Seconds of Yes

One of the ironies of COVID is that our extended isolated downtime has forced me to confront the traumas of a pandemic that came before.

In 1981, the New York Times published an article with the headline of “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”  I was a young, sexually-active man of seventeen who, a month before, had graduated from high school. The previous autumn, I’d engaged in one of the grander deceptions of my adolescence: dead set on escaping the suffocating South and finding other men like myself, I’d defied my parents and secretly applied to a university in Manhattan. I’d sent for the application materials on the sly, paid the fee from my own sex work savings, copied numbers from another financial aid application, and (in the biggest betrayal of all) forged my parents’ signatures. I was determined to be a resident of New York City in the nineteen-eighties.

The university accepted me and extended a scholarship, but I ended up declining. My mother had burned out, physically and emotionally, trying to get Carter re-elected in 1980; she seemed so fragile in the following months that though I yearned for life in the big city, I chose a college close to home. My betrayals might break her completely, I feared. I mourned the loss of the metropolitan existence torn away from me, though. All that summer and during my undergrad years, I pored over the pages of the Times and the Voice, trying to imagine what my alternate-universe self attending school in the Village might be up to—what clubs he’d be exploring, what seedy little shows he’d be seeing, what personal ads he’d be answering.

I read that first article in the Times with unease. In a cubicle in my college library, I searched through the New York newspapers to find any follow-up. I obsessed over any articles about what was for months called GRID, and then AIDS. Early on, I recognized that if I’d stubbornly followed my whims, I would have landed in an epicenter of this mysterious disease.

But I didn’t live in a big city like New York or San Francisco, so I convinced myself that whatever the new syndrome was, it would pass me by.

During college, I majored in magical thinking. I conjured reasons I’d weather what was shaping up to be a serious storm. I was safe because I’d never sniffed poppers, which for a very long time was suspected to be a cause. I was in a very small college town; the disease would never reach as far as its dirt roads and sidewalks of brick. The men fucking me were either professorial sorts, whom I could of course count on to recognize the signs of disease before they allowed it into their beds, or rednecks who never ventured into the big cities where a virus was on the rampage.

I imagined myself immune because I was good at heart, or too young to catch anything, or too important for the world to lose, or simply because I willed it so. When people I knew in college began dying immediately after graduation, those fictitious protections dissolved like tissue in a thunderstorm. Men died I’d known in my home town parks, from the days and nights I’d cruise there. I saw my old mentors emaciated and covered in sores. A colleague of my father's, known to be a confirmed bachelor, suddenly developed cancers that my parents discussed in hushed whispers. Mornings, I’d read the obituaries for names I might know, like an elderly person might. My college classmates attended each other’s weddings; I only entered churches for memorials.

Death surrounded me. Even when I left my native state for an unknown new home, I couldn’t escape its reach. I witnessed my best friend, a wide-eyed boy my own age, wither over the course of mere weeks; as dementia ossified his brain, I would hold him in my arms to calm his distress when he couldn’t remember where or who he was. I felt his skin, hot and fevered, against my own, while he wept at the unfairness of it all. Close to the end, his family took him away to die. I never saw him again.

And how did I react to this decade and a half of horrors? Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Then I’d circle back to denial again, never managing to achieve acceptance. Day after day, loss after loss, I’d reassure myself that I was still alive, that I was okay. Never once did I acknowledge that survival alone was insufficient. I put out of my mind the cost of longevity. I concentrated on anything else instead.

I’ve kept journals since my teens, but I suspect any future historian looking through them would be puzzled how the word AIDS never appears in their pages. They’d find plenty of memories of good times with friends, but nothing of the hospital visits, nor of the funerals, nor of the consolation I might try to take in another survivor's arms. I aspired to be a writer, but never could I put pen to pad and confront the disease ravaging everything and everyone I knew. Writing about it, accepting it, would make it too real.

I was sinking fast, those years. Yet I refused to admit how deep were the waters I tried to tread, or how overpowering their current.

The current pandemic has really done a number on the creative writing classes I teach. For a while, they were only on Zoom, which I disliked. Admittedly, I didn’t have to get dressed up for Zoom classes, nor did I have to commute. The students were amused whenever one of my cats would climb up onto the desk and stare into my laptop’s camera for minutes at a time, so that it appeared she was talking instead of me. But I hated the electronic lag; the virtual classroom felt impersonal in the most personal of seminars. 

Last autumn, I was at last allowed to teach in person again. Because of the school’s precautions, however, we were masked up and spaced around the perimeter of the room, and a custodian hovered outside to evict us the moment the class was supposed to be officially over, so he could spray down the place with disinfectants.

This semester, Omicron hit at an inopportune time in the enrollment window, causing most prospective students to look at the spring catalog, shake their heads, and stay at home. I’ve never had such a low enrollment. But the class is relaxed; we’re at a point in the pandemic in which we aren’t as freaked out, hearing someone cough down the hall. Each week, I ask my students to bring in whatever they’ve been working on. They read aloud, I listen, and we we all provide our feedback. When there are a quorum of writers present, the system works. With low enrollment, even one absence can put me in a tough position in which I need to fill time in a constructive way.

So I’ve stockpiled some essays of my own. For the last year I’ve been working on my own book-length project, and I’ve been mining it for short sections to share. This last week, however, it occurred to me I’ve been sitting on god knows how much old material of mine from my twenties, when I was about the same age as many of these kids. Why not pass some of those, and let the students have at them?

I’ve always archived and backed up all my writing projects through the years. I’ve a folder on my hard drive dedicated to any fiction I might have worked on before 1995 or so—at least, from the years when I stored all my labors on floppy discs. It’s a jumble of miscellaneous files and subfolders all (thanks to the vagaries of various operating systems and having copied them from floppies) without any dates to identify when I might have worked on them. Some I can remember. The murder mystery that was supposed to be my first big breakthrough: I remember working on it in the summer of 1988, when I was teaching an undergraduate course in Shakespeare and needed a frivolous project to fill out the long hot Detroit afternoons. The post-apocalyptic science fiction novel I abandoned after a hundred pages, I remember writing in 1989 while I considered giving up academe altogether.

Still searching for something I might take in for my students, this last week, I browsed through the files. Some I remembered vividly; others I didn’t recognize at all. The more I read, though, the more I realized that all of them, in some way or another, were about the terrible times I was living through. They all were about death, and disease, and loss.

My murder mystery, which an amateur detective who worked in a funeral home, and who lived my experiences of feeling beaten down from having to attend countless memorial services—all identical in their basics, each populated with families hostile to outsiders. My SF novel, in which the protagonist wanders alone among familiar, now-empty streets, missing the people who once lived there. A play I wrote, in which a longterm same-sex couple, both deceased, are helpless to prevent young, straight newlyweds from moving into their former home. Another play in which a wealthy family watches without emotion as an apocalypse descends upon the town beyond their closed gates. A short story in which the protagonist fashions charms to ward off a deadly plague threatening his village. Another science fiction draft in which two sleight-of-hand artists are stranded on a planet suffering from a disfiguring ailment. A strange thriller in which a woman refuses to allow her lover to touch her, for fear he harbors a terrible secret.

They all were about AIDS. Everything I wrote for fifteen years, every novel draft, every short story, was about the pandemic roaring its way unchecked through my population. I don’t think I ever was fully conscious of what I was doing. It’s so obvious, though, reading everything from the vantage of decades later.

As I sat there last week, reading through these old files created with software that hasn’t existed since before Clinton was President, I really wanted to reach back through the decades and give my poor young self a hug. Years later, that kid is still trying to unpack the trauma and guilt of surviving. Even at this remove, it’s still tough for him to admit how much and how many he lost.

One of my folders, labeled simply, From Davy’s Chair, is a collection of short stories. I don’t remember composing them, but I’m guessing by the fact they were saved in MacWrite format that they were from the late 1980s. The titular Davy is a barber; each story is a monologue from a client who speaks while Davy works in silence. 

There’s a rowdy story from one customer about meeting his current husband at a gay bar; another is the stream of consciousness of a drag queen about finding someone to look beyond the wigs and makeup at the man beneath. There’s a story I actually kind of love about a man who, in trying to escape the romantic interest of female coworker, makes up elaborate stories about an imaginary boyfriend to keep her off his back. When she loses interest, he continues fabricating the stories because he’s lonely, and can’t stop.

Then there was a final story told in Davy’s Chair, probably the closest I ever came to directly addressing the disease stealing the people in my life: Seconds of Yes. Is it good? Well. I was young when I wrote it. Reading such an old draft triggers the editor and critic in me. I see hundreds of ways it could be improved. The teacher in me want to fix it, just as I want to help my own writers make their own work better. But I’m going to reproduce it below with all its flaws intact.

Imperfect as it is, the story reminds me of a boy so intent upon surviving that, as the tide pulled him down, he didn’t realize his frantic prose gestures weren’t waving, but drowning.

Seconds of Yes

I don't lay out. The idea's always turned me off. When I see people slathered in grease, half naked in the sun, it reminds me of bacon. I don't like thinking of myself as sizzling pork product, you know? But yes, I've been getting more sun lately. I need to get out of the condo, sometimes. Thanks for noticing, Davy. Just the usual, this time—I’m getting a little shaggy.

Did I tell you about my new hobby? You'll never guess. No, it's not basket weaving. Think bigger. I'm talking danger, adrenaline. I'm talking excitement. I'm talking about raw energy coursing through your body, your heart in your mouth. I'm talking bungee jumping.

Emerald City's been having it on weekends, the sports bar? Fridays and Saturdays—usually I go both nights. They've got that large parking lot, you know. The manager's hired a crane for the summer, set up bleachers around the edges, added more tables to the patio. The crowds are amazing—boys from all over the city come just to see people jump. You'd be surprised. It's like a roller coaster, but without the track, without the train, without the safety restraints. Not very much like a roller coaster at all, maybe.

The first time I did it I was trashed, I admit. I don't even remember the trip up. One minute I was drinking at a table with some of the guys—I don't even remember who, that's how bad off I was—and then I came to with a terrible crack in my neck. There I was, swinging upside down, feeling stretched like Silly Putty, with my wallet twenty-five bucks lighter. And everyone was cheering and clapping like crazy.

I didn't mind the attention, of course, but after I pushed through the crowd, I stumbled away from the parking lot thinking, never again. Too risky, too dangerous. Not worth killing yourself over. I've seen those videos on TV—some poor kid concussing herself on the bottom of the jump platform, or worse, the broken bungee.  I don't need this crap, I thought. But at home that night, I conked out right away. Then I woke up the next morning feeling, well, happy for the first time in a while. I have trouble sleeping these days, you see. Most nights I lie awake, listening to Bernard's breathing. I have to be ready to rouse him if he slips into a nightmare, ready to towel him down if he needs it.

How is he? Oh, Bernard's fine. He's fine. Yeah, really. I’ll tell him you asked.

Let me tell you about bungee jumping.

The first part's all anticipation. Getting on the rig and helmet, waiting for your turn, the ride up. All the while, you're taking deep breaths and steeling your nerves. Yeah, even when it’s not your first time. You’re preparing yourself for one moment, that swift passage between safety and uncertainty, between sane and loony tunes. The transition from the no screaming in your skull to everlasting seconds of yes.

At the top, the wind whips by. Sometimes it's hard to hear. At the top, the people you know vanish. If you looked for them—which you don't because you're concentrating and focusing on the moment—they'd be only featureless faces, lost among the other bodies on the bleachers. Everybody disappears, Davy. You don't think they would, but they do. At the top, you forget everything except the ground below, and your distance from it.

No, Bernard doesn't come to watch me jump. He won't leave the condo often, these days. He knows where I go and he knows what I do, but he doesn't say anything. Sometimes it surprises me how different we are. Most of our friends can't believe we've lasted for nine years. At first it was the superficial differences I noticed—the tomayto-tomahto kind of thing. I'd say vomit, he'd say puke. I'd say ejaculate, he'd say jizz. I'd say masturbate, he'd laugh and say jack off. It took me the longest time to say the word…well, the f-word…when we would…you know.

It used to be Bernard who took risks. Sky diving. Hang gliding. He would always urge me to go hiking with him in the desert or camping in the mountains. Once he took made vacation reservations for the both of us at a dude ranch. You heard me. A dude ranch. Can you believe it? It's just like you probably picture—a bunch of men in worn jeans and chaps walking around wearing ten-gallon hats. And Bernard? He was out learning to rope steer, trying to buck broncos. Don't give me that look, Davy. Real broncos. It was dangerous. He could’ve been thrown or trampled. His rear end was red for a solid two weeks after, but everywhere else he glowed with tan. Me, I was still lily-white all over.

Now Bernard stays at home and twice a week I'm throwing myself off a high platform into nothingness, with a stretchy cord the only thing keeping me from cracking my head against the asphalt. Funny, isn't it? And Bernard doesn't worry, like I used to worry about his adventures. Like I worry about him now, nights, when I lie awake to make sure he’s breathing. Sometimes I rest my ear against his ribcage, to listen for fluid in his lungs.

Bernard has a lot going on. He doesn't need to waste worry on me.

At the bottom, after the earth rushes to kiss you and time stops, after you've forgotten everything in that time it takes to fall, you swing in a gentle arc. Back and forth, over the crowd, over the yellow lines of the parking lot, over the patio where nervous diners watch. The world comes back, bit by bit—it starts with your muscles aching, where the harness pinches. You pick out your friends, waving in the bleachers. Then your memories return, along with your problems and fears. For a few moments you're trapped there, swinging, dangling like a side of beef in a butcher's shop. That’s when you realize nothing has changed. Not really. But there's always the next Friday night, so you let the anticipation build again.

Oh, that looks great. Thank you. And thanks for asking about Bernard. I'll tell him you said hello. Wait...I’ve got your tip right here. See you in three weeks? Some night, come over to the Emerald City and watch me jump, okay? Maybe you'll try for yourself—it's an experience you don't regret.

The Cream Puff

When I was very, very young, my father’s sister was the coolest of cool aunts. Straight out of art school, Aunt Jane affected a bohemian lifestyle, choosing to live in a run-down studio apartment in one of Baltimore’s dicier neighborhoods. She’d always wanted to be a painter; she’d lavish layer upon layer of oils upon her outsized canvases to achieve abstract results, usually in different shades of a single hue. One of her gloomier works, a study in browns that resembled a lake in a cavern, or perhaps the cross-cutting of a tree trunk, has covered one full wall of my father’s bedroom for decades now. She exhibited at no-name downtown shows where hungry artists made a dinner from the cheese plate served on opening night; she wore cat’s-eye glasses before they were popular.

I loved going to her apartment, when we would visit Baltimore. She would bring out a bottle of red chianti in a straw-covered bottle to share with my parents, though she’d drink most of it herself. We’d sit around a coffee table on her super-modern and super-uncomfortable butterfly canvas sling chairs, and dip bread cubes into her fondue dish. My parents were very young themselves, and preferred Jane’s unconventional flat to the antiques and rigid deportment required at my Maryland grandmother’s house. Visiting Jane was a breath of fresh air.

Then she met and married a man named Bert, and that was the end of that.

Bert was already divorced when she met him, and a decade older. Jane’s ambition was to paint; Bert thought all art was crapola. Both my father and my sister might have rejected the country club society in which they grew up, but their manners were pure Baltimore Blue Book. Bert installed shelving for a living and was proud of his calluses and perpetually dirty nails. He swore like a sailor, scratched himself at the dinner table, and made it very clear he wasn’t interested in any conversations that weren’t about sports.

I don’t know what Jane saw in him. Perhaps he was an act of rebellion. Perhaps opposites really do attract. Either way, they married quickly. My grandmother moved out of my father’s childhood home into a smaller apartment, and sold the property and its contents to my aunt. She and Bert moved into my grandmother’s house, surrounded by my grandmother’s furniture, her photos, her books. She slept in my grandmother’s bed, cooked in her kitchen. A metamorphosis took place. Very quickly, my aunt Jane transformed into a younger version of my grandmother: easily irritated, narrow-minded, constantly disapproving. She tucked away her paints and canvases behind a wall in the basement, never to touch them again. She became the kind of person who cared about what the neighbors thought. Jane was no longer cool.

A lot of her change of outlook had to do with Bert. He mocked anyone with a degree higher than high school—especially my parents, with their multiple graduate diplomas and professor titles. Effete intellectuals weren’t real men. Real men worked with their hands. A real woman didn’t teach, either; she stayed home, like Jane. My mother’s activism enraged him. The two butted heads with vicious abandon at every family gathering, especially when she would talk about her pet projects—voter registration, equal housing opportunities, birth control. Bert was a lazy conservative who couldn’t muster any better arguments than Archie Bunker with his vague talk about welfare queens and the minorities trying to get handouts instead of working hard, and my mother delighted in shooting down each and every of his protests with actual facts and figures. It didn’t matter; she was a woman, and he could holler louder, so he stomped away from every argument fuming, but convinced he’d shown the Southern broad what’s what.

My father didn’t like his brother-in-law much, either. Not only would Bert insult my mom, but he’d would take every opportunity to remind my dad that his house was bigger, his neighborhood was better, and that he relied on his hands instead of his namby-pamby education to make his way in life. (That the house and neighborhood was my grandmother’s, and not anything he’d achieved himself, didn’t seem to matter.) When we’d arrive as a family for a visit, Bert would mince toward my dad with loose wrists and imitate comedian Alan Sues’ tag line—Laugh-In had been popular just a couple of years before—“It’s Uncle Al, the kiddies’ pal.” Though my dad ignored the barbs, but I could tell they’d make him bristle. I didn’t exactly understand the inference…but I could tell from my father’s reaction it must be unwholesome.

I got the worst of it. Bert constantly needled me, from the second grade up, weighing my every word and action against some imaginary standard of stalwart boyhood that I could never attain. I was a quiet kid. Not a sissy—I wasn’t especially effeminate, nor did I play with dolls. Even in the late nineteen-sixties or early seventies my parents were progressive enough that they wouldn’t have cared if I’d been girly. Other kids, though policed the genders with such fascistic zest that I’d learned never to cross those lines.

My interests didn’t lie with the boisterous pursuits of many boys, though. I preferred to read, to get my schoolwork done. I wrote stories and poetry. “You gotta get his nose out of the books,” Bert would bark at my parents, when I’d visit Maryland and spend the trip in the attic bedroom reading. “Christ, he’s gonna end up a pansy.” There was no piano at my grandmother’s old house, but when at my mom’s command I’d play during their visits to us, Bert would spend the entire performance tapping his foot with impatience, or sighing. When my piece was finally over, he’d skip the applause and bolt, disgusted that my parents would pay good money for lessons. For a boy.

In fourth grade, I started independently making cookies and breads and meals for the family, finding recipes and trying them out (with my mother’s glad approval, since it was less work she had to do). I was once pressed into service to make dessert during one of Jane and Bert’s visits. I spent a couple of hours baking one of my dad’s favorite desserts—puff pastry from scratch, filled with an eggy homemade vanilla custard, drizzled with chocolate sauce (Hershey’s…I was only 10). When I approached the table, thinking everyone would love the delicious pastries I’d labored over, Bert rolled his eyes and tossed down his napkin. “Cream puffs?” he said. “C’mon. Cream puffs from the cream puff? This shit writes itself.”

My aunt, who rarely attempted to leaven any of Bert’s insults, this time put a hand on his arm. “Just eat your dessert.”

“All I know is my kids are never gonna grow up to make cream puffs like some kind of faggot.”

My father froze. My mother pushed back her chair, folded her napkin, and all the while staring at Bert, remove the plate of pasty from my hands and suggested I take my serving to my room. I gladly obeyed, closing my door as tightly as possible and turning on the radio, so that I wouldn’t have to hear the fireworks below.

I knew by then what faggot meant.

All through my childhood and adolescence Bert needled me. Not all his aggressions were so overt: most were subtle. He took my father and I fishing on his boat, but ‘accidentally’ left the bag of books I’d brought on the dock. He’d plan outings to football games, knowing I found them excruciating. He’d parse every word I spoke in the hope of finding something to mock. It got to a point after puberty that it seemed easier to remain silent for days on end, whenever our families visited. Even if I was quiet, though, Bert would interrogate my parents. How could they raise such a sulky boy? Or was I, with that long hair of mine, a sulky girl?

Every time we’d drive up to Baltimore, or Jane’s family would drive down to Richmond, I would have to dig deep and endure, knowing I was in for day after day of non-stop taunts. We all know how adaptable humans are: we learn to diminish unpleasant stimuli we can’t avoid. Bert was the most unpleasant stimulus on that side of the family. Though we couldn’t ignore his bullying, we marked it privately, rolled our eyes at it in public, and pretended as best we could that it wasn’t happening.

Because Bert was wrong about nearly everything. He was wrong about race. He was wrong about social services—or at least hopelessly Neanderthal. He was wrong about music, wrong about art. He was wrong to convince Jane never to paint again, when it had been something she’d wanted to do for a lifetime before him. He was wrong about treating service workers like shit. He was wrong to be a complete and relentless asshole to a little kid. When someone is incontrovertibly, absolutely, astonishingly wrong about everything, he’s easier to dismiss, right?

Of course, no one save myself realized Bert was right about one thing. I was a faggot. A pansy, a cream puff. I had to come to terms with my sexuality during the rough tenure of his withering disdain. My loving parents could dismiss his name-calling, his scorn, the scrutiny he gave to my every word and action, because they assumed like everything else, he was misinformed and incorrect. I, however, knew if that brand of harassment could come from someone related to me (by marriage…but still), what would follow from strangers would be even worse. Perhaps even violent. No little kid should have to grow up with that kind of constant fear around a family member.

So, when I could, I stopped making myself available for his sarcasm and insults. I stopped seeing my aunt and uncle when I started college. I politely declined to take any more trips to Maryland; I’d stay away when they visited my parents. After I moved away, I’d listen to the news from that side of the family from my parents, and then later from just my dad. But after Bert had made my life miserable for such a long period, once I was of age and gave myself permission not to tolerate it any more, it ended.

I’ve only seen Jane and Bert twice in the years since. The first was at my mom’s funeral, which happened at a point long after my sexuality was known to everyone. Neither of them could even bring themselves to address me afterward, either at the church or the interment, much less the gathering at my dad’s house. The second time was several years later at a family wedding—a teetotal affair micromanaged by a bridezilla who threw a public tantrum that people had the nerve to bring gifts not on the registry. I’d been warned by my dad in advance that the clusterfuck would be alcohol-free, but Jane unbent enough to join me and her brother for shots from the trunk of my car. (My dad never drinks. That’s how bad it was.)

I was the oldest of the grandchildren on that side of the family. Jane and Bert ended up having two sons, both more than a decade younger than myself. Neither of them grew up as Bert’s ideal boy: they weren’t athletic, unruly, or manly in all the traditional ways. The older played sports unwillingly until he hit his adolescence, when he refused to participate any longer. He preferred video games, and eventually bourbon from the family’s liquor cabinet: after drunkenly trashing the house and many of my grandmother’s old things, he had to be sent to rehab in his very early teens. He straightened out as an adult; he married, had two kids, got a job as an architect. But even though he’d hit all the tick marks on his dad’s American Dream checklist, none of it lasted. His wife divorced him, and took the house and the kids. For years he was in so over his head with child support and payments on a home in which he didn’t live that he had to board in an elderly couple’s home.

Jane and Bert’s younger son is more of a mystery. ‘Sensitive’ was always the word I heard used to describe him, or ‘artistic’—and I know from experience how well sensitivity thrives in the emotional desert where Bert walked. As soon as my younger cousin was able, he managed to find a scholarship to study in Australia. He stayed there for a decade, working in IT. “It’s like he decided to move to the other side of the globe to get away with us,” Jane would joke with my father, probably hoping that if she spoke the words aloud, it might make them untrue. He moved back to Maryland, but only after Jane and Bert finally gave up the family home at the turn of the millennium and relocated to Tennessee. He never married. He lived with two women, but only as roommates—they both were involved in romantic relationships with other men.

I remember my dad calling me with his suspicions, about fifteen years ago. “I think he’s gay,” he said about my younger cousin.

“Because your gaydar’s so good?” I asked.

“He’s never once had a relationship. Not that he’s told his mother about,” my dad reasoned. “He had to move to Australia to get away from them for a decade. I genuinely think he’s gay and terrified to come out to Bert. Bert would explode.”

“I know.”

“He probably figures it’s easier to wait until after his dad is dead to live openly. Poor kid.”

“I know.” If that’s what was going on with my younger cousin, I’d lived it myself. I’d had more than enough of Bert, growing up.

* * *

I’m writing this essay as a form of self-soothing. When I tell stories on a page, when I collect my memories and arrange them into a pattern I find satisfying, and true, and real, it helps pacify the turmoil in my head. Cobwebs gather on much of what I remember, particularly in passages of my mind on which I’ve long shut and locked the door, intending never to return. Giving them an airing does me good.

I’ve been resurrecting my experiences with Bert because he’s dying. My dad called me last month to say Bert had experienced a few strange symptoms that sent him to his doctor, and then a specialist, who diagnosed him with an advanced form of leukemia. Within a day he was rushed to a special treatment center in Texas; after only a few days there, they sent him home with the news that he only had four or five days to live. It was all very abrupt and unexpected.

My dad said Bert called him to say goodbye, and that the man seemed fairly reconciled to the approaching darkness. At least he was dying at home, with hospice workers helping, and his wife and older son by his bedside the entire time. (My younger cousin has declined to be there.) Since then he’s been on painkilling drugs, so not entirely present any longer. The prognosis of four or five days came three weeks ago. He’s been holding on, improbably, ever since.

My aunt’s reacting as anyone might, coping with the death of someone to whom she’s been married for over four decades. She calls my dad and cries. She’s made plans to sell the house in Tennessee and to return to Maryland. She watches her TV shows, helps with the painkillers, and waits for the inevitable. My father is elderly himself, and has always probably expected to go before his little sister and the man she married, and certainly before any of his own children. He provides what support he can, and keeps me informed. It’s sobering to him, though.

And I react by arranging my memories onto a page. The pain Bert caused is long in the past, though the scars ache when I summon the many psychic souvenirs he left. I turned out okay, despite his warnings: my love of music and of language and poetry, my queerness, my stubbornness in refusing to change to please him—those things he despised made me the man I am.

Writing all these words has made me realize how Bert must have made a straw man of me to scare his own children. The aspersions he cast in my direction, the ways in which he sniggered and mocked the girly boy who liked reading instead of camping, who preferred Beethoven to baseball—how that picture he painted of my softness must have terrified his own kids. He must have made such a bugaboo of me. I was the thing they must never emulate, the unholy creature he feared one of his kids might become.

This straw man, however, feels nothing but pity for Bert. So much time wasted, frightening little kids. And to what end? The pansy has prospered, while Bert’s older son wallows in mediocrity and bankruptcy, and the younger is a wounded little boy in his late forties, refusing to see the man who might hate him because of what he is.

It might not be the outcome anyone would have predicted. I’m certain it’s not the outcome anyone, save maybe the cream puff, deserves.

Conversations with My Father: Summer Visit Edition

(I spent last week in Virginia with my dad. If you haven't heard, we drive each other crazy.)

My Dad: What’re you looking at on your phone?

Me: Twitter.

My Dad: Oh, you’re on the Tweeter?

Me: It’s Twitter.

My Dad: What do you twit about?

Me: On Twitter, one tweets about…oh, never mind.

My Dad: Are you into politics?

Me: No, I definitely don’t enjoy politics on Twitter.

My Dad: I thought the Tweeter was all about politics.

Me: No, I do gay Twitter.

My Dad: Gay…? Is that a whole different Tweeter?

Me: No. Who you choose to follow kind of determines what kind of content you see.

My Dad: What’s the gay Tweeter like?

Me: It’s mostly nude selfies…

My Dad: Oh, are you posting a nude selfie?

Me: Um, we’re sitting in a car in your doctor’s office parking lot. Am I nude?

My Dad: I don’t think so?

Me: You don’t think…? Well, did you see me take a selfie?

My Dad: No?

Me: Okay then.

My Dad: But you know I do have really, really bad eyesight.

---

My Dad (upon seeing me wearing a baseball cap): Are you wearing a baseball cap?

Me: Yep.

My Dad: Do you always wear baseball caps?

Me: Not always, but I wear them pretty often.

My Dad: Do you play baseball?

Me: They’re just to cover my head. Especially when my haircut grows out. I’m a lousy baseball player.

My Dad: I have a lot of baseball caps.

Me: Yes, I know. They’re littering your office.

My Dad: Do you want some of my baseball caps?

Me: GOD no.

My Dad: Well!

Me: I mean, no thank you.

My Dad: What’s wrong with my baseball caps?

Me: Well, for one thing, they’re all incredibly ugly.

My Dad: Well!

Me: Okay, let me put it this way. All your baseball caps either are emblazoned with the logos of various freight railroad lines…

My Dad: I will have you know that the railroads of the Eastern Shoreline directly contributed to the growth and development of the…

Me: And then the rest of them are gifts from your sister and they all have really obnoxious embroidered cats on them. I’m pretty sure one of them says I LOVES ME KITTY.

My Dad: You love cats.

Me: I do love cats but I do not want to proclaim that love to the world like a crazy cat person.

My Dad: So what’s on your hats?

Me: A couple of days ago I had on a Provincetown cap. Yesterday was our college…

My Dad: What’s on your hat now?

Me: Uh…it’s just a clothing logo.

My Dad (taking the cap and holding it a centimeter from his eyes): A clothing logo? It looks like…a baseball diamond.

Me: It’s supposed to be a pig. A...stylized...pig.

My Dad: A pig? What manufacturer of clothing has the logo of a pig?

Me: [mumbles]

My Dad: Come again?

Me (louder): NASTY PIG.

My Dad: So you won’t tell people you love cats, but you don’t mind telling people you love nasty pigs?

Me: That’s…pretty accurate, actually.

My Dad: And you wear a hat that tells everybody you like pigs.

Me: Yes, I do.

My Dad: And then other people who like pigs come up to you and say, ‘Hey, I like pigs too.’

Me: Depends on which bar I’m in.

My Dad: What?

Me: Nothing.

---

(On the penultimate day of my visit, my dad had an invitation from his old college roommate to visit, so I drove him to Williamsburg, where we both went to college.)

My dad: Were you seeing anyone in college? You mother and I never heard if you were seeing anyone.

Me: Mostly I just slept around.

My dad: Your mother and I were virgins until marriage.

Me (snorting): Not I.

My dad: I don’t know whether it was from choice or whether it was just the way things were back then.

Me: Well, ultimately, if you’re happy with how it turned out, it doesn’t matter.

My dad: Who were you sleeping around with? Not that roommate of yours, [he names my sophomore roommate]?

Me: No. He didn’t know he was gay then.

My dad: Not that other roommate of yours, [he names my junior roommate]?

Me: God no. He was a crazy conservative Christian closet case.

My dad: You knew how to pick them, I guess. Didn’t you have a boyfriend at all?

Me: I kind of had one my junior year, but what a dick.

My dad: He had a dick? Or he was a dick?

Me: He had a huge dick. And he definitely was a huge dick.

My dad: Why, what did he do to be a dick?

Me: The biggest thing was that if we were going anywhere together on campus, he would make me walk twenty feet behind him.

My dad: Why?

Me: I guess he just didn’t want thinking people we were together.

My dad: It wasn’t because he thought you were funny looking?

Me: OUCH.

My dad: I didn’t mean it like that.

Me: Jeez, whose side are you on?

My dad: I mean, maybe he thought it would look funny for two boys to be walking together. Like you said, maybe it was just the way things were back then.

Me: Guys walk together all the time. You walked with your old roommate this afternoon.

My dad: Why did you stay with him for a year then?

Me: You heard me say he had a big dick, right?

Monday Morning Questions: Public Apology Edition

I can tell by the way you write you’re educated, but all you write about is sex. Is it just me or does it seem like a waste of all your education to have your entire life obsessed with one thing? Seems like you could be doing something better with your time, I don’t know.

I extend my deepest apologies that you have tracked down and visited a sex blog on the internet to find that it is primarily focused upon . . . sex.

I thank you for bringing this unforgivable oversight to my attention. My highly-honed mission statement here at A Breeder’s Journal is to be absolutely everything to absolutely everyone. Obviously I have failed in this regard.

In order to make amends, I would call to your attention the fact that at my twitter account (@meetthebreeder), you will find that I am not only obsessed with sex, but also with the pop music group Steps, the video game Animal Crossing, and with incredibly bad television shows. It is upon Twitter I thus achieve a rich diversity I obviously have failed to garner—much to my eternal regret—with my blog.

Thank you for bringing these oversights to my attention. Rest assured that in the future, I will do everything in my control to tailor the contents of my personal sex blog to the needs of you, the individual who pays absolutely nothing for its content, who never buys me gifts, and who doesn’t contribute to my income in any way. Until that day comes, here’s an image of kittens with laser eyes on pizza slices:

I have a gentlemen caller who is trying to get me into a cock cage. It's not as if I had nothing to do with that desire (I sure did) but I also have not decided yet if I just like the idea of being in one (I never have). I'm enjoying every moment of his attention, though it is a bit hard to keep any sort of focus! I probably will buy one on my own and find out the answer - is this something I'd rather just fantasize about?

I’ve noticed a curious correlation between a huge rise in interest in chastity caging and the current pandemic. Were I still an academic, I’d propose the theory that men are turning to chastity devices as a way to deal with increasing uncertainty during a time of lockdowns—asserting control over a device from which they can be released any time, unlike how most of us captives have felt during this COVID-19 crisis.

If you’re interested in genital restraint, why not give it a try? Unlike auto-erotic asphyxiation, it's a safe kink to explore. 

I’ve held the keys to many a man’s cock cage over the last several decades. Physically held the keys, that is. A guy will buy a chastity device and I will lock him into it. Then I will take the only copies of the keys that can release him, thus leaving his little dick restrained until I return. It’s a kick for both parties. The caged party gets the sexual thrill of being denied and controlled; I get the knowledge that the boy has ceded his own sexual freedom to me, plus the sadistic knowledge that the longer I deny him, the more discomfort and need he experiences.

The longest I’ve held a key was probably for about five years, with a local guy I’d see frequently. No, I didn’t keep the guy caged that entire time—the longest period was for maybe about a month. When in lockdown, he was totally free to suck as many cocks and he wanted and to take as many loads in his hole as he could collect. The only time he would get himself off, however, was when I granted him the favor of unlocking his penis cage myself. I enjoyed that control. He enjoyed my superiority, and loved to hand over his own sexual authority to a more dominant personality.

That relationship may be a more extreme example of chastity and control; not everyone who locks himself into a cock cage hands over the key to someone, much less for years at a time. You may wish to experiment by letting yourself be caged (without an actual lock) for the length of a single sexual session, to see if you like it. That’s enough for most men who engage in the kink. If you choose to explore longer periods of chastity, add a single day at a time, and see how much you can endure.

Consider the type of cage in which you intend to imprison yourself. Solid plastic cages tend to be the cheapest—but how disgusting are they going to be, and how rancid will they become from your own urine and secretions, when you wear them for days at a time? You’re going to want to select something that allows you to keep clean (unless staying dirty is your goal—and if so, no judgement), that can be flushed with extended wear, and that’s going to make you feel sexy and good about yourself, even as you’re denying yourself or being denied your own sexual autonomy.

If I had to pick an ideal cage for enforcing chastity on someone long-term, I’d probably choose a steel cage, like those by Mature Metal (modeled below by my friend @verswolfXXX—I wish I were close enough to hold his key). The cage allows air and water to circulate. The heft of the steel construction means it can’t be easily ignored or forgotten, even as it’s concealed by everyday clothing. From a fetish perspective, it’s everything a guy could ask for.*

As for actually handing over the key to someone—I don’t recommend beginners take that step immediately. At least, not without keeping a copy of the key for yourself, in case of emergency. Ask yourself the following questions: are you going to be in raptures at the thrill of being caged while the man caging you is towering over you, only to be irritated by the mundane realities when he isn’t? Will the fellow be responsible enough, and considerate enough, about your health and sexual well-being to uncage you on a schedule you can tolerate? Is he going to be around enough to do so? Can you truly rely upon your key holder not to ghost you?

Most dominant-submissive scenarios require mutual trust between parties. Make sure your trust in your partner is rock solid before you make any commitments that might end up with a professional having to take bolt cutters to your most delicate regions.

*Note: I have not received any promotional consideration from Mature Metal for this endorsement. I just like their stuff. @verswolfXXX, on the other hand, owes me his hole for pimping him.

Could you tell us about your best/worst gloryhole experiences?

I’m finding your question difficult to answer. Not because I’m ancient and my memory is like a sieve just yet—but because I’ve had so many excellent gloryhole experiences, and because I am having a lot of difficult trying to summon up even one truly bad one. (If someone remembers one from my decade plus of this blog, remind me. I’m ancient and my memory is like a sieve.)

Let’s start with the latter. It’s not so much an actual singular experience as an ongoing circumstance. There was a year when I was a doctoral candidate that I would visit a gloryhole in the campus library, in an out-of-the-way men’s room in a far stretch of the library’s periodicals section that few people visited. Chances were that if anyone trekked the long route to that restroom, they were looking for business.

The gloryhole itself had been hacked into the sheet metal partition between the two stalls within. Someone had used pliers to bend back the points of jagged metal so that they wouldn’t stab anyone in the groin or face; someone else had applied electrical tape around the perimeter on both sides to smooth it out and prevent injury. I used to spend hours at a time at that glory hole. Lunch times were particularly busy. I’d sit in the stall further from the two doors leading in, sucking cock after cock. Students, faculty, staff, men from the streets. Some would stride in already hard, unzip, and without prelude shove their meat through the hole. I’d efficiently take care of it, swallow the load, and await the next horny fucker standing impatiently by the sinks for his turn.

I know, it all sounds very good, but after the hole had been open for about a month, a rival arose. Some lump of a person from the local community (in my head, I remember him as the wheelchair-bound Andy that Matt Lucas used to perform on Little Britain, but he probably wasn’t that repulsive) discovered the hole and would attempt to commandeer it at the same times I did. (So basically, whenever the library was open.) 

If I arrived after my rival was already there and I spied him through the hole, I honorably followed the Cocksucker’s Code and would leave. He, however, like a total asswad, would refuse to vacate the other stall when I had arrived first. Cocksucker’s Code says the first cocksucker claims the hole, so I would stubbornly refuse to budge when he'd shuffle in, groan, and heft his enormous backside on the other seat. On those days, no one got sucked. Men would come in, wait a little bit, see that nothing was going on, and then leave for greener pastures.

Sadly, gloryholes are ephemeral things. That particular hole was open only about six months before the school’s custodial staff welded new metal over it on both sides. I’d had it to myself most days for maybe the first third of that time. The last two-thirds were a bitter rivalry to the end between two cocksuckers, with both of us losing out in the end.

Okay, now the best gloryholes. I’m going to divide this into two parts—gloryholes knowingly created for their intended use, and gloryholes in the wild.

The best manufactured gloryholes I would visit were at the late and much-lamented Bijou in Toronto, during the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands. The Bijou was essentially a clothes-on bathhouse in the basement of a building in Toronto’s gay district. It featured what was known as the Slurp Ramp, an elevated platform with stairs, partitioned on all sides so that guys who wanted to feed would stand on the platform and slide their meat through the dozen-plus gloryholes around the perimeter. Cocksuckers below would stand on the ground, the holes at mouth level, fighting for the prime cocks. The room was dark save for what light filtered in from a TV playing porn in an adjacent room.

I could easily spend hours at a time at the Slurp Ramp, sucking cock after cock, then climbing the ramp and taking my pick of the eager mouths, then heading back to the floor once more. I’d often drag myself back to my hotel at three in the morning, shirt covered in dried cum despite my best attempts to take every drop, weary and exhausted, but happy. I even once had a cock poke me in the eye so insistently that I lost a contact lens in the dark, there.

Best gloryhole in the wild: probably my first, what was then known as the Business Building (now Harris Hall) at the university where my parents taught, in Richmond, Virginia. I’ve written before of my business in that particular building, so I’ll keep it brief. But let me paint you a picture of public cruising in 1975, when my prepubescent self went exploring while my mom or dad would be teaching a two-hour seminar in the evenings.

The Business Building was a six-story structure with all its men’s rooms stacked atop each other, directly across from the same stairwell. Though there were no facilities on the first floor, the second and third floor boasted identical large U-shaped restrooms with five stalls apiece, basically all of which had gloryholes drilled into the particleboard. Floors four through seven had smaller restrooms with only two stalls apiece.

The action would always start on the second floor. Men would occupy the stalls and fuck and suck through the holes and beneath the partitions; others would stand at the urinals on the side of the U invisible from the door leading in and out, and either fuck and suck there, or watch what was going on in the stalls, or wait for someone to open a stall door for sex. Some men watched the action from the sink area in front of the door; they would take it upon themselves clumsily to impede intruders who weren’t regulars for just enough time it took for the men in the stalls to climb from their knees and back onto the seats. If the second floor restroom was totally occupied—and in the evenings it always was at capacity—men would take their business up to the third floor. If both the large restrooms were too full, the action would spill up the staircase to the fourth floor, to the smaller facilities. And then up to the fifth and sixth, if necessary. In the mid-seventies, it was never unusual to find all five upper stories…every stall, every urinal…occupied with cocksuckers and sodomites and voyeurs, going at it until ten or eleven at night.

And those weren’t the campus’ only cruising spots, either: the campus library there was equally cruisy, as was the Hibbs Building, where in 1976 I finally gave in and let my first stranger fuck me.

By the time I graduated college in 1985 and had started studying for a Master’s degree at that university, the AIDS epidemic had struck fear into everyone. The Business Building tearooms had emptied out; the gloryholes patched over. Occasional shenanigans happened in the second floor restrooms, but I’d have to waste fruitless hours there in the silence for it to happen, and the cruising scene there became no longer worth the investment of time. The spillover from floor to floor that had taken place nightly, for years, was gone forever. Generations after mine would never experience anything like it. (Hell, most of my generation never experienced anything like it.)

I miss the gloryholes of the Business Building. They were where I’d seen my first erect penis. They were where I’d been taken in hand by my elders and shown the ropes of making contact and pleasing anonymous dick. The Business Building restrooms were where I was protected by, and welcomed into, the fraternity of cocksuckers.

Have you had many experiences with cum rags? I am a little obsessed. I have always hunted for them— both my brothers, my dad, roommates— pretty much my entire life I’ve tried to track down the rag/cloth/sock/tissue just to smell the musk of it or lick out anything still wet and sticky. Maybe a question for the blog and probably something you’ve got a story about!

As a kid I was scrupulous about leaving absolutely zero evidence of my masturbation around the house, so I’d shoot my boy loads on my stomach, wipe them up with tissue, and then toss the hardened mass in the toilet to flush the next morning before my parents woke up. Later on, most of my sex was happening in the parks and toilets around the city, so I was usually shooting there (and leaving the evidence either down someone’s throat or spilled on the ground).

I don’t think I actually realized guys kept towels or scraps to mop up their seed until I was in my early twenties, when a Latin guy fucking me would mop up my leaking ass or the semen I’d spewed onto my chest with a terry-cloth towel he kept beneath his bed. When he was done, he’d simply toss it back under. The next time we’d play, it would be harder and crustier than before.

I’ve written before about Darryl, a guy I used to play with back in Michigan who had a serious fetish for underwear used as a cum rag. Probably of all my encounters, he had the biggest cum rag fetish of anyone I knew. And of course, for readers of my blog, I’ve made crusty cum rags out of old socks and raffled them off.

Maybe this is a good question for my readers, too—have any of you gentlemen harbored a fetish for cum rags? Whose did you track down and how did you get them?

As someone who has done financial domination and has seen finsubs, what do you think are the signs to you that a sub is taking it too far?

I wrote a long answer last year about my relationship with the fetish known as findom—financial domination, or being a cash master to cash slaves. For those unfamiliar with the scene, or with my relationship to it, I advise taking a moment to review what I said there.

I’m not one of those low-investment cash masters whose day-to-day involvement with his subs extends only as far as posting scowling photos of himself on social media and demanding money for new footwear. Any findom arrangement with me is an investment of my time and energy. I am always devising ways in which my submissives should express their gratitude for my attention in ways including, but not exclusive to, what’s in their wallets or bank accounts.

As a responsible dominant, I don’t allow a submissive to make promises that he’s going to be unable to keep. One of the first assessments I make of a prospective cash slave before accepting him is of how sustainable a commitment to me is going to be. In the flush of sexual excitement, a submissive will promise all kinds of things—but when a man's boner deflates, does he have the actual wherewithal to follow through? I may ask to see bank statements, pay checks. Invasive as that might seem to you, to cash slaves, a good rummaging in their finances can be as erotic and exposing as bending over with bare buttocks.

I keep an eye out for signs of trouble. Late offerings. Missed tributes. Emails that sound stressed or distraught. Lack of response altogether, as if he’s avoiding me. I look for signs that draining a submissive’s wallet is causing trouble in his home life, such as missed bill payments, or an inability to pay essentials. Money arguments with their significant other. If a submissive wants to deny himself luxuries in order to please his cash master, that’s one thing. If he’s genuinely unable to make commitments to his landlord or to utility companies, that’s another, and it’s a sign that the sub should withdraw and reassess his ability to serve a cash master.

In general I think it’s fair to ask the very same questions about cash servitude as it might be about other behaviors that might interfere with everyday life—from something as mild as too much video game playing or too much time on social media, to more serious interferences like too many party favors or too much alcohol. Is it interfering with the person’s family relationships? Is it affecting his work? Is it causing the submissive too much stress? Is it even affecting his health?

If any of these turn out to be the case, I feel it’s the dominant’s duty to step back and ask the submissive to make changes in his life before he’s permitted to resume his tributes.

How do I get over my shyness? I wanna suck my friends dick. He’s gay. I’m gay. We have many things in common. Lotta flirting. My underwear are always wet after he leaves. And I kick myself for not just jumping him? I feel like I’m getting signals. How can I tell and how do I tell him I wanna swallow his dick and his load.

It’s kind of tough to tell when flirting is mere playfulness—a form of social lubricant that keeps the dialogue flowing—and when it’s the real thing. Is it the real thing on your end? Are you flirting back because he’s flirting? Or is there actual intent behind it, on your part?

If the latter and you’re truly trying to hook up with your friend, I’d recommend a little more directness. However, if you’re typically a reticent type, I wouldn’t try leading with “Hey, shove those inches of yours down my throat.” That might be too much for a shy personality to handle, right out of the gate.

However, even a morbidly shy person can speak up and say, when the double entendres fly, something earnest and honest along the lines of, “Hey, am I reading too much into this, or is there something between us you’d maybe like to explore?” Or, “I can’t tell if you’re just being playful with me, or if you’re flirting for real. Can we talk about that for a second?” You’re the one who knows the typical interplay between yourself and your friend. Think up something like those above statements, memorize it, and have it ready to go at an appropriate point.

If your friend says that yes, he’s been wanting to jump your bones too, fan-fucking-tastic. Enjoy. Know, however, that you absolutely run the risk of having your friend say, “Oh shit, nah, I was just jokin’ with you, bro.” Just because you’re both gay doesn’t mean that sex inevitably is in the cards. But you know what? It’s better to ask, get rejected, and to know, than to waste months or years of your life pining after someone who’s just a flirt for the fun of it.

If it does turn out that your friend isn’t into the idea—you’ve still got a friend. Hang onto those. They’re tough to find these days.

Do you have questions for future editions of Monday Morning Questions? Email me at the address on the sidebar, or send me a DM on Twitter.

Doing Without

As of this week, it will be six months since I’ve had sex. For me, that’s a very long time—probably the longest stretch I’ve gone without, since puberty.

A reader and friend of mine commented:

Sometime, I'd find it really interesting to read what you have to say about how not having sex for several months has affected you. I know I would be in some sort of catastrophic depression.

I can’t claim with one hundred percent certainty that I’m not depressed. I’ve been isolated in my home since March. The first couple of months were terrifying in my part of the U.S. The supermarkets were barren. Every trip out of the house felt like an installment in the initial chapters of a post-apocalyptic movie, right before everybody gets wiped out save for an unlikely (yet Hollywood-attractive) troupe of rag-tag survivors. During the initial few weeks, sex wasn’t really even on my mind.

With time the terrifying turned mundane. The supermarkets restocked. The weather turned warm and welcoming. I started not only wearing masks when I’d go outdoors, but wearing them in my sleeping dreams as well. That’s about the time the loneliness started to take its toll, and I’d find myself wishing I’d had the foresight to isolate with a perpetually horny bottom.

Sure, I’ve managed to distract myself during this terrible half-year. I’ve played video games. I’ve listened to music. A lot of music. (It’s a very good year for music.) I’ve streamed drag shows and supported friends whose lives as entertainers have been brutally interrupted. I’ve watched a lot of television and movies. I do all these things to distract myself, and at night I crawl into bed and try to pretend I’m content.

My dick, punching holes in the memory foam, tells me otherwise.

Every day I remind myself how fortunate I am. How lucky to have food in the freezer, a roof over my head. How auspicious it is that I haven’t been sick. How incredibly charmed my life must be that I’m to be able to hole up at home and be only inconvenienced in minor ways. I recognize that in a time of distress and disease and death and widespread fear, I am privileged. My libido has been a driving force in my life for decades, and having to pack it in mothballs has at times seemed cruel. It’s led to any number of self-pitying moments. But then I remind myself that in the larger context, a mere lack of ready holes to fuck is a minor inconvenience.

On Twitter and the various sex apps I’d see guys who were proceeding with a business-as-usual approach—they’d be advertising that they’d be ass-up and ready in a hotel room for all comers. Or they’d be hitting the cruisiest spots of a local park. Or they’d be hosting a small group at their home that night. Guys would hit me up on Scruff telling me to come on over, their place was free.

I’d resist. Some made it easy by flaunting their lack of concern for the virus; I knew I wasn’t going to take my chances with anyone who didn’t recognize or care about the risks. Others, those who had round and beautiful butts that made my cock strain in my shorts, were difficult to resist. Particularly if they assured me that they’d been isolated as well. But I resisted all the same.

I’ve somehow already lived through one pandemic more or less intact. But there’s a big difference between COVID-19 and HIV. An HIV infection isn’t going to spread casually throughout my household. An HIV infection isn’t going to leap from my body to dozens of others when I attend a social event, or sit in a bar, or sing in a choir. Someone taking risks with HIV in his sexual life is endangering himself only—not the well-being of everyone around him.

This was a conviction theoretical to me during the first few months of my isolation, but when my aging dad was diagnosed with cancer last month, the thought of potentially infecting him inadvertently, in his compromised state, distressed me greatly. Particularly because I’m soon going to have to live with him for a few weeks during his treatment. I can’t conceive of risking his life with my own personal need for contact. I’m just going to have to resist some more.

At first, friends commiserated with me. We all were in similar straits of needing touch, needing a mouth on our own, needing the physicality of another body next to ours—but at first we all were resisting. Then they began slipping. I’ve tried hard not to judge adversely their hookups—because even after six months of abstinence, who’s to say when I won’t have a moment of weakness and give in to temptation? Every big mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made with my dick. With that kind of track record, how likely am I to do what’s right? Perhaps I can extend my monkish solitude another six months, but it’s more likely I’ll succumb to some dude’s come-ons tomorrow, or next week.

But oh, god, how I have to resist the urge to judge. When a friend tells me about the strangers he’s sucking off in a park, even as my dick springs up, the rest of me recoils. When friends tell me about ‘calculated risks’ they’re taking that sound to me like business-as-usual picking up serial random dick on Grindr without any vetting, I have to shush the Mrs. Grundy that wants to lecture them, and instead listen with envy about the hookups. When buddies text me about the half-dozen guys they banged over a weekend, all I want to do it yell in all caps, HOW IS THAT SAFE? But I listen, and gnash my teeth, wishing it were me.

For a while, though, it won’t be.

How can I judge them? I’m no saint. Many are the times I’ve let circumstance carry me on unexpected adventures on the turn of a dime. All it would take to make me crumble would be a wayward smile or a certain stare as I passed someone. A text from a favorite. A come-hither photo. An opportunity. Any of those, and I’d lose any claim I might have to remaining virtuous during these trying times. So how can I blame anyone I know, much less those I like and understand, for doing exactly what I myself yearn to do?

Once in a while I think maybe this is it for me. Maybe I just won’t have sex again in what span of my days is left. Then frequently I wonder if once again in my lifetime, disease will redefine how, where, and when I have sex. Decades ago, fear of AIDS emptied the sexual field I’d known of its players. Tearooms that had been packed from noon until midnight suddenly were deserted. Campus cruising spots that had seethed with action in 1980, floor after floor of them, echoed emptily in 1982. Bathhouses shuttered. The scores of men who had spent their nights in unlit parks sliding among the shadows, congregating by picnic tables and near ponds to locate each other only by their glowing cigarette tips—vanished.

Maybe this second pandemic of my life, like the last, will fashion new ways I connect with men. Maybe, in the rear view mirror, this time of self-denial will seem nothing more than a hiccup. Until then, like everyone else, I stumble ahead, trying to survive. Trying to do the best I can.

Open Forum Friday: How Y'all Coping?

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.

The Tenth Anniversary: Readers' Top Twelve Posts

As part of my tenth-anniversary commemoration I answered a number of questions readers asked about some of the more memorable personalities that have appeared on these pages in the last decade—Runt, Scruffy, Spencer, Earl, and the like—and in return I received a number of emails and messages saying how grateful they were to hear about my former lovers, and to know (mostly) that they were well. I was glad to make my readers happy.

But you know what messages have made me happiest? Hearing congratulations and thank-yous from readers who had disappeared off my own radar. I’ve made a lot of friendships through my blog. Some have lasted for many years; a few were temporary, but none the less enjoyable. Some were barely momentary, a quick exchange of emails with no follow-through whatsoever.

Over the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve received several emails from men who’ve checked in to let me know what they’ve been up to since the last time we talked, which sometimes has been as many as five or six years. Like Runt and Scruffy, most of these men are in much better places than they were when originally they reached out to me. That’s always heartening to hear.

This week I’ve compiled a list of my dozen most popular blog entries. I’ve had millions of visitors in the last decade; these entries have had the most unique view totals. Perhaps with the world shutting down around us, you might have some spare time to enjoy some erotic writing. Revisit a few of these essays from the past, won’t you?

12. July 26, 2016—Dick Dock 2016: Cocksucker

My Dick Dock entries have always been popular. Two of them made this list, in fact. I think this one, in which I’m made to inhale poppers as I slobber all over dick is my favorite of the two. Re-reading it makes me rock hard, in fact—I think it’s one of the two times in my life I’ve done poppers. I know, I’m such a puritan!

11. April 12, 2010—Incriminating Evidence

It’s interesting that this particular entry popped up; it’s about the records I used to meticulously keep when I was a kid, of all the men I had sex with. I’ve been trying to revisit the memory of this sexual accounting in order to write about it again, for a different sort of project I’ve been toying with.

10. April 15, 2011—Field Trip Friday: Jayson Park

Porn actor Jayson Park has been one of the best friends I’ve made through my blog. This entry asking readers to make a visit to his website (which doesn’t seem to be working these days) must get a lot of hits from guys trying to find him through search engines. He’s a stud. Always has been, always will be.

9. February 11, 2013—Open Forum Monday: The Big One

I’m amused that so many men have looked at, and read, my entry about a milestone birthday. I understand why I wrote it; I remember during much of my forties I always wondered why the clock seemed to stop for men once they hit the age of 49. I still know men who are in their sixties at this point but whose app profiles all say 49. But sexy, this entry isn’t.

I’ve had several of the Open Forum entries, which ask for and respond to reader feedback, not only make this list, but come very close to it. I suspect people liked reading what other commenters had to say.

8. July 11, 2013—The Rest Stop at Dusk

I really like this essay. It’s one of my favorites from my first few years. There was one point at which, for some milestone or another (my first million views, I think?) I was planning to attempt a podcast-style reading from my blog, and this essay about rest stop cruising along I-275 in Michigan was going to be the entry I read.

In the end, I was too lazy to figure out the recording process.

7. February 7, 2012—A Long, Sloppy Blowjob

Usually when I look at the titles of my more popular entries, I immediately can tell you what they’re about. Not this one, boy. I had to read it from start to finish, and only when I was approaching the end did I have a recollection of it. You kind of tend to remember when some crackhead bangs on the front door of the public library down the street, thinking it’s your house.

These department of bad encounters stories never end well.

6. August 19, 2013—Home Gloryhole

Oh man, I loved this guy. I used to visit his gloryhole every couple of months when I’d be on my way back to Grand Central. Amazing mouth, hot gloryhole set-up. I wonder if he’s still in business?

5. July 18, 2013—Dick Dock

I tend to get cocky when I’m cruising publicly. I know it. I admit it. My philosophy in a bathhouse, or backroom, or bookstore, is that I’ll wait for what I want, rather than settle for what other dudes won’t touch. And I tend to get what I want, as I did on this night in P-town.

I’m actually kind of fond of my Dick Dock entries. The place is legend, but I understand it’s touch for guys who’ve never been there before to know exactly what the protocol might be for cruising there. I’ve received a lot of feedback from new visitors to Provincetown who’ve told me that more than any other source, these essays gave them a taste of the atmosphere there, and the ways men connect in that dark space beneath the Boatslip.

4. April 29, 2011—Open Forum Friday: Cocksuckers

I admit: I’m puzzled how this one rose so high over many more thoughtful entries. Essentially I wrote an essay here about bad blow jobs, and how much I dislike it when a cocksucker decides to stop using his mouth and instead seize onto my cock with a vise grip and beat it so hard that I lose any will to have sex for a good long time. (Or I simply can’t, because of the chafing sores.)

The real gold here—as in any of my Open Forum entries—lies buried in the reader responses, which are plentiful and thoughtful, and sympathetic.

3. October 4, 2013—Nasty Little Faggot

I’m happy this particular memoir occupies this spot, because it’s as nasty as the title boasts. Reading it from a distance of seven years, I find I’ve forgotten exactly which cocksucker I’m describing in this essay…but in a certain sense, it doesn’t really matter, does it? He did his job well.

2. January 21, 2013—Stupid Faggot

I’m intrigued, but not surprised, that entries with the word faggot in the title have made two of the three most popular spots on this list. I’ve noticed for years that variations of faggot and cocksucker are in the top search terms that lead random viewers to my blog, month after month. Sometimes it’s just faggot cocksucker stories, sometimes it’s faggots who suck cock, sometimes it’s cocksucker faggots, but those search terms are always up there.

I was going to illustrate with a list of search phrases from this month, but when I went to look, the top search terms were free jockstrap giveaway (no, I’m not having one), hornyfather (just like that), bareback blog, and sissies in snap-on plastic panties, which seems oddly specific to me.

This particular entries is one of my all-time favorites. It’s more than a scene in which a Puerto Rican boy debases himself in front of me—though I was very fond of this particular kid for a couple of years until ultimately he overstepped his boundaries. It’s a meditation on the ways in which words that sound vile in one man’s mouth can be a balm from another’s; it’s a thoughtful defense of men who find joy and pleasure from epithets that have hurt them in the past.

But mostly I suspect the number of readers who’ve flocked to this particular entry do so to see a hungry boy doing what he does best.

1. May 24, 2011—Cruising 101: The Bathhouse

Here we are—the most popular post in the history of my blog. And by a long shot, too. ‘Cruising 101’ has had ten times more viewers than #12 on this list, and twice as many as #4. I remember writing it because in the first couple of years of writing about my sexual encounters, I’d encounter a lot of prejudice and ignorance whenever I’d write about visiting one of Detroit’s multiple (at the time—I think they only have one now) bathhouses.

“They’re a breeding ground for disease,” I heard. Well, sure, but not any more than your own bedroom. “Only desperate guys go to bathhouses…eeeewww,” they’d say. Um, okay. Sure. Enjoy sitting at home looking at blank profiles on Grindr and wondering why you’re not getting any.

Simultaneously, I’d get a lot of questions from men curious about the experience. What were bathhouses like? How did they work? What did they need to know if they decided to give one a try? This entry arose out of that.

Like the Dick Dock entries, I’ve had a lot of thanks and feedback over the years for this quick introduction to the tubs; I would like to point out, though, that there was a follow up entry, Cruising 101: Mr. Manners Visits the Bathhouse, that goes beyond the mechanics of how to get into and navigate around a bathhouse, and into how to treat the men one encounters there. Worth a read, I think.


And that’s the list! Taking a deep dive into the statistics of my blog for the last ten years has been interesting. I’d been vaguely aware that although I was writing blog posts more frequently during the first three years, save for the entries that made this list, on average the number of views those pages got were really quite low compared to those I’ve made in the last five years—I can look at the number of unique readers for any post in the last year and it’ll usually have ten times the number of views my much older posts ever had.

Yet the direct engagement I have these days is much less; I might get emails and comments from followers on Twitter about the posts, but I get many fewer comments in the blog itself. My own attitude about the blog has been more more casual, however. Hard to blame anyone else from feeling the same.

What have been your favorite entries from the past ten years? Share with everyone in the comments below!


Are you looking to help me celebrate the tenth anniversary of my blog? Send me a message or email and tell me about your favorite blog post or memory! Share your photos with me! If you're feeling especially generous, check out my Amazon wish list. Mostly, though, I'd just like to hear from you!