browse through public boards or even to press a single button to get a listing of upcoming events. Others might appear in local sex blogs. Some are going to be private, by invitation only, and you have to know the right people.
Anxious as you might be, however, to get your first taste of group sex, before you start worrying about whether you’ll fit in, make sure the event suits you. If you’re looking for guaranteed bareback sex, don’t sign up to attend a foot fetishists’s festival or a jackoff party. Don’t sign up for a group in which safer sex rules are strictly enforced. If you think anal sex is dirty and disgusting, don’t attend a fisting party. This advice might seem obvious, but believe me, I’ve been in a lot of situations in which guys showed up, convinced they could make the party suit their own desires, without any regard to what everyone else wanted. It ain’t cute, and the results ain’t pretty.
There are a handful of events in which the people throwing the party very rigorously screen attendees. They may be searching for a certain degree of hotness, or excluding men who don’t meet a certain invisible requirement for looks, weight, or age. If you do submit your stats and photos for one of these and don’t get invited, don’t waste any of your time mourning when you get the rejection. You are not totally unfuckable. That party just wasn’t for you—and you can do better, trust me.
3. If you agree to attend a group sex party, show up. And show up on time.
Nothing irritates a man who’s spent a lot of his own personal time attempting to arrange a group sex party more than people who simply don’t show. My experience in arranging groups has always been pretty dismal; if I invite ten guys to come play at my place on a given date and time, I usually expect about three to show up, at most. I have friends who are more trusting.
Don’t sit behind your computer wanking while you think to yourself how hot an orgy would be, if all you plan to do is get off and never show up, even though the host is expecting you. If you’re unsure you’ll be able to attend, don’t say yes. If you know the chances are slim of you emerging from beneath the rock where you live, please tell the nice guy inviting you Think of me next time, but I can’t be there on that date. Thanks.
If the party’s one of those affairs in which you’re encouraged to show up anytime between eight p.m. and midnight, feel free to make a late entrance. Otherwise, show up at exactly the appointed hour the party’s supposed to start. It’s annoying for the host or one of the other guests to open and close the door repeatedly. You’re pulling them away from the action, when you show up late.
If you do have a genuine conflict, tell your host as soon as possible—preferably before the event commences. Telephone, text, or email your regrets. Doing so as an afterthought might indicate how little regard you have for the host, but even that’s better than not showing up at all.
4. If you agree to attend a group sex party, show up ready to play.
Don’t bounce into the room expecting everyone to be hugely interested in the traffic you just encountered. Don’t spill the hundred excuses you might have for being fifteen minutes late. Don’t assume that the motel room or the host’s house will have a working shower so you can clean up. Arrive with your cock ring on, your jock on your butt beneath your business suit, and your hole cleaned out and ready to go. Everyone’s time is at a premium these days; don’t waste it when it comes to others.
Additionally, don’t even bother attending a sex party if you’re not committed actually to having sex. If you’re going to lurk in the corner and not remove your clothes, stay home. If you’re going to arrive only to check out the guys, decide they’re not good enough for your persnickety ass, and then flounce off, just don’t come in the first place. If you’re planning to whack off furiously watching others while growling like a rabid dog at anyone who attempts to touch you, you’d do better behind your monitor watching porn. I’ve encountered all three types of these guys at just about every party I’ve been to, and I can tell you from experience, none of them ever got invited back.
If you are going to need lube for your adventures, bring lube. If you are requiring condoms, bring condoms. If the guy throwing the party has asked for a few bucks to cover the overhead costs, bring a few bucks. Don’t assume that others will cover for you.
5. While you’re at a group sex party, stay responsible for your own safety and behavior.
Start off by being responsible for what you bring with you. If it’s a regular group of guys you trust, that’s one thing. But if you’re in a dark hotel room with a bunch of naked strangers, don’t show up with a Coach leather man-bag that’s holding your iPad, your smartphone, the one printed copy of your doctoral thesis due next week and the one backup, and the irreplaceable birthday gift you just bought your dear mother-in-law. You don’t know who’s going to take off with it while you’ve got your legs lifted to heaven. Leave your wallet in the car, or at home. Arrive with as little cash as possible, and with as little that a light-fingered stranger might be tempted to filch.
If you’re attempting to preserve a negative serostatus at a group sex party, doing so is your responsibility. If you want your partners to wear condoms, it’s up to you to ask them. If you’re trying to bareback but to serosort your partners through some kind of superstitious voodoo ritual that convinces you that you’re immune to risk, be aware that a man’s answers to your question about his HIV status may be affected by exactly how few inches away his raging cock is from your raw hole. Don’t accept substances at a party you wouldn’t otherwise accept; don’t venture to a neighborhood where you’d feel uncomfortable, just for the sake of cheap and easy sex.
When it comes right down to it, you are responsible for your own safety and welfare at a group sex party. Don’t let your dick or anybody else make those important decisions for you.
6. Be nice to the host.
I don’t know how many times I can emphasize this particular point. Every couple of weeks I attend a group event at the home of a retired professor, at which fifteen to twenty guys show up on any given day. And every single time there’s always one asshole—he’s always a different person, but it seems like someone new is always occupying the Designated Asshole slot—who comes in, drops his drawers, and proceeds to rebuff not only the genial host’s advances, but even his attempts at conversation. The Designated Asshole will try to corner whoever he thinks is the hottest guy, get off quickly, and then disappear without even thanking the host.
Grandmotherly though I know I sound, I think this kind of behavior is appalling. (I know, you’re picturing me in a housecoat clutching my pearls and intoning Whatever are they teaching the children these days!) But I know I’m not the only one. Not only does my host keep track of who’s being a rude son-of-a-bitch, but the other regulars at the party, when they see our host given the cold shoulder, are more inclined to shut out the Designated Asshole so that he’s not getting any fun whatsoever. We can be highly protective of our favorite professor.
So if your party has a host, whether it’s the fellow whose house you’re using, or whether it’s the nice pervert who’s taken his time to arrange for the hotel room and to line up the list of guests, be nice to the guy. Give him some extra attention. Slip him a twenty to help pay for the costs, if he’s rented a hotel room for the day. Give him a blow job or your dick or make him feel extra special and hot with your compliments. Your kindness will be remembered, and you will be invited back.
7. For the love of god, play nicely with others.
You’re not going to be attracted to every single person at a sex party. You’re just not. But that doesn’t mean you’re excused from treating them politely.
That guy you think is a creepy old troll might be the boyfriend of the hottie you’re trying to get with, for all you know. Kicking him to the curb with a rude comment could backfire. Even if the creepy old troll is indeed merely a creepy old troll, you’re still not going to do yourself any favors by cutting him down with what you imagine is a witty and devastating remark. Mostly you’re just going to make yourself look like a cruel dick in front of your peers.
The same rules your mom taught you on the playground when you were five years old apply here. Don’t shove others out of the way to get to your favorite toy. You are no more entitled than anyone else present to be first on the best rides. Don’t cause fights, don’t argue, don’t make a fuss or a scene. Do not monopolize any one person. You will be expected to share.
I’ve always found that the camaraderie of men enjoying sex with each other is a bonding experience that can’t be beat; it’s a surefire way to make friends, earn respect, and to share joyful experiences that you’ll remember for a very long time to come. Group sex can be fucking amazing when everyone’s looking out for each other and helping each other to have a hot, sweaty time. And it can be lousy, frustrating, and godawful when one or two guys spoil it by behaving heedlessly or by trying to ruin the spirit of sharing with selfish behavior. Don’t be the Designated Asshole, and treat everyone as you’d like to be treated. It’s the Breeder’s Golden Rule.
If you’ve got questions about group sex, ask them in the comments below. And if you’re experienced in it and have other tips to share, post those as well. We’re all here to help each other over these hurdles—and once those fears of groups are conquered, you’ll be on your way to having some great fun.
(Just remember to invite me, too.)
Most of the sex I’ve had over the last six months, it seems, has either been in group situations, or with men I’ve met during big naked groups. I can’t say why this is, exactly—beyond, of course, the fact that I’m a top with a big dick, and big-docked tops are popular (and rare) in groups. Maybe there are more orgies in this part of the country? Maybe I’ve just stumbled into a handful of sex friends who are more inclined to throw groups when they know there’s a reliable top to invite? I don’t know.
What I do know is that of the mail I get from readers, the topic that gets addressed the most, the topic which has people fretting and worrying more than any other, has to do with the etiquette involved in attending group sex functions.
I’m not going to dismiss any of this anxiety as foolish or unwarranted. Meeting up with one stranger can be scary on its own. Walking into a group situation with a bunch of unknown strangers only multiplies whatever body anxieties and performance fears one might have; it’s enough to make a neurotic out of the most stable personality.
If you’re considering following in my footsteps and attempting group sex for the first time, however, I think there are a few general guidelines to follow.
1. Don’t be afraid to say yes to to a group sex invitation.
Group sex isn’t inherently deviant and perverted. Attending an orgy isn’t going to make you into an unredeemable slut or a bad person. Gay or straight, large group or small, it can be highly enjoyable and a great way to socialize. Yes, socialize. And network too, believe it or not.
Overwhelming as the prospect of getting naked in front of group might be for a first-timer, however, I think it’s important to remember that most of the men attending a group sex event are really all there for the same reason—to get off a time or two, and to have an enjoyable couple of hours doing it.
Chances are they’re all arriving with the same worries you might be feeling. Am I good looking enough? Am I hung enough? Will anybody want to fuck me? They’ll be worrying about whether or not they’ll have to make the first move, and how humiliated they’ll be when they try to reach out for some hot guy’s dick and the hot guy up and slaps away that filthy greasy paw. There might be some die-hard group sex aficionados in the mix like me, but chances are a lot (if not most) of the guys are new to it, just like you.
If you get the invite, or if you see an opportunity while you’re prowling online, first relax. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Think about it. Then accept. You might have more fun than you think, and you probably will even come away more confident than you went in.
2. Pick an event that’s right for you.
If you live in a big city, there are probably sex parties happening around you on a frequent basis. Some of them get advertised on sites such as Manhunt or Adam4Adam or BBRT, where it’s possible to browse through public boards or even to press a single button to get a listing of upcoming events. Others might appear in local sex blogs. Some are going to be private, by invitation only, and you have to know the right people.
Anxious as you might be, however, to get your first taste of group sex, before you start worrying about whether you’ll fit in, make sure the event suits you. If you’re looking for guaranteed bareback sex, don’t sign up to attend a foot fetishists’s festival or a jackoff party. Don’t sign up for a group in which safer sex rules are strictly enforced. If you think anal sex is dirty and disgusting, don’t attend a fisting party. This advice might seem obvious, but believe me, I’ve been in a lot of situations in which guys showed up, convinced they could make the party suit their own desires, without any regard to what everyone else wanted. It ain’t cute, and the results ain’t pretty.
There are a handful of events in which the people throwing the party very rigorously screen attendees. They may be searching for a certain degree of hotness, or excluding men who don’t meet a certain invisible requirement for looks, weight, or age. If you do submit your stats and photos for one of these and don’t get invited, don’t waste any of your time mourning when you get the rejection. You are not totally unfuckable. That party just wasn’t for you—and you can do better, trust me.
3. If you agree to attend a group sex party, show up. And show up on time.
Nothing irritates a man who’s spent a lot of his own personal time attempting to arrange a group sex party more than people who simply don’t show. My experience in arranging groups has always been pretty dismal; if I invite ten guys to come play at my place on a given date and time, I usually expect about three to show up, at most. I have friends who are more trusting.
Don’t sit behind your computer wanking while you think to yourself how hot an orgy would be, if all you plan to do is get off and never show up, even though the host is expecting you. If you’re unsure you’ll be able to attend, don’t say yes. If you know the chances are slim of you emerging from beneath the rock where you live, please tell the nice guy inviting you Think of me next time, but I can’t be there on that date. Thanks.
If the party’s one of those affairs in which you’re encouraged to show up anytime between eight p.m. and midnight, feel free to make a late entrance. Otherwise, show up at exactly the appointed hour the party’s supposed to start. It’s annoying for the host or one of the other guests to open and close the door repeatedly. You’re pulling them away from the action, when you show up late.
If you do have a genuine conflict, tell your host as soon as possible—preferably before the event commences. Telephone, text, or email your regrets. Doing so as an afterthought might indicate how little regard you have for the host, but even that’s better than not showing up at all.
4. If you agree to attend a group sex party, show up ready to play.
Don’t bounce into the room expecting everyone to be hugely interested in the traffic you just encountered. Don’t spill the hundred excuses you might have for being fifteen minutes late. Don’t assume that the motel room or the host’s house will have a working shower so you can clean up. Arrive with your cock ring on, your jock on your butt beneath your business suit, and your hole cleaned out and ready to go. Everyone’s time is at a premium these days; don’t waste it when it comes to others.
Additionally, don’t even bother attending a sex party if you’re not committed actually to having sex. If you’re going to lurk in the corner and not remove your clothes, stay home. If you’re going to arrive only to check out the guys, decide they’re not good enough for your persnickety ass, and then flounce off, just don’t come in the first place. If you’re planning to whack off furiously watching others while growling like a rabid dog at anyone who attempts to touch you, you’d do better behind your monitor watching porn. I’ve encountered all three types of these guys at just about every party I’ve been to, and I can tell you from experience, none of them ever got invited back.
If you are going to need lube for your adventures, bring lube. If you are requiring condoms, bring condoms. If the guy throwing the party has asked for a few bucks to cover the overhead costs, bring a few bucks. Don’t assume that others will cover for you.
5. While you’re at a group sex party, stay responsible for your own safety and behavior.
Start off by being responsible for what you bring with you. If it’s a regular group of guys you trust, that’s one thing. But if you’re in a dark hotel room with a bunch of naked strangers, don’t show up with a Coach leather man-bag that’s holding your iPad, your smartphone, the one printed copy of your doctoral thesis due next week and the one backup, and the irreplaceable birthday gift you just bought your dear mother-in-law. You don’t know who’s going to take off with it while you’ve got your legs lifted to heaven. Leave your wallet in the car, or at home. Arrive with as little cash as possible, and with as little that a light-fingered stranger might be tempted to filch.
If you’re attempting to preserve a negative serostatus at a group sex party, doing so is your responsibility. If you want your partners to wear condoms, it’s up to you to ask them. If you’re trying to bareback but to serosort your partners through some kind of superstitious voodoo ritual that convinces you that you’re immune to risk, be aware that a man’s answers to your question about his HIV status may be affected by exactly how few inches away his raging cock is from your raw hole. Don’t accept substances at a party you wouldn’t otherwise accept; don’t venture to a neighborhood where you’d feel uncomfortable, just for the sake of cheap and easy sex.
When it comes right down to it, you are responsible for your own safety and welfare at a group sex party. Don’t let your dick or anybody else make those important decisions for you.
6. Be nice to the host.
I don’t know how many times I can emphasize this particular point. Every couple of weeks I attend a group event at the home of a retired professor, at which fifteen to twenty guys show up on any given day. And every single time there’s always one asshole—he’s always a different person, but it seems like someone new is always occupying the Designated Asshole slot—who comes in, drops his drawers, and proceeds to rebuff not only the genial host’s advances, but even his attempts at conversation. The Designated Asshole will try to corner whoever he thinks is the hottest guy, get off quickly, and then disappear without even thanking the host.
Grandmotherly though I know I sound, I think this kind of behavior is appalling. (I know, you’re picturing me in a housecoat clutching my pearls and intoning Whatever are they teaching the children these days!) But I know I’m not the only one. Not only does my host keep track of who’s being a rude son-of-a-bitch, but the other regulars at the party, when they see our host given the cold shoulder, are more inclined to shut out the Designated Asshole so that he’s not getting any fun whatsoever. We can be highly protective of our favorite professor.
So if your party has a host, whether it’s the fellow whose house you’re using, or whether it’s the nice pervert who’s taken his time to arrange for the hotel room and to line up the list of guests, be nice to the guy. Give him some extra attention. Slip him a twenty to help pay for the costs, if he’s rented a hotel room for the day. Give him a blow job or your dick or make him feel extra special and hot with your compliments. Your kindness will be remembered, and you will be invited back.
7. For the love of god, play nicely with others.
You’re not going to be attracted to every single person at a sex party. You’re just not. But that doesn’t mean you’re excused from treating them politely.
That guy you think is a creepy old troll might be the boyfriend of the hottie you’re trying to get with, for all you know. Kicking him to the curb with a rude comment could backfire. Even if the creepy old troll is indeed merely a creepy old troll, you’re still not going to do yourself any favors by cutting him down with what you imagine is a witty and devastating remark. Mostly you’re just going to make yourself look like a cruel dick in front of your peers.
The same rules your mom taught you on the playground when you were five years old apply here. Don’t shove others out of the way to get to your favorite toy. You are no more entitled than anyone else present to be first on the best rides. Don’t cause fights, don’t argue, don’t make a fuss or a scene. Do not monopolize any one person. You will be expected to share.
I’ve always found that the camaraderie of men enjoying sex with each other is a bonding experience that can’t be beat; it’s a surefire way to make friends, earn respect, and to share joyful experiences that you’ll remember for a very long time to come. Group sex can be fucking amazing when everyone’s looking out for each other and helping each other to have a hot, sweaty time. And it can be lousy, frustrating, and godawful when one or two guys spoil it by behaving heedlessly or by trying to ruin the spirit of sharing with selfish behavior. Don’t be the Designated Asshole, and treat everyone as you’d like to be treated. It’s the Breeder’s Golden Rule.
If you’ve got questions about group sex, ask them in the comments below. And if you’re experienced in it and have other tips to share, post those as well. We’re all here to help each other over these hurdles—and once those fears of groups are conquered, you’ll be on your way to having some great fun.
(Just remember to invite me, too.)
Friday, March 28, 2014
Friday Open Forum: Deal-Breakers
Deal-breakers. All of us have them. What’re yours?
Not that long ago I was going about my day when I got a direct message on Twitter. It was from a reader. He loved my blog, he told me. He thought I was hot. He wanted me to be his daddy and fuck his hot little ass.
Well, it’s tough for me to hold up against blandishments like that. I couldn’t tell much about the guy from his Twitter profile other than he did indeed appear to have a hot ass (it featured prominently as his user photo), so I asked him to tell me more about himself.
He responded with some photos and information. He was young—in his early twenties. Of mixed race. Muscular and attractive. His dick was large, his ass round and larger. And he happened to be taking a train from Manhattan home back to somewhere else in New England he happened to call home, and would be passing through my area around dinnertime.
I actually had that afternoon and evening free, and was able to host. I offered the kid my phone number and asked him what time his train was coming through my area. Well look, he replied. I can’t commit right now. It depends on whether these muscle guys get back to me or not.
Which made me ask him, Huh?
I was going to hook up these muscle guys if they get back to me. But if they don’t I am totally free to chill with you, he wrote back.
I took a moment to make sure I understood the situation. So I’m really just second choice behind some muscle couple? I wrote.
No, no, he wrote back, trying to soothe me. They’re not a couple. Just two hot muscle guys. Not together. I’ve been after one of them for a long time, but I told the other if the first didn’t get back to me I’d fuck with him. If I don’t hear back from either of them it can be you, daddy. Followed by little smiley faces.
I was so taken aback I could’ve spit nails. The little motherfucker was telling me outright that I wasn’t his first or second choice of hookups, but a distant third, behind some random guys with muscles.
Now, for some guys, this state of affairs might be fine. Some guys are more laid back than I. Some chaps don’t have as huge an ego to wound. I, however, was offended. After I made sure that I’d assessed the situation correctly, I wrote back to the kid plainly and politely. I’m going to say no to meeting, I told him. I’m not interested in being your third choice. Good luck to you.
Unfortunately, the kid tried to badger me for the rest of the day. He said he’d tell the other two guys no and meet up with me. He said he’d wanted me first all along, but had been afraid to ask. Then he turned right around and said I’d better meet him because after all, I wasn’t going to get any better offers than him. No thank you, I wrote, then blocked him on Twitter.
Also unfortunate was the fact I’d already given him my phone number. Immediately after that the text messages started to come. Pleas. Photos. Please stop contacting me, I texted him, and blocked the number on my phone.
Then somehow he started to send me messages on one of the geolocation apps on my phone. I blocked him there, too.
It was a lot of weirdness in a very short period of time, and it just made me kind of glad that I discovered how annoying and stalkery the kid really was before I’d actually met him. He’s unfortunately not unique, however. There are certainly a lot of men out there who need to realize the impression they’re giving when they’re trying to lure someone between the sheets.
The deal-breaker here, of course, was the presumption that I’d be okay with the bronze medallion in this guy’s sexual olympics. I wasn’t. Frankly, nobody should be happy to be anyone’s third place. Before I’m accused of hypocrisy, let me state that yes, absolutely, I have confessed on these very pages before to double-booking and even triple-booking a time slot I know I’ll have open and available for some sexual gymnastics, so that if my first choice of playmate doesn’t show, at least I’ll have a couple of other options from which to choose. Sure I do. Almost every time.
But you know what I don’t do? I don’t tell the guys. I don’t inform someone that I might be available Wednesday night and if so, would he like to get together, and oh, by the way, he’s the backup to my backup. Telling the guy is fucking rude. I’d basically be saying I’d be happy to give him the amazing gift of myself but that he doesn’t mean as much to me in return. When I’m fucking someone, my goal is make sure they know they’re my gold trophy. Not just something I’m dumping a load into because better options weren’t available.
So I’m interested. What are your deal-breakers? What can a guy say or do, after he’s interested you in meeting, to make you break off the deal? Is it issues of common courtesy, as mine? Or is it more specific, like finding out a guy’s a smoker, or married, or hasn’t visited the dentist in ten years? What behaviors or attributes will make you do a complete one-eighty in your attitude and send a prospect packing? Sound off in the comments below.
And for the record, I certainly did have better offers than that kid, that night. I usually do.
Not that long ago I was going about my day when I got a direct message on Twitter. It was from a reader. He loved my blog, he told me. He thought I was hot. He wanted me to be his daddy and fuck his hot little ass.
Well, it’s tough for me to hold up against blandishments like that. I couldn’t tell much about the guy from his Twitter profile other than he did indeed appear to have a hot ass (it featured prominently as his user photo), so I asked him to tell me more about himself.
He responded with some photos and information. He was young—in his early twenties. Of mixed race. Muscular and attractive. His dick was large, his ass round and larger. And he happened to be taking a train from Manhattan home back to somewhere else in New England he happened to call home, and would be passing through my area around dinnertime.
I actually had that afternoon and evening free, and was able to host. I offered the kid my phone number and asked him what time his train was coming through my area. Well look, he replied. I can’t commit right now. It depends on whether these muscle guys get back to me or not.
Which made me ask him, Huh?
I was going to hook up these muscle guys if they get back to me. But if they don’t I am totally free to chill with you, he wrote back.
I took a moment to make sure I understood the situation. So I’m really just second choice behind some muscle couple? I wrote.
No, no, he wrote back, trying to soothe me. They’re not a couple. Just two hot muscle guys. Not together. I’ve been after one of them for a long time, but I told the other if the first didn’t get back to me I’d fuck with him. If I don’t hear back from either of them it can be you, daddy. Followed by little smiley faces.
I was so taken aback I could’ve spit nails. The little motherfucker was telling me outright that I wasn’t his first or second choice of hookups, but a distant third, behind some random guys with muscles.
Now, for some guys, this state of affairs might be fine. Some guys are more laid back than I. Some chaps don’t have as huge an ego to wound. I, however, was offended. After I made sure that I’d assessed the situation correctly, I wrote back to the kid plainly and politely. I’m going to say no to meeting, I told him. I’m not interested in being your third choice. Good luck to you.
Unfortunately, the kid tried to badger me for the rest of the day. He said he’d tell the other two guys no and meet up with me. He said he’d wanted me first all along, but had been afraid to ask. Then he turned right around and said I’d better meet him because after all, I wasn’t going to get any better offers than him. No thank you, I wrote, then blocked him on Twitter.
Also unfortunate was the fact I’d already given him my phone number. Immediately after that the text messages started to come. Pleas. Photos. Please stop contacting me, I texted him, and blocked the number on my phone.
Then somehow he started to send me messages on one of the geolocation apps on my phone. I blocked him there, too.
It was a lot of weirdness in a very short period of time, and it just made me kind of glad that I discovered how annoying and stalkery the kid really was before I’d actually met him. He’s unfortunately not unique, however. There are certainly a lot of men out there who need to realize the impression they’re giving when they’re trying to lure someone between the sheets.
The deal-breaker here, of course, was the presumption that I’d be okay with the bronze medallion in this guy’s sexual olympics. I wasn’t. Frankly, nobody should be happy to be anyone’s third place. Before I’m accused of hypocrisy, let me state that yes, absolutely, I have confessed on these very pages before to double-booking and even triple-booking a time slot I know I’ll have open and available for some sexual gymnastics, so that if my first choice of playmate doesn’t show, at least I’ll have a couple of other options from which to choose. Sure I do. Almost every time.
But you know what I don’t do? I don’t tell the guys. I don’t inform someone that I might be available Wednesday night and if so, would he like to get together, and oh, by the way, he’s the backup to my backup. Telling the guy is fucking rude. I’d basically be saying I’d be happy to give him the amazing gift of myself but that he doesn’t mean as much to me in return. When I’m fucking someone, my goal is make sure they know they’re my gold trophy. Not just something I’m dumping a load into because better options weren’t available.
So I’m interested. What are your deal-breakers? What can a guy say or do, after he’s interested you in meeting, to make you break off the deal? Is it issues of common courtesy, as mine? Or is it more specific, like finding out a guy’s a smoker, or married, or hasn’t visited the dentist in ten years? What behaviors or attributes will make you do a complete one-eighty in your attitude and send a prospect packing? Sound off in the comments below.
And for the record, I certainly did have better offers than that kid, that night. I usually do.
Friday, December 6, 2013
Friday Open Forum: The Micromanager
Taking a six to eight weeks hiatus from my sex life—rather unwillingly, I might add—does a couple of things to a guy. For one, I was feeling so decidedly unsexy during the whole sick spell that I didn’t so much as masturbate the entire time. (To be honest, I was feeling so poorly that I didn’t even miss it.) After a month and a half-ish of abstinence, when my health roared back, my erection roared with it; I almost needed a bucket and a mop to clean up the load from that first orgasm. Whew.
For another, it gave me a little distance and perspective on some issues I’d been taking for granted, over the last few years. Some of those I’m still thinking about. I’d like to address one of them, though, and get some reader feedback as well.
Every online site that I know (not to imply that I sniff haughtily and turn up my nose at others) has some kind of function that allows a member to control who sees his photo. At the most basic, it allows him to set some photos to public, and some to private. Usually—unless there are explicit instructions on the website detailing that certain types of photos should not be visible to everyone—I leave all my photos open. Anybody can see them. Face, dick, the whole thing. In part I do so because I have a philosophy that I’m not really ashamed of who I am as a person, including my, shall we say, rather vibrant libido.
I think I mentioned that when I first moved to the tri-state area I got a lecture from someone online—I think it was on Manhunt—who was absolutely appalled that I would allow a shot of my erect dick to appear next to my smiling mug. “That’s just not the way we do things here!” he shuddered, in what was the online Manhunt equivalent of fanning himself, reaching for his smelling salts, and groping delicately for a fainting couch.
Fuck that. I think most grown adults are capable of imagining that other adult men not only have dicks of their own, but that sometimes they get erect and need attention. A dick is nothing of which to be ashamed. It’s a body part, like an elbow. I’m not ashamed of my face, of my nose, or of my junk. I’m not ashamed of being a sexual person. Besides, anyone who’s cruising Manhunt or any sex site isn’t there to exchange Christmas cookie recipes or talk about comparative religion. Anyone protesting about seeing a hard penis doth protest too much.
The primary reason I went to all open photos a few years back, though, is because managing that dance of who unlocks first and when and why is just so tiring. One of the guys has to say unlock plz. Then the other has to say u first. Then there’s no u and i dont go 1st!! Sometimes there’s a standoff of epic proportions, a electronic peen-fight of chicken in which the loser has to unlock first and face the possibility of the other guy finding him unattractive . . . and the subsequent empty moment in which he realizes that the guy has blocked him, rejected him, and moved on to someone else. I figure that by letting guys see all of my photos, face, body, and dick alike, they can figure out on their own whether they want to make a further move. I’m spared having to exert my psychic powers and the services of the Delphic oracle to augur when might be the best strategic moment to unlock for the guy.
Here’s the thing I’ve noticed since I began looking around online again, though. I have absolutely no patience for men who micromanage their photos.
You probably know the type. They’re the ones on Manhunt who write long paragraphs in their profiles that in effect say, No offense but I lock my photos every time before I log off, so if you want to see them again, you will have to ask me. On BBRT and Adam4Adam in particular they have an annoying habit of unlocking and then locking again on some kind of accelerated internal time clock that seems to be connected to how quickly they want me to respond.
Yesterday, for example, I was doing some legitimate work in another window of my laptop and tabbed over to my browser, where on A4A a guy had unlocked his photos for me. I looked at his profile. All the photos were locked. A minute later, I got another blinking note that the same guy had unlocked his photos for me. Now, my response time wasn’t sluggardly; I clicked on his profile in less than thirty seconds after I received the email. But there they were, locked again. I know it wasn’t a server error, either, because I wrote the guy the note that read Why do you keep locking your photos immediately after unlocking them? and got back the answer maybe u aren’t looking quick enough.
Fuck that, too. I blocked the guy.
I can speculate endlessly on the reasons guys micromanage their photos—who can see them, who can’t, for how long they allow the photos to be visible. A lot of the men, however, seem really to get off on the notion that guys are begging them to unlock—as if the number of requests they generate through denial is directly proportional to their virility and desirability. And some seem to be genuinely paranoid about what I might do with those photos, which in itself shows a mistrust I find borderline offensive.
Look. Your photos are your photos, on these website. I fully support a guy’s right to set his own pictures to private. I encourage anyone to show online only what he’s comfortable sharing. That’s totally his right, and his business. But I swear to god, when a guy starts toinking around with viewing privileges and letting me see only the one out-of-focus shot of his upper thigh in a murky bathroom in the middle of the night in a February winter when he’s got seven other locked photos of which I might’ve gotten a brief glance before he snapped them shut again . . . well, I’ve discovered in the last couple of weeks that I’ve just lost the patience for that kind of gamesmanship.
So I’m asking those of you guys who are confident to post photos online. What do you think about those who keep a tight rein on unlocking and relocking photos? Or if you’re one of the folk who relock frequently, what’re your reasons for doing so? And if all your photos are open and visible, why haven’t you shared the link with me yet? Sound off in the comments for today’s open forum!
For another, it gave me a little distance and perspective on some issues I’d been taking for granted, over the last few years. Some of those I’m still thinking about. I’d like to address one of them, though, and get some reader feedback as well.
Every online site that I know (not to imply that I sniff haughtily and turn up my nose at others) has some kind of function that allows a member to control who sees his photo. At the most basic, it allows him to set some photos to public, and some to private. Usually—unless there are explicit instructions on the website detailing that certain types of photos should not be visible to everyone—I leave all my photos open. Anybody can see them. Face, dick, the whole thing. In part I do so because I have a philosophy that I’m not really ashamed of who I am as a person, including my, shall we say, rather vibrant libido.
I think I mentioned that when I first moved to the tri-state area I got a lecture from someone online—I think it was on Manhunt—who was absolutely appalled that I would allow a shot of my erect dick to appear next to my smiling mug. “That’s just not the way we do things here!” he shuddered, in what was the online Manhunt equivalent of fanning himself, reaching for his smelling salts, and groping delicately for a fainting couch.
Fuck that. I think most grown adults are capable of imagining that other adult men not only have dicks of their own, but that sometimes they get erect and need attention. A dick is nothing of which to be ashamed. It’s a body part, like an elbow. I’m not ashamed of my face, of my nose, or of my junk. I’m not ashamed of being a sexual person. Besides, anyone who’s cruising Manhunt or any sex site isn’t there to exchange Christmas cookie recipes or talk about comparative religion. Anyone protesting about seeing a hard penis doth protest too much.
The primary reason I went to all open photos a few years back, though, is because managing that dance of who unlocks first and when and why is just so tiring. One of the guys has to say unlock plz. Then the other has to say u first. Then there’s no u and i dont go 1st!! Sometimes there’s a standoff of epic proportions, a electronic peen-fight of chicken in which the loser has to unlock first and face the possibility of the other guy finding him unattractive . . . and the subsequent empty moment in which he realizes that the guy has blocked him, rejected him, and moved on to someone else. I figure that by letting guys see all of my photos, face, body, and dick alike, they can figure out on their own whether they want to make a further move. I’m spared having to exert my psychic powers and the services of the Delphic oracle to augur when might be the best strategic moment to unlock for the guy.
Here’s the thing I’ve noticed since I began looking around online again, though. I have absolutely no patience for men who micromanage their photos.
You probably know the type. They’re the ones on Manhunt who write long paragraphs in their profiles that in effect say, No offense but I lock my photos every time before I log off, so if you want to see them again, you will have to ask me. On BBRT and Adam4Adam in particular they have an annoying habit of unlocking and then locking again on some kind of accelerated internal time clock that seems to be connected to how quickly they want me to respond.
Yesterday, for example, I was doing some legitimate work in another window of my laptop and tabbed over to my browser, where on A4A a guy had unlocked his photos for me. I looked at his profile. All the photos were locked. A minute later, I got another blinking note that the same guy had unlocked his photos for me. Now, my response time wasn’t sluggardly; I clicked on his profile in less than thirty seconds after I received the email. But there they were, locked again. I know it wasn’t a server error, either, because I wrote the guy the note that read Why do you keep locking your photos immediately after unlocking them? and got back the answer maybe u aren’t looking quick enough.
Fuck that, too. I blocked the guy.
I can speculate endlessly on the reasons guys micromanage their photos—who can see them, who can’t, for how long they allow the photos to be visible. A lot of the men, however, seem really to get off on the notion that guys are begging them to unlock—as if the number of requests they generate through denial is directly proportional to their virility and desirability. And some seem to be genuinely paranoid about what I might do with those photos, which in itself shows a mistrust I find borderline offensive.
Look. Your photos are your photos, on these website. I fully support a guy’s right to set his own pictures to private. I encourage anyone to show online only what he’s comfortable sharing. That’s totally his right, and his business. But I swear to god, when a guy starts toinking around with viewing privileges and letting me see only the one out-of-focus shot of his upper thigh in a murky bathroom in the middle of the night in a February winter when he’s got seven other locked photos of which I might’ve gotten a brief glance before he snapped them shut again . . . well, I’ve discovered in the last couple of weeks that I’ve just lost the patience for that kind of gamesmanship.
So I’m asking those of you guys who are confident to post photos online. What do you think about those who keep a tight rein on unlocking and relocking photos? Or if you’re one of the folk who relock frequently, what’re your reasons for doing so? And if all your photos are open and visible, why haven’t you shared the link with me yet? Sound off in the comments for today’s open forum!
Friday, May 17, 2013
Open Forum Friday: That Manwhore!
One of the things I love about the area where I live is that no matter what the night, no matter what the hour, there’s always weird shit to do.
Weird is a relative term, of course. I’m not talking about dressing up in rubber and rolling around in butterscotch pudding with someone weird (though I probably could find it with a little hunting), or getting into a hot ’n’ nasty session of popping helium balloons in the nude weird (ditto). But at any given moment, there’s always something entertaining to do that I would never have found in the Midwest, or god knows the South. This calendar year alone I’ve stumbled into odd art gallery openings, movie and TV shoots, impromptu zombie appearances, a kimono fashion show, strange street theater, and a pair of Elmos going at each other with fists flying in Times Square.
Compared to all that, a night at something called Porno Bingo sounds pretty tame. And it actually was. I’ve been to many a Drag Queen Bingo night at some bar or another, all of them of varying quality. Porno Bingo is something of an institution here, though; it’s run by porn actor Will Clark, a handsome grizzly of a guy who keeps things moving through three games.
The porno, in case you’re wondering, is the prize for each winner. Porn is not actually playing during the game itself. And porno not something that takes place when Clark calls O-69. Although it does get a little porny when he starts flirting with me, which is something he’s done the couple of times I’ve been. (Did one of you guys show him a pic of my dick?)
Anyway. A couple of weeks ago I was at Porno Bingo with a handful of friends. It was between games, and during the break a Boylesque performer was sauntering around the bar wearing an awful lot of makeup and an outfit that looked like one of the Kit Kat Club dancers from the Alan Cumming Cabaret. And I mean the female Kit Kat Club dancers. I knew two of the other guys fairly well; the others crowding around our table were more mere acquaintances than anything else. We were drinking and commiserating over not winning any man-on-man DVDs at that point, and watching the Boylesque performer use a very sharp pair of hair shears to cut the elastic bands holding together his skimpy little outfit, when a fellow named Philip walked up.
I’d met Philip once before. Much as I dislike the word, I find it appropriate here—he’s a little bit of a hipster. Scruffy face, bad complexion, hair that looks like it just rolled out of bed independently of the head to which it was attached. He was wearing a hand-knitted scarf of Doctor Who proportions in Kelly green and dirty white, a pair of too-tight jeans, and a ironic T-shirt of some late-nineteen-eighties band. He was slightly sleazy looking, to be honest—not a bad look for someone who admires a little sleaze, like I do, but it wasn’t quite the well-groomed fashion of most of the guys in the bar.
Philip had come not to play bingo, and not to see the Boylesque performer who was down to nothing but his lederhosen and some spangles on his nipples, but to drop off a book to one of the other guys at my table. He was on his way to a party, he explained—and the party had a name, which I now can’t recall. It was something like Splashdown! or Hothouse! or Jetstream!—it definitely had an exclamation mark at the end, and I remember thinking during the moment that the party name sounded like some kind of porn distributor. But he wanted to stop in and drop off the book he’d promised his friend—and then, with a round of handshakes and hugs as appropriate, he was on his way.
“Splashdown!?” I asked (or Hothouse!, or Jetstream!, or whatever it was), once he was out of earshot. “Is that a party at a bar? Or like, a sex party?” Not an unreasonable question, as this city has a lot of regular, weekly sex parties, most of which have their own names for easy publicity.
One fellow that I didn’t know well leaned over and hissed, “I’m sure it’s an orgy, because that one is such a MANWHORE!”
I stared at the guy, blinked, and thought to myself, Man, you really don’t know whom you’re talking to, do you?
I have no idea whether Philip is a manwhore or not. If he is, more power to him, from one manwhore to another. Solidarity, manwhorebro! But I did have my suspicions about why someone else was accusing him of marwhoreialism. “A bigger manwhore than me? Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Oh please. You, a manwhore? As for him, trust me on this one,” said the gossipy queen. “All you have to do is look at him.”
I left it alone after that, and thought to myself how dispiriting it was that someone would assume the guy was the town tramp, just because of looking at him.
When I was much younger, I considered myself afflicted by a wholesome demeanor. I had a sweet, innocent baby face that totally belied the depraved things I was doing for men in parks and restrooms city-side. I learned fairly quickly that no one wanted to corrupt what they assumed was my unsullied innocence until they actually saw me whip out my dick or unzip my pantsand get on my hands and knees. Then they were game. The experience taught me to be a sexual instigator, rather than someone who sits and waits. To this day I’ve used that wholesome, innocent look to get what I want. It’s tough for many guys to imagine that someone with my sweet smile can be as lowdown and dirty. Until they see the X-rated photos, that is.
In other words, I get away with so much simply because I look so innocent. It’s a quality I’ve learned to work to my advantage. I suspect a good four-fifths of what appeal I have is because on the surface I don’t really look like the kind of guy who’d do incredibly dirty stuff. But if I’d been born with hair that was more unruly, or eyes that were beadier, or a complexion that wasn’t as good, if my facial hair grew out in a way that was seedier or if I put myself together differently, maybe people I know would be (rightly) hissing the word manwhore about me, too.
Okay, perhaps I should assume that the people I know who know me well are already using that word to describe me. Maybe the people who’ve just seen me a few times would be hissing it, too.
It applies to sexual roles, too. I’ve known guys who’ve gone far in their sexual adventuring because they look like the strapping, take-charge tops that they really are, and I’ve known bottoms who exude a certain come-hither appeal that lets others know exactly what they want. At the same time, I’ve known quite a few bottoms who become frustrated because the looks with which they were born seem to give off a toppish, butch, or dominant message—they can’t hook up without the other guy trying to go ass-up for them. And I’ve known a couple of tops whom no one takes seriously because they seem so damned bottomy, even before they take off their clothes.
It’s not a new observation that we tend to project our own expectations and desires on others based on how they look. What I’m curious about, in today’s Open Forum, is how my readers have found their own looks affect the snap judgments others make of you.
Have you gotten away with debauched escapades all your life because of your rosy cheeks and winsome dimples? Are your friends whispering things about your sluttiness behind your back because of your louche appearance? Are they dismissing you because you look like the type of person who would never do anything extreme? Are you characterized as one thing when you’re really another? If so, is it something you’ve resented all your life, or have you learned how to capitalize on it?
Post your thoughts in the comments below, and let’s learn something from each other.
Weird is a relative term, of course. I’m not talking about dressing up in rubber and rolling around in butterscotch pudding with someone weird (though I probably could find it with a little hunting), or getting into a hot ’n’ nasty session of popping helium balloons in the nude weird (ditto). But at any given moment, there’s always something entertaining to do that I would never have found in the Midwest, or god knows the South. This calendar year alone I’ve stumbled into odd art gallery openings, movie and TV shoots, impromptu zombie appearances, a kimono fashion show, strange street theater, and a pair of Elmos going at each other with fists flying in Times Square.
Compared to all that, a night at something called Porno Bingo sounds pretty tame. And it actually was. I’ve been to many a Drag Queen Bingo night at some bar or another, all of them of varying quality. Porno Bingo is something of an institution here, though; it’s run by porn actor Will Clark, a handsome grizzly of a guy who keeps things moving through three games.
The porno, in case you’re wondering, is the prize for each winner. Porn is not actually playing during the game itself. And porno not something that takes place when Clark calls O-69. Although it does get a little porny when he starts flirting with me, which is something he’s done the couple of times I’ve been. (Did one of you guys show him a pic of my dick?)
Anyway. A couple of weeks ago I was at Porno Bingo with a handful of friends. It was between games, and during the break a Boylesque performer was sauntering around the bar wearing an awful lot of makeup and an outfit that looked like one of the Kit Kat Club dancers from the Alan Cumming Cabaret. And I mean the female Kit Kat Club dancers. I knew two of the other guys fairly well; the others crowding around our table were more mere acquaintances than anything else. We were drinking and commiserating over not winning any man-on-man DVDs at that point, and watching the Boylesque performer use a very sharp pair of hair shears to cut the elastic bands holding together his skimpy little outfit, when a fellow named Philip walked up.
I’d met Philip once before. Much as I dislike the word, I find it appropriate here—he’s a little bit of a hipster. Scruffy face, bad complexion, hair that looks like it just rolled out of bed independently of the head to which it was attached. He was wearing a hand-knitted scarf of Doctor Who proportions in Kelly green and dirty white, a pair of too-tight jeans, and a ironic T-shirt of some late-nineteen-eighties band. He was slightly sleazy looking, to be honest—not a bad look for someone who admires a little sleaze, like I do, but it wasn’t quite the well-groomed fashion of most of the guys in the bar.
Philip had come not to play bingo, and not to see the Boylesque performer who was down to nothing but his lederhosen and some spangles on his nipples, but to drop off a book to one of the other guys at my table. He was on his way to a party, he explained—and the party had a name, which I now can’t recall. It was something like Splashdown! or Hothouse! or Jetstream!—it definitely had an exclamation mark at the end, and I remember thinking during the moment that the party name sounded like some kind of porn distributor. But he wanted to stop in and drop off the book he’d promised his friend—and then, with a round of handshakes and hugs as appropriate, he was on his way.
“Splashdown!?” I asked (or Hothouse!, or Jetstream!, or whatever it was), once he was out of earshot. “Is that a party at a bar? Or like, a sex party?” Not an unreasonable question, as this city has a lot of regular, weekly sex parties, most of which have their own names for easy publicity.
One fellow that I didn’t know well leaned over and hissed, “I’m sure it’s an orgy, because that one is such a MANWHORE!”
I stared at the guy, blinked, and thought to myself, Man, you really don’t know whom you’re talking to, do you?
I have no idea whether Philip is a manwhore or not. If he is, more power to him, from one manwhore to another. Solidarity, manwhorebro! But I did have my suspicions about why someone else was accusing him of marwhoreialism. “A bigger manwhore than me? Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Oh please. You, a manwhore? As for him, trust me on this one,” said the gossipy queen. “All you have to do is look at him.”
I left it alone after that, and thought to myself how dispiriting it was that someone would assume the guy was the town tramp, just because of looking at him.
When I was much younger, I considered myself afflicted by a wholesome demeanor. I had a sweet, innocent baby face that totally belied the depraved things I was doing for men in parks and restrooms city-side. I learned fairly quickly that no one wanted to corrupt what they assumed was my unsullied innocence until they actually saw me whip out my dick or unzip my pantsand get on my hands and knees. Then they were game. The experience taught me to be a sexual instigator, rather than someone who sits and waits. To this day I’ve used that wholesome, innocent look to get what I want. It’s tough for many guys to imagine that someone with my sweet smile can be as lowdown and dirty. Until they see the X-rated photos, that is.
In other words, I get away with so much simply because I look so innocent. It’s a quality I’ve learned to work to my advantage. I suspect a good four-fifths of what appeal I have is because on the surface I don’t really look like the kind of guy who’d do incredibly dirty stuff. But if I’d been born with hair that was more unruly, or eyes that were beadier, or a complexion that wasn’t as good, if my facial hair grew out in a way that was seedier or if I put myself together differently, maybe people I know would be (rightly) hissing the word manwhore about me, too.
Okay, perhaps I should assume that the people I know who know me well are already using that word to describe me. Maybe the people who’ve just seen me a few times would be hissing it, too.
It applies to sexual roles, too. I’ve known guys who’ve gone far in their sexual adventuring because they look like the strapping, take-charge tops that they really are, and I’ve known bottoms who exude a certain come-hither appeal that lets others know exactly what they want. At the same time, I’ve known quite a few bottoms who become frustrated because the looks with which they were born seem to give off a toppish, butch, or dominant message—they can’t hook up without the other guy trying to go ass-up for them. And I’ve known a couple of tops whom no one takes seriously because they seem so damned bottomy, even before they take off their clothes.
It’s not a new observation that we tend to project our own expectations and desires on others based on how they look. What I’m curious about, in today’s Open Forum, is how my readers have found their own looks affect the snap judgments others make of you.
Have you gotten away with debauched escapades all your life because of your rosy cheeks and winsome dimples? Are your friends whispering things about your sluttiness behind your back because of your louche appearance? Are they dismissing you because you look like the type of person who would never do anything extreme? Are you characterized as one thing when you’re really another? If so, is it something you’ve resented all your life, or have you learned how to capitalize on it?
Post your thoughts in the comments below, and let’s learn something from each other.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Open Forum Monday: The Big One
I had one of those birthdays last week. It wasn’t a milestone birthday in the traditional sense—that is, the year didn’t end with a zero. But it was one of those birthdays that’s ominous to gay men in general, because it’s a number at which time suddenly stands still and past which, mysteriously no gay man ever ages.
No, not 25. I can see your confusion, though. That’s the age that gay men ape in their dress habits, especially the fifty-somethings who stuff themselves into a Hollister T-shirt under the hope that the brand name will do a David Copperfield on their age and shave off twenty-five years before everyone’s marveling eyes. So no, not 25. The other number.
No, not 29. Yes, I know that’s the age that all women over 30 claim to be. That’s more of a female thing, though. Men over thirty claim they’re 32, all the way up until they’re my age. It doesn’t matter if they’re 39, or 42, or 46. If you look at their profile, or ask them in a bar late at night when the lights are low, they’re going to tell you they’re 32. But not either of those numbers.
And no, it’s not 43. Where’d that come from?
Look, I’ll just tell you. I turned 49. For-ty-niiiiine. It’s the last number to which gay men will admit. Men born in the year I was born—1964—are 49. Men born in the nineteen-fifties are 49. Guys who popped out of a Great Gatsby-era flapper wearing a shingled skirt and shouting twenty-three skiddoo! claim to be 49. Gay men hit 49 and then remain there until their deaths, thirty-five years later. It doesn’t matter that they’re hunched over and clutching a cane and looking like Young Mr. Grace on Are You Being Served?, who doddered around barely able to say his one line of the entire show. He’s 49, dammit, and 49 he’ll stay.
FOREVER.
I had an argument with my own brother about the age of 49 a couple of years ago. My brother has been 49 for almost a dozen years now, both in his online profiles and with new guys he meets. It made me more and more anxious about approaching the age myself—not because I feared the number itself. I don’t give a rip. It’s because I had this vision of my age matching his, then surpassing him. Then I’d be the older brother. And that’s a crime against nature. I’m too foxy to be the older brother.
So I nagged. And I pleaded. Finally he changed his age to 99, which in online profile land is basically a big fuck you to anyone who wants to get a general idea of how old someone is.
But it’s still older than 49.
I’d like to proclaim up front that my age will continue to change from year to year. Next February I will be 50. In 2015, I will be 51. Just you wait and see. Check in with in a decade and I’ll be 59. Still foxy, and 59.
I don’t like to let a number dictate how I feel about myself, see. I spent way too much of my early life doing that. It started the week I lost my virginity at 12, in my earliest encounter getting cruised in a men’s room toilet. The guy next to me, after peering through a gloryhole and looking at my smooth and hairless body, passed me a note written on toilet paper and wrapped around a Bic pen that read, How old are you???
Right away, I lied. 14, I wrote back. Because in my naive mind, there was a vast world of experiential difference between a callow youth of 12 and a seasoned sexual professional of 14, and I didn’t want to seem like a young newbie.
God, was I dumb. Not that the guy cared. He had his dick in me less than thirty seconds later.
I was always lying about my age to men in my teens. I added on three, four, five years to make men comfortable about fucking me. In college, because I’d skipped a year of high school and entered early, I added on a couple of years so that my classmates didn’t think I was contemptibly young. I had a baby face in grad school, where I the only 20-year-old surrounded by students in their late twenties, thirties, and forties—so I told everyone I was 25. I added on years until I reached 30, when I decided I’d had enough about apologizing for something as silly as how old I was.
And yes, at 49 I’ve had my share of rejection based on my age. Or more accurately, I’ve run across the guys to whom I’m invisible because I’m not 25 (or wearing that Hollister T to pretend I am). I’ve seen plenty of profiles of guys who absolutely positively will never ever meet anyone over 45 ever! You know what? Screw that. It’s easy to see the scores of those profiles and feel slighted. I don’t intend to waste my time bemoaning them. It seems to me the men who are missing out are those who sit on the sidelines and simply don’t try, because they’re too sensitive to rejection.
In the end, I’d rather be rejected arbitrarily so that I know someone’s a close-minded asshole, than magically accepted because I gave out a fictional number as my age. And that’s, as Edith Ann used to say (see, I’m dating myself), the truth.
So in this Monday’s open forum, I’m curious. Who out there has lied about his or her age in order to land a guy? For what reasons? Are you fibbing about your age now? Are you going older or, more likely, younger? How young do you dare to go—that is, how many years is it safe to shave off in the service of preserving one’s youth? And is there life after 49? I’d love to hear from you guys.
No, not 25. I can see your confusion, though. That’s the age that gay men ape in their dress habits, especially the fifty-somethings who stuff themselves into a Hollister T-shirt under the hope that the brand name will do a David Copperfield on their age and shave off twenty-five years before everyone’s marveling eyes. So no, not 25. The other number.
No, not 29. Yes, I know that’s the age that all women over 30 claim to be. That’s more of a female thing, though. Men over thirty claim they’re 32, all the way up until they’re my age. It doesn’t matter if they’re 39, or 42, or 46. If you look at their profile, or ask them in a bar late at night when the lights are low, they’re going to tell you they’re 32. But not either of those numbers.
And no, it’s not 43. Where’d that come from?
Look, I’ll just tell you. I turned 49. For-ty-niiiiine. It’s the last number to which gay men will admit. Men born in the year I was born—1964—are 49. Men born in the nineteen-fifties are 49. Guys who popped out of a Great Gatsby-era flapper wearing a shingled skirt and shouting twenty-three skiddoo! claim to be 49. Gay men hit 49 and then remain there until their deaths, thirty-five years later. It doesn’t matter that they’re hunched over and clutching a cane and looking like Young Mr. Grace on Are You Being Served?, who doddered around barely able to say his one line of the entire show. He’s 49, dammit, and 49 he’ll stay.
FOREVER.
I had an argument with my own brother about the age of 49 a couple of years ago. My brother has been 49 for almost a dozen years now, both in his online profiles and with new guys he meets. It made me more and more anxious about approaching the age myself—not because I feared the number itself. I don’t give a rip. It’s because I had this vision of my age matching his, then surpassing him. Then I’d be the older brother. And that’s a crime against nature. I’m too foxy to be the older brother.
So I nagged. And I pleaded. Finally he changed his age to 99, which in online profile land is basically a big fuck you to anyone who wants to get a general idea of how old someone is.
But it’s still older than 49.
I’d like to proclaim up front that my age will continue to change from year to year. Next February I will be 50. In 2015, I will be 51. Just you wait and see. Check in with in a decade and I’ll be 59. Still foxy, and 59.
I don’t like to let a number dictate how I feel about myself, see. I spent way too much of my early life doing that. It started the week I lost my virginity at 12, in my earliest encounter getting cruised in a men’s room toilet. The guy next to me, after peering through a gloryhole and looking at my smooth and hairless body, passed me a note written on toilet paper and wrapped around a Bic pen that read, How old are you???
Right away, I lied. 14, I wrote back. Because in my naive mind, there was a vast world of experiential difference between a callow youth of 12 and a seasoned sexual professional of 14, and I didn’t want to seem like a young newbie.
God, was I dumb. Not that the guy cared. He had his dick in me less than thirty seconds later.
I was always lying about my age to men in my teens. I added on three, four, five years to make men comfortable about fucking me. In college, because I’d skipped a year of high school and entered early, I added on a couple of years so that my classmates didn’t think I was contemptibly young. I had a baby face in grad school, where I the only 20-year-old surrounded by students in their late twenties, thirties, and forties—so I told everyone I was 25. I added on years until I reached 30, when I decided I’d had enough about apologizing for something as silly as how old I was.
And yes, at 49 I’ve had my share of rejection based on my age. Or more accurately, I’ve run across the guys to whom I’m invisible because I’m not 25 (or wearing that Hollister T to pretend I am). I’ve seen plenty of profiles of guys who absolutely positively will never ever meet anyone over 45 ever! You know what? Screw that. It’s easy to see the scores of those profiles and feel slighted. I don’t intend to waste my time bemoaning them. It seems to me the men who are missing out are those who sit on the sidelines and simply don’t try, because they’re too sensitive to rejection.
In the end, I’d rather be rejected arbitrarily so that I know someone’s a close-minded asshole, than magically accepted because I gave out a fictional number as my age. And that’s, as Edith Ann used to say (see, I’m dating myself), the truth.
So in this Monday’s open forum, I’m curious. Who out there has lied about his or her age in order to land a guy? For what reasons? Are you fibbing about your age now? Are you going older or, more likely, younger? How young do you dare to go—that is, how many years is it safe to shave off in the service of preserving one’s youth? And is there life after 49? I’d love to hear from you guys.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Open Forum Friday: Selling It
After nearly three years of blogging about my sex life, I’ve developed a keen eye for the subjects that tend to be contentious. I know which topics are going to bring out the hateful comments and the howls of those who have a point to prove at someone else’s expense. I’ve learned the hard way which types of entries are going to elicit those little acid pools left by the dripping fangs of someone who only feels big when he’s anonymously venomous.
I almost wish I hadn’t figured it out. Because sometimes I’ll think about a topic, consider it for an entry, think about all the negative shit-storm that’ll follow, and just delete it from the list. And that’s no good, because it clearly causes me to write less.
But today I’m not so much here to write about the Negative Nancies and their desire to squelch anyone who thinks or lives differently from themselves, as I am to discuss a topic that inevitably raises their hackles. Because nothing brings out the irate and disparaging commenters as much as when I discuss the fact that sometimes I accept money for my sexual services.
It’s a taboo area of discussion or even contemplation for a lot of people. We have an cultivated knee-jerk reaction, as ‘nice people,’ automatically to assume a number of things about the people who get paid for sex. At best they think they’re hardened mercenaries who have no better way to earn money. They’re predators, out to make an easy buck. They can’t get a real job. They’re simply unfortunate. At the other end of the spectrum, they see sex workers as wicked, and evil. Diseased. Untouchables. They’re taught to think these things from an early age and taught so strictly not to deviate from a single way of thinking about people who are sex workers that it almost prevents any serious and critical thought about it. Hell, those in the sex trade aren’t even people to most folk. They become in many minds an awful, dreaded other, a subhuman species that’s disposable and forgettable and which should be ignored.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why my selling sex enrages and disgusts a small handful of (vocal) readers. It’s not like I’m telling them to fork over a twenty to read my sexual encounters. I don’t post on my profiles phrases like, LQQKing 4 generou$ men. I don’t hot men up and then suggest they make it worth my while with cold cash. In my youth and adulthood both, I never demanded cash for cock; I just accepted it when it was given me. I don’t claim to be an escort. (Hardly. Escorts are much better looking and have way better bodies than I.) I never suggest anyone pay me, I never demand it. I don’t have only an eye for the bottom line, and choose sex for cash over just good old-fashioned fucking.
To be totally honest, when my libido’s running on overdrive and my dick is hard and my pants barely holding onto my waist, exchanging sperm for cash is about the last thing on my mind.
Yet earlier this week, when I was contemplating my 2012 reported annual income for my tax returns, one thing that kind of leapt out at me was that when I compared the amount I made last year from pushing my artistic work to the amount I made from selling my body . . . well, it kind of made me half-wonder for a moment or two if I was in the wrong business.
If we look at the amount of income I’ve generated over the years from sex work, my life would look like a reverse bell curve. The graph would be high in my teens, start declining in my mid-twenties, bottom out to nothing during my thirties, and then swing back up to a new peak in my forties. It’s not something I think is an awesome accomplishment of my life. But I’m not ashamed of selling sex, either; I’ll talk about my experiences pretty openly. Mostly I just think it’s kind of a hoot that I’m racing up a half-century and still rake in pretty good bucks for my body.
Yet when some butthole of a reader decides to be snide and to write in a comment saying something like Aren’t you ashamed of having been a prostitute when you were a teen?, it makes me sigh, swat the irritation off my shoulders like a bull would a swarm of flies, and ask right back, Are you ashamed of having been a babysitter when you were younger? Because frankly, if one removes the stigma of the sexual component from the equation, the economic transactions are about the same. And there’s less puke to clean.
Though frankly I don’t know many people who would rather babysit brats for three or four hours when they could make four times the money in a fraction of the time getting a blow job. Nor do I know many people who made their first house downpayment with their babysitting or lawn-mowing money. Just sayin’.
As as bad as the misconceptions I think we have about sex workers, however, are those we have about those who buy it. I get those in my comments as well—the sneering implications that anyone who would pay for my time must be ancient, decrepit, blind, desperate, or some combination of the above. And probably leprous. People believe that anyone who would pay for sex must be unattractive, past his prime, and unable to get it any other way than preying on young victims. (Or me, if he’s really desperate.)
These people would be dead wrong.
Over the years I’ve found that men who offer to pay for sex fall into three broad types.
1. The Fetishists: These men get off on the little extra kick that the exchange of money lends to a sexual situation. Whether they’ve bought into the notion that adding a financial component to something they already consider sordid and dirty makes it doubly so, or whether they get off on the notion of being controlled through the wallet in the same way that some men like to be controlled with blindfolds, or restraints, or verbal domination, the exchange of money is vital to their enjoyment.
The cash slaves I’ve had fall into this category—that is the men who give me money to degrade and control them, whether or not we’ve actually met or not. So does the Latin boy I wrote about in my last entry, who empties his billfold into my pocket to prove how thoroughly I control him before I skull-fuck him and pound his little hole. So do the married men who fork over folded bills for my time and then breathlessly get off on a dick that other men have paid for.
2. The Justifiers: Some men, like the Landscaper, can only settle their consciences by rationalizing what they do in what is—let’s face it—a self-deluding way. They approach their sex not as a physical act, but as a financial transaction. To them, sex is best when it’s drained of all its implications of desire and need, and reduced to an entry in their Quicken ledger or the writing of a check. Everyone buys stuff. To these guys, paying a couple of hundred dollars to suck a dick is about as free of guilt and shame as a trip for groceries to Trader Joe’s. (In my opinion, the two are already equally shameless, but not everyone is as sexually liberal as I.)
3. The Businessmen: Some of these guys actually do have careers in business, but I use the phrase loosely. These are guys who feel their time is valuable; they’d rather pay someone to give them exactly what they want, than have to waste time hunting fruitlessly for it. They’re willing to pay a guy who has the look they want, or the dick size they want, or who can perform the specific act they crave. The money’s not a sticking point. Nor do they get off on paying a professional for his services any more than they might get off on hiring a guy to clean out the gutters on their houses in the autumn after the leaves have fallen. It’s simply a matter of expediency and guaranteed performance, for them. They get what they want, for a guaranteed period of time, with a minimum of fuss and complication.
I’d venture to say that the vast majority of men who’ve paid me for sex fall into this last category. The Texas department store magnate who forks over hundreds of dollars for three hours of my time in his hotel whenever he’s in the city is a handsome, virile, and surprisingly young man—but he’d rather have me come back time after time because I give him what he wants, and then some. The college professor in New Haven who could easily have just about any man he wanted, but who reads my blog and enjoys talking to me after the sex, pays me because I understand what makes him tick in bed and he’d rather not have to answer Craigslist ads for hours. The out-of-towners who contact me before their visits, pay ask me to reserve nights for them weeks in advance, pay me for the courtesy of arranging my calendar for them (and for the fucking).
Whatever it is, I have something all these men want. They consider it worth their money. So I pocket it, keep in mind the reasons they pay for sex, and attempt to exceed their expectations. They get what they need, and I have a little extra spending money for books and music and household expenses. Are they men unattractive? Lord, no. Not by a long shot. A handful of them are pictures of physical perfection. Are they old and senile? Most are mature enough to be earning a comfortable living, but some are young and barely scraping by, but need the thrill that saving up for a really good fuck can give them. Are they desperate?
Desperate for my dick, surely. But not desperate in the general sense of the word.
I know that many of my readers—probably more than most would suspect— have had experience with the sex trade. I’m curious to hear from those who have, in today’s open forum. If you’ve bought sex before, in what category would you consider yourself to be—or would you create a new category for yourself? If you’d sold it, how have you experiences compared to mine, with the types of men who pay for yourself?
I just ask that your comments be thoughtful and nonjudgmental. It’s not necessary automatically to preface your comments with a phrase like I’ve never paid for sex and never would, but. . . . I’ll probably delete comments like those. That kind of phrasing isn’t thoughtful. It’s just a way to to establish guiltlessness—which implies guilt for those who have paid, or received money, for sexual acts.
But insightful dialogue about money for sex? Bring it on, people. And enjoy your weekends.
I almost wish I hadn’t figured it out. Because sometimes I’ll think about a topic, consider it for an entry, think about all the negative shit-storm that’ll follow, and just delete it from the list. And that’s no good, because it clearly causes me to write less.
But today I’m not so much here to write about the Negative Nancies and their desire to squelch anyone who thinks or lives differently from themselves, as I am to discuss a topic that inevitably raises their hackles. Because nothing brings out the irate and disparaging commenters as much as when I discuss the fact that sometimes I accept money for my sexual services.
It’s a taboo area of discussion or even contemplation for a lot of people. We have an cultivated knee-jerk reaction, as ‘nice people,’ automatically to assume a number of things about the people who get paid for sex. At best they think they’re hardened mercenaries who have no better way to earn money. They’re predators, out to make an easy buck. They can’t get a real job. They’re simply unfortunate. At the other end of the spectrum, they see sex workers as wicked, and evil. Diseased. Untouchables. They’re taught to think these things from an early age and taught so strictly not to deviate from a single way of thinking about people who are sex workers that it almost prevents any serious and critical thought about it. Hell, those in the sex trade aren’t even people to most folk. They become in many minds an awful, dreaded other, a subhuman species that’s disposable and forgettable and which should be ignored.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why my selling sex enrages and disgusts a small handful of (vocal) readers. It’s not like I’m telling them to fork over a twenty to read my sexual encounters. I don’t post on my profiles phrases like, LQQKing 4 generou$ men. I don’t hot men up and then suggest they make it worth my while with cold cash. In my youth and adulthood both, I never demanded cash for cock; I just accepted it when it was given me. I don’t claim to be an escort. (Hardly. Escorts are much better looking and have way better bodies than I.) I never suggest anyone pay me, I never demand it. I don’t have only an eye for the bottom line, and choose sex for cash over just good old-fashioned fucking.
To be totally honest, when my libido’s running on overdrive and my dick is hard and my pants barely holding onto my waist, exchanging sperm for cash is about the last thing on my mind.
Yet earlier this week, when I was contemplating my 2012 reported annual income for my tax returns, one thing that kind of leapt out at me was that when I compared the amount I made last year from pushing my artistic work to the amount I made from selling my body . . . well, it kind of made me half-wonder for a moment or two if I was in the wrong business.
If we look at the amount of income I’ve generated over the years from sex work, my life would look like a reverse bell curve. The graph would be high in my teens, start declining in my mid-twenties, bottom out to nothing during my thirties, and then swing back up to a new peak in my forties. It’s not something I think is an awesome accomplishment of my life. But I’m not ashamed of selling sex, either; I’ll talk about my experiences pretty openly. Mostly I just think it’s kind of a hoot that I’m racing up a half-century and still rake in pretty good bucks for my body.
Yet when some butthole of a reader decides to be snide and to write in a comment saying something like Aren’t you ashamed of having been a prostitute when you were a teen?, it makes me sigh, swat the irritation off my shoulders like a bull would a swarm of flies, and ask right back, Are you ashamed of having been a babysitter when you were younger? Because frankly, if one removes the stigma of the sexual component from the equation, the economic transactions are about the same. And there’s less puke to clean.
Though frankly I don’t know many people who would rather babysit brats for three or four hours when they could make four times the money in a fraction of the time getting a blow job. Nor do I know many people who made their first house downpayment with their babysitting or lawn-mowing money. Just sayin’.
As as bad as the misconceptions I think we have about sex workers, however, are those we have about those who buy it. I get those in my comments as well—the sneering implications that anyone who would pay for my time must be ancient, decrepit, blind, desperate, or some combination of the above. And probably leprous. People believe that anyone who would pay for sex must be unattractive, past his prime, and unable to get it any other way than preying on young victims. (Or me, if he’s really desperate.)
These people would be dead wrong.
Over the years I’ve found that men who offer to pay for sex fall into three broad types.
1. The Fetishists: These men get off on the little extra kick that the exchange of money lends to a sexual situation. Whether they’ve bought into the notion that adding a financial component to something they already consider sordid and dirty makes it doubly so, or whether they get off on the notion of being controlled through the wallet in the same way that some men like to be controlled with blindfolds, or restraints, or verbal domination, the exchange of money is vital to their enjoyment.
The cash slaves I’ve had fall into this category—that is the men who give me money to degrade and control them, whether or not we’ve actually met or not. So does the Latin boy I wrote about in my last entry, who empties his billfold into my pocket to prove how thoroughly I control him before I skull-fuck him and pound his little hole. So do the married men who fork over folded bills for my time and then breathlessly get off on a dick that other men have paid for.
2. The Justifiers: Some men, like the Landscaper, can only settle their consciences by rationalizing what they do in what is—let’s face it—a self-deluding way. They approach their sex not as a physical act, but as a financial transaction. To them, sex is best when it’s drained of all its implications of desire and need, and reduced to an entry in their Quicken ledger or the writing of a check. Everyone buys stuff. To these guys, paying a couple of hundred dollars to suck a dick is about as free of guilt and shame as a trip for groceries to Trader Joe’s. (In my opinion, the two are already equally shameless, but not everyone is as sexually liberal as I.)
3. The Businessmen: Some of these guys actually do have careers in business, but I use the phrase loosely. These are guys who feel their time is valuable; they’d rather pay someone to give them exactly what they want, than have to waste time hunting fruitlessly for it. They’re willing to pay a guy who has the look they want, or the dick size they want, or who can perform the specific act they crave. The money’s not a sticking point. Nor do they get off on paying a professional for his services any more than they might get off on hiring a guy to clean out the gutters on their houses in the autumn after the leaves have fallen. It’s simply a matter of expediency and guaranteed performance, for them. They get what they want, for a guaranteed period of time, with a minimum of fuss and complication.
I’d venture to say that the vast majority of men who’ve paid me for sex fall into this last category. The Texas department store magnate who forks over hundreds of dollars for three hours of my time in his hotel whenever he’s in the city is a handsome, virile, and surprisingly young man—but he’d rather have me come back time after time because I give him what he wants, and then some. The college professor in New Haven who could easily have just about any man he wanted, but who reads my blog and enjoys talking to me after the sex, pays me because I understand what makes him tick in bed and he’d rather not have to answer Craigslist ads for hours. The out-of-towners who contact me before their visits, pay ask me to reserve nights for them weeks in advance, pay me for the courtesy of arranging my calendar for them (and for the fucking).
Whatever it is, I have something all these men want. They consider it worth their money. So I pocket it, keep in mind the reasons they pay for sex, and attempt to exceed their expectations. They get what they need, and I have a little extra spending money for books and music and household expenses. Are they men unattractive? Lord, no. Not by a long shot. A handful of them are pictures of physical perfection. Are they old and senile? Most are mature enough to be earning a comfortable living, but some are young and barely scraping by, but need the thrill that saving up for a really good fuck can give them. Are they desperate?
Desperate for my dick, surely. But not desperate in the general sense of the word.
I know that many of my readers—probably more than most would suspect— have had experience with the sex trade. I’m curious to hear from those who have, in today’s open forum. If you’ve bought sex before, in what category would you consider yourself to be—or would you create a new category for yourself? If you’d sold it, how have you experiences compared to mine, with the types of men who pay for yourself?
I just ask that your comments be thoughtful and nonjudgmental. It’s not necessary automatically to preface your comments with a phrase like I’ve never paid for sex and never would, but. . . . I’ll probably delete comments like those. That kind of phrasing isn’t thoughtful. It’s just a way to to establish guiltlessness—which implies guilt for those who have paid, or received money, for sexual acts.
But insightful dialogue about money for sex? Bring it on, people. And enjoy your weekends.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Friday Open Forum: Pussy Wars
When I was a very small kid, my parents sat me down and had a talk about my genitalia and its synonyms. Penis was the preferred term for what I had between my legs, I was gravely informed. Some people were going to call it a dick, which was vulgar—not that a little vulgarity ever stopped my parents, mind you. What they absolutely frowned upon, however, was the thought of me using infantile phrases like wee wee or pee pee to describe it. In the end, they told me, it didn’t really matter what I called it in conversation. (So long as it wasn’t pee pee.) They were all just words. Penis was merely the correct term.
I was maybe four at the time. This is the kind of dinner conversation with which I grew up.
Now, my parents were a little more flexible on the words they used to describe bodily functions. My father was strictly of the number one and number two school, while my mother was a firm believer in airy euphemisms like tinkle or whizz to describe peeing, or an earthy Anglo-Saxon shit for the other stuff. I think one of the reasons they stuck to those phrases, infantile though some of them might have been, was because one of my mom’s friends was a crunchy granola whole earth type who’d taught her little tykes to use the clinically-correct terms . . . which I found absolutely hilarious. It only took a few times of me mocking them by saying, in the accent of some little British cherub of a previous century, “Mummy! I have to urinate!” or (and this was the one I thought was especially hilarious) “Father! I must defecate!” before we all settled on pee and poop as the socially-acceptable phrases to use around the house.
I’ve never known an issue that causes such a wide divide, though, as what gay men call their holes. Their buttholes, that is. There are a few terms upon which we can all agree. Butt. Ass. Hole. Butthole. Asshole. But then we start to deviate. I’ve known a couple of guys who get a little put out when it’s called a shitter or a poop chute. They don’t like to be reminded that they defecate, apparently.
Even I am likely to get a little bit smirky when someone gets too clinical during sex, and uses a phrase like rectum. It makes me want to taunt him, in Masterpiece Theatre tones, with “Mummy! This chap wants me to insert my penis into his rectum! Mightn’t I please play with his anus?” (But I don’t.)
You know what two words create the biggest divide in the gay population, though? I bet you do. Cunt and pussy.
There’s no middle ground with these words, it seems. The men who object to them do so with a vigor that’s clamorous; the men who love them identify with them with a passion.
I think it’s quite curious how a man can be one of the biggest and most passionate pigs around—he can be dressed in stinking, sopping leather, covered with sweat and urine and semen, leaking the loads of a dozen men from both holes, smelling like a horse during harvest, uttering obscenities that would make Satan himself blush like a virgin. But growl something like, Yeah, boy, give me that mancunt, and he’ll turn into the prissiest, primmest, most disagreeable little old lady ever to wipe the tip of her white lace glove across the top of a hanging photograph to make sure it’s dusted. “I do not have a—a—a C-WORD!” he will sniff and intone, pretending he’s not sitting in a puddle of bodily fluids.
These guys post their lexicon limitations in their online profiles, admonishing you in advance never, ever to use one of those forbidden words in their presences. They scold. I’ve known them to stop the proceedings dead in their tracks to give a lecture about how they refuse to be feminized . . . after a half dozen men have pounded dick into them for a couple of hours. I used to know one guy who refused to see or speak to anyone who had the temerity to use the words pussy or cunt in his presence, and would block someone online and cut them dead in person if he dared.
On the other hand, the guys who are into it, are really, really into it. If they haven’t already made a profile online with a name like WarmSloppyCuntNYC or URPussyboi, they mention in their profiles how they need their cunts stretched and their pussies opened by monster dicks. Saying the words to them inflames their libidos; you can feel their holes become less rigid and more yielding. They want not necessarily to be feminized, but to be used. They want men to open them, to invade them, to put their holes to a purpose just like that uniquely female organ.
Me? I tend to be somewhere in the middle. If a guy’s really into being called a pussy or cunt, sure. I’ll call him that. I’ll call him that a lot. If a man dislikes it—I’m not likely to bring it into dirty talk anyway, without some obvious hints dropped. I’m unlikely to refer to my own hole as my man-pussy. On the other hand, I’ve got no issue with describing the afternoon I lost my virginity as being cunted.
Forty-five years after I learned about my penis, the point’s pretty much the same to me—they’re all just words.
How about you guys? Where do you stand in the lexicon battles that are the pussy wars? Speak up in today’s open forum and let everyone know!
I was maybe four at the time. This is the kind of dinner conversation with which I grew up.
Now, my parents were a little more flexible on the words they used to describe bodily functions. My father was strictly of the number one and number two school, while my mother was a firm believer in airy euphemisms like tinkle or whizz to describe peeing, or an earthy Anglo-Saxon shit for the other stuff. I think one of the reasons they stuck to those phrases, infantile though some of them might have been, was because one of my mom’s friends was a crunchy granola whole earth type who’d taught her little tykes to use the clinically-correct terms . . . which I found absolutely hilarious. It only took a few times of me mocking them by saying, in the accent of some little British cherub of a previous century, “Mummy! I have to urinate!” or (and this was the one I thought was especially hilarious) “Father! I must defecate!” before we all settled on pee and poop as the socially-acceptable phrases to use around the house.
I’ve never known an issue that causes such a wide divide, though, as what gay men call their holes. Their buttholes, that is. There are a few terms upon which we can all agree. Butt. Ass. Hole. Butthole. Asshole. But then we start to deviate. I’ve known a couple of guys who get a little put out when it’s called a shitter or a poop chute. They don’t like to be reminded that they defecate, apparently.
Even I am likely to get a little bit smirky when someone gets too clinical during sex, and uses a phrase like rectum. It makes me want to taunt him, in Masterpiece Theatre tones, with “Mummy! This chap wants me to insert my penis into his rectum! Mightn’t I please play with his anus?” (But I don’t.)
You know what two words create the biggest divide in the gay population, though? I bet you do. Cunt and pussy.
There’s no middle ground with these words, it seems. The men who object to them do so with a vigor that’s clamorous; the men who love them identify with them with a passion.
I think it’s quite curious how a man can be one of the biggest and most passionate pigs around—he can be dressed in stinking, sopping leather, covered with sweat and urine and semen, leaking the loads of a dozen men from both holes, smelling like a horse during harvest, uttering obscenities that would make Satan himself blush like a virgin. But growl something like, Yeah, boy, give me that mancunt, and he’ll turn into the prissiest, primmest, most disagreeable little old lady ever to wipe the tip of her white lace glove across the top of a hanging photograph to make sure it’s dusted. “I do not have a—a—a C-WORD!” he will sniff and intone, pretending he’s not sitting in a puddle of bodily fluids.
These guys post their lexicon limitations in their online profiles, admonishing you in advance never, ever to use one of those forbidden words in their presences. They scold. I’ve known them to stop the proceedings dead in their tracks to give a lecture about how they refuse to be feminized . . . after a half dozen men have pounded dick into them for a couple of hours. I used to know one guy who refused to see or speak to anyone who had the temerity to use the words pussy or cunt in his presence, and would block someone online and cut them dead in person if he dared.
On the other hand, the guys who are into it, are really, really into it. If they haven’t already made a profile online with a name like WarmSloppyCuntNYC or URPussyboi, they mention in their profiles how they need their cunts stretched and their pussies opened by monster dicks. Saying the words to them inflames their libidos; you can feel their holes become less rigid and more yielding. They want not necessarily to be feminized, but to be used. They want men to open them, to invade them, to put their holes to a purpose just like that uniquely female organ.
Me? I tend to be somewhere in the middle. If a guy’s really into being called a pussy or cunt, sure. I’ll call him that. I’ll call him that a lot. If a man dislikes it—I’m not likely to bring it into dirty talk anyway, without some obvious hints dropped. I’m unlikely to refer to my own hole as my man-pussy. On the other hand, I’ve got no issue with describing the afternoon I lost my virginity as being cunted.
Forty-five years after I learned about my penis, the point’s pretty much the same to me—they’re all just words.
How about you guys? Where do you stand in the lexicon battles that are the pussy wars? Speak up in today’s open forum and let everyone know!
Friday, August 10, 2012
Open Forum Friday: The Crush, Take Two
Apparently, when it comes to crushes, I have a type. And that type is big, pretty, and stupid.
Also, it doesn’t hurt if the guy’s a bartender—but perhaps (and I hate to generalize, here, because I know some clever people who work on the opposite side of a sprawling bar) bartending is one of the last refuges of hope for the pretty and stupid. But after the last couple of years, and after the last couple of serious schoolgirl crushes I’ve endured, I’ve come to realize this about myself: take some pretty guy with dark, floppy hair and big brown eyes who’s never finished high school, put him in a tank top, and stick him behind a counter and ask him to make drinks for me, and boom, every night the guy is slinging liquor, you’re sure to find me there gazing at him mutely, with my chin in my hands and little pulsating heart-shapes where my dilated pupils used to be.
I wrote about my last bartender crush while I was still living in Michigan—pretty Lenny, he of the the long brown hair and the big brown eyes and the lanky body. Lenny, king of the vacant expression. Lenny, whom I watched with longing from across the bar on so many nights, and who I was so certain harbored some vibrant inner light that kept his soul nourished—a yen to become a serious artist, or a journalistic photographer. Lenny, who, when I finally sat at the bar and attempted to strike up conversations, stood there clutching a giant Tupperware container of liquid to his chest and spooned it into his mouth. Then who, in the same dopey tone as the abominable snowman in the Bugs Bunny cartoon when he squeezed Bugs hard and said I will name him George and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him!, said through a mouthful of the stuff, “I like soup! Soup is good!”, forever ruining my vision of his secret artistic and sensitive nature. Because the only thing nourishing that boy was Campbell’s Chicken Noodle.
Sigh.
And now I have a crush on another bartender. Tommy, his name is. Tommy used to be an underwear model. He used to appear on the pages of Men’s Fitness. He’s got that classic combination of enormous brown eyes, sloppy longish hair, and muscles that makes my chest tighten and my heart go pitty-pat; when he slouches around the bar in his ratty jeans and a T-shirt, I stare at his biceps and long for the day when I find them holding me tight around my chest while he whispers the sexier sonnets of Shakespeare into my ears. When he wears a tight tank top and lifts it up to wipe his face and reveal his tanned abs, I’m reduced to a gibbering idiot who can only drool and say ‘Whuh?’ in response to any conversation directed my way.
But Tommy has, I’m not that surprised to have to relate, about the same mental acuity as a soggy baked potato. I kind of became aware of it the first time I asked him to make me one of the speciality drinks listed on the bar’s menu, and I watched him scrunch up his eyebrows and furrow his forehead as he peered at the ingredients and worked his lips as he silently sounded out the words. I haven’t had him tell me in a caveman manner that he likes soup, yet, but our conversations usually run a little something like:
This week I sat down at the bar and Tommy immediately asked how my week was going and what I’d done that day. I made some small talk. “Ask me how my day is going,” he said.
“How’s your day going?” I replied obediently.
“Fantastic,” he told me. “You know why? Because I’m an ideas man. I got all kinds of ideas just like, coming out of my brain! Because you know what the brain is, right? It’s spirits! And once you got those spirits in you, it’s like a genie in a bottle! You rub it, and rub it, and rub it—“ And here, to demonstrate what the word rub meant in case I wasn’t clear, he started moving his palms all over his chest, so that his tank top revealed his nipples and navel. I’d been carrying a copy of Next Magazine in my hands, but at the sight of what typically one has to pay a monthly subscription to see streamed live from LiveJockFratDorm.com, it slipped out of my hands and onto the floor, along with my jaw and my dignity. “Then you rub it right and make your wish and boom! It might not come right away but it comes on its own time and when it does it rushes all through you and outside of you and it feels like a goddamn orgasm, that’s what it feels like.”
Well. I basically stood there slack-jawed, having heard only one word of that entire speech (I’ll let you guess which one). He went to take someone's drink order; I stared and stammered until someone jostled me into a seat. Tommy came back over after a moment. “It’s like when I was a dancer,” he said earnestly to me. “There were dancers, and then there was me. I’d give ‘em a little of this—“ Here he held his hands on his abs and bit his lower lip and did some sexy little thrusting motions with his hips. “And a little of this—“ He put his hands behind his head, sneered, and ground his package at the freezer. “And I’d be thinkin’ outside the box with each and every client because I’m an ideas man, and that’s why they kept comin’ back to me instead of to those other dancers. Because I think outside the box!”
My throat was dry. I couldn’t speak. Somehow I got the impression that his dancing career had not been in the New York City Ballet. I was having ideas. Most of them were dirty. I noticed he was looking at me expectantly for some kind of reply. I tried to work my lips, but all I could do was look in those big brown eyes and at those bulging biceps and stutter out, “Um . . . huuuh . . . whuh?”
Which frankly makes I like soup! seem like a quip worthy of the Algonquin Round Table, in comparison.
So you know the kind of guy that makes me go moony, speechless, and head over heels. This is a Friday open forum, though. What about yours? Do you have a type for which you have a perpetual weakness—not so much as an object of sexual desire, but more for an unrequited schoolkid crush or a serious case of puppy love? Or have you had a thing for a dumb but pretty bartender, too? Let’s hear about it in the comments!
Also, it doesn’t hurt if the guy’s a bartender—but perhaps (and I hate to generalize, here, because I know some clever people who work on the opposite side of a sprawling bar) bartending is one of the last refuges of hope for the pretty and stupid. But after the last couple of years, and after the last couple of serious schoolgirl crushes I’ve endured, I’ve come to realize this about myself: take some pretty guy with dark, floppy hair and big brown eyes who’s never finished high school, put him in a tank top, and stick him behind a counter and ask him to make drinks for me, and boom, every night the guy is slinging liquor, you’re sure to find me there gazing at him mutely, with my chin in my hands and little pulsating heart-shapes where my dilated pupils used to be.
I wrote about my last bartender crush while I was still living in Michigan—pretty Lenny, he of the the long brown hair and the big brown eyes and the lanky body. Lenny, king of the vacant expression. Lenny, whom I watched with longing from across the bar on so many nights, and who I was so certain harbored some vibrant inner light that kept his soul nourished—a yen to become a serious artist, or a journalistic photographer. Lenny, who, when I finally sat at the bar and attempted to strike up conversations, stood there clutching a giant Tupperware container of liquid to his chest and spooned it into his mouth. Then who, in the same dopey tone as the abominable snowman in the Bugs Bunny cartoon when he squeezed Bugs hard and said I will name him George and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him!, said through a mouthful of the stuff, “I like soup! Soup is good!”, forever ruining my vision of his secret artistic and sensitive nature. Because the only thing nourishing that boy was Campbell’s Chicken Noodle.
Sigh.
And now I have a crush on another bartender. Tommy, his name is. Tommy used to be an underwear model. He used to appear on the pages of Men’s Fitness. He’s got that classic combination of enormous brown eyes, sloppy longish hair, and muscles that makes my chest tighten and my heart go pitty-pat; when he slouches around the bar in his ratty jeans and a T-shirt, I stare at his biceps and long for the day when I find them holding me tight around my chest while he whispers the sexier sonnets of Shakespeare into my ears. When he wears a tight tank top and lifts it up to wipe his face and reveal his tanned abs, I’m reduced to a gibbering idiot who can only drool and say ‘Whuh?’ in response to any conversation directed my way.
But Tommy has, I’m not that surprised to have to relate, about the same mental acuity as a soggy baked potato. I kind of became aware of it the first time I asked him to make me one of the speciality drinks listed on the bar’s menu, and I watched him scrunch up his eyebrows and furrow his forehead as he peered at the ingredients and worked his lips as he silently sounded out the words. I haven’t had him tell me in a caveman manner that he likes soup, yet, but our conversations usually run a little something like:
HIM: So I got an audition in the city tomorrow!It’s a good thing he’s so pretty.
ME: That’s fantastic. What’s it for?
HIM: It’s for a movie film.
ME: A movie . . . film?
HIM: Yeah! Like you know, in the movie film theaters. It’s for a Road Warrior movie film. I guess it's supposed to be like Mad Max?
ME: The Road Warrior was a Mad Max movie fil—I mean, movie..
HIM (confused): Nuh-uh?
ME: I’m pretty sure.
HIM: So they like that I got this longish hair so should I like, grease it down or leave it the way it is?
ME: Which is going to look more post-apocalyptic?
HIM (confused again): Apo—?
ME: Apocalyptic.
HIM: Apo—?
ME: Apoca. . .
HIM: Apoca. . .
ME: Lyptic.
HIM: Lyptic.
ME: Apocalyptic.
HIM: Apoppapoptic.
ME: Apocalyptic.
HIM: Apocaclyppic.
ME: Apoppapipp—which is going to look better for the movie film?!
This week I sat down at the bar and Tommy immediately asked how my week was going and what I’d done that day. I made some small talk. “Ask me how my day is going,” he said.
“How’s your day going?” I replied obediently.
“Fantastic,” he told me. “You know why? Because I’m an ideas man. I got all kinds of ideas just like, coming out of my brain! Because you know what the brain is, right? It’s spirits! And once you got those spirits in you, it’s like a genie in a bottle! You rub it, and rub it, and rub it—“ And here, to demonstrate what the word rub meant in case I wasn’t clear, he started moving his palms all over his chest, so that his tank top revealed his nipples and navel. I’d been carrying a copy of Next Magazine in my hands, but at the sight of what typically one has to pay a monthly subscription to see streamed live from LiveJockFratDorm.com, it slipped out of my hands and onto the floor, along with my jaw and my dignity. “Then you rub it right and make your wish and boom! It might not come right away but it comes on its own time and when it does it rushes all through you and outside of you and it feels like a goddamn orgasm, that’s what it feels like.”
Well. I basically stood there slack-jawed, having heard only one word of that entire speech (I’ll let you guess which one). He went to take someone's drink order; I stared and stammered until someone jostled me into a seat. Tommy came back over after a moment. “It’s like when I was a dancer,” he said earnestly to me. “There were dancers, and then there was me. I’d give ‘em a little of this—“ Here he held his hands on his abs and bit his lower lip and did some sexy little thrusting motions with his hips. “And a little of this—“ He put his hands behind his head, sneered, and ground his package at the freezer. “And I’d be thinkin’ outside the box with each and every client because I’m an ideas man, and that’s why they kept comin’ back to me instead of to those other dancers. Because I think outside the box!”
My throat was dry. I couldn’t speak. Somehow I got the impression that his dancing career had not been in the New York City Ballet. I was having ideas. Most of them were dirty. I noticed he was looking at me expectantly for some kind of reply. I tried to work my lips, but all I could do was look in those big brown eyes and at those bulging biceps and stutter out, “Um . . . huuuh . . . whuh?”
Which frankly makes I like soup! seem like a quip worthy of the Algonquin Round Table, in comparison.
So you know the kind of guy that makes me go moony, speechless, and head over heels. This is a Friday open forum, though. What about yours? Do you have a type for which you have a perpetual weakness—not so much as an object of sexual desire, but more for an unrequited schoolkid crush or a serious case of puppy love? Or have you had a thing for a dumb but pretty bartender, too? Let’s hear about it in the comments!
Friday, July 13, 2012
Open Forum Friday: I Hate 69
I’m just going to throw it out there in a way I haven’t, before: I don’t like to 69.
Whew. That was liberating. Let me say it again: I don’t like to 69.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not repulsed by the idea of mutual simultaneous oral sex. If I’m in the heat of the moment and a guy whisper’s in my ear, Let’s 69, baby, I’m not going to wrinkle my nose, scoot myself away from him in repulsion and declare, “Icky-poo!” If I’m sucking on a guy and all of a sudden he makes a dive for my junk, I’m not going to inform him in a chilly voice to get the hell out and never return again.
The act of 69ing is fun enough, I suppose. It doesn’t make me lose my hard-on. It’s not repulsive in itself—certainly not like a guy squirting his leftover enema juice in my face, or someone asking me to drive finishing nails through his scrotum. (Both of which have happened to me, by the way.) In fact, on the list of Things I’m Officially Not Into, it probably ranks as one of the more arousing and enjoyable activities. But the simple fact is, I’d rather do just about anything else but.
Sometimes it seems that when I look back on all the guys who’ve hit on me during a one or two-week period, I can sense a statistically-skewed distribution of some sort. A trend, if you will. A couple of years ago I hit on a streak of guys who came to me with pre-lubed holes, which is something I haven’t encountered since; week before last I had several guys tell me something I hadn’t heard before, which was slight variations on, “You’ve aged really well.” (Thanks a bunch, fuckers.) I’ve had weeks of flakes, and weeks of slutty bottoms who want multiple cocks.
This last week was the week of the 69. I logged onto Manhunt a couple of times and I’d come back to find my inbox had accumulated a couple of letters with the subject line 69??, but no body. A reader sent me a lot of photos he’d collected from somebody’s Tumblr of guys going at it in a 69 position, and emailed them to me with all-cap message, THIS IS WHAT I WANT US TO DO. Guys kept mentioning it in their come-ons in a way they haven’t in a very long time. It was as if Oprah had featured 69ing in her book club or something, and suddenly everyone was hot to try it. (Is there a lot of 69 in Fifty Shades of Grey? Is that what’s going on?)
As I said, I like oral sex. I enjoy receiving it. I enjoy giving it. There have been times in the past, when I was much younger, that a guy would be sucking on my dick and I would feel guilty simply laying there and enjoying it. It’s tough for me sometimes simply to enjoy something without giving back. So if the guy’s meat was within sucking distance, I’d reluctantly suck on it too, mostly out of guilt. I’d rather have been sucking on it while he lay back and relaxed and enjoyed, not while he was working on me.
My experience of oral sex is entirely pleasurable until the moment comes when I take another man’s dick into my mouth. At that point, it’s almost too much sensation for me. Where before his tongue running over my cock head would make me gasp and groan and arch my back and wish for more, if I am having to divide my attentions between my own dick and his, suddenly that tongue simply feels like sandpaper—unpleasant and even painful. What’s a delightful slippery sensation when I’m sliding in and out of a mouth solo, suddenly becomes awkward and grating on my dick when 69ing.
It’s almost as if the pleasure centers in my mouth when I’m giving head switch off the receptive pleasure centers of my dick when I’m receiving it—except that if a third party is sucking me while I’m eating dick, I’m totally in hog heaven. I don’t know what the difference can be, unless it has something to do with the upside-down positioning required in a mutual 69.
I’ve done quite well managing to talk my way out of 69ing through most of my life, since I’ve pretty much always felt this way. Yet I feel slightly guilty when I encounter men for whom the position is a main course, who think that more than anything else it represents deep-down wallowin’ pig sex. Two dudes chompin’ on each other’s hogs. Yeah man! That’s the stuff! When I’m with one of those fellows I feel as if I missed the boat somehow.
I’m throwing this out to my readers to find out what they have to say about the matter. Is 69ing overrated? Am I doing it wrong—or is there something I should be doing to make it better? (And if so, do you want to help me practice?) Or is there a relatively mild act of which you’re not fond, yourself, and feel mildly embarrassed about admitting? Let’s talk it over in today’s open forum.
Whew. That was liberating. Let me say it again: I don’t like to 69.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not repulsed by the idea of mutual simultaneous oral sex. If I’m in the heat of the moment and a guy whisper’s in my ear, Let’s 69, baby, I’m not going to wrinkle my nose, scoot myself away from him in repulsion and declare, “Icky-poo!” If I’m sucking on a guy and all of a sudden he makes a dive for my junk, I’m not going to inform him in a chilly voice to get the hell out and never return again.
The act of 69ing is fun enough, I suppose. It doesn’t make me lose my hard-on. It’s not repulsive in itself—certainly not like a guy squirting his leftover enema juice in my face, or someone asking me to drive finishing nails through his scrotum. (Both of which have happened to me, by the way.) In fact, on the list of Things I’m Officially Not Into, it probably ranks as one of the more arousing and enjoyable activities. But the simple fact is, I’d rather do just about anything else but.
Sometimes it seems that when I look back on all the guys who’ve hit on me during a one or two-week period, I can sense a statistically-skewed distribution of some sort. A trend, if you will. A couple of years ago I hit on a streak of guys who came to me with pre-lubed holes, which is something I haven’t encountered since; week before last I had several guys tell me something I hadn’t heard before, which was slight variations on, “You’ve aged really well.” (Thanks a bunch, fuckers.) I’ve had weeks of flakes, and weeks of slutty bottoms who want multiple cocks.
This last week was the week of the 69. I logged onto Manhunt a couple of times and I’d come back to find my inbox had accumulated a couple of letters with the subject line 69??, but no body. A reader sent me a lot of photos he’d collected from somebody’s Tumblr of guys going at it in a 69 position, and emailed them to me with all-cap message, THIS IS WHAT I WANT US TO DO. Guys kept mentioning it in their come-ons in a way they haven’t in a very long time. It was as if Oprah had featured 69ing in her book club or something, and suddenly everyone was hot to try it. (Is there a lot of 69 in Fifty Shades of Grey? Is that what’s going on?)
As I said, I like oral sex. I enjoy receiving it. I enjoy giving it. There have been times in the past, when I was much younger, that a guy would be sucking on my dick and I would feel guilty simply laying there and enjoying it. It’s tough for me sometimes simply to enjoy something without giving back. So if the guy’s meat was within sucking distance, I’d reluctantly suck on it too, mostly out of guilt. I’d rather have been sucking on it while he lay back and relaxed and enjoyed, not while he was working on me.
My experience of oral sex is entirely pleasurable until the moment comes when I take another man’s dick into my mouth. At that point, it’s almost too much sensation for me. Where before his tongue running over my cock head would make me gasp and groan and arch my back and wish for more, if I am having to divide my attentions between my own dick and his, suddenly that tongue simply feels like sandpaper—unpleasant and even painful. What’s a delightful slippery sensation when I’m sliding in and out of a mouth solo, suddenly becomes awkward and grating on my dick when 69ing.
It’s almost as if the pleasure centers in my mouth when I’m giving head switch off the receptive pleasure centers of my dick when I’m receiving it—except that if a third party is sucking me while I’m eating dick, I’m totally in hog heaven. I don’t know what the difference can be, unless it has something to do with the upside-down positioning required in a mutual 69.
I’ve done quite well managing to talk my way out of 69ing through most of my life, since I’ve pretty much always felt this way. Yet I feel slightly guilty when I encounter men for whom the position is a main course, who think that more than anything else it represents deep-down wallowin’ pig sex. Two dudes chompin’ on each other’s hogs. Yeah man! That’s the stuff! When I’m with one of those fellows I feel as if I missed the boat somehow.
I’m throwing this out to my readers to find out what they have to say about the matter. Is 69ing overrated? Am I doing it wrong—or is there something I should be doing to make it better? (And if so, do you want to help me practice?) Or is there a relatively mild act of which you’re not fond, yourself, and feel mildly embarrassed about admitting? Let’s talk it over in today’s open forum.
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