What Dads Are For

You are exceptionally handsome, Sir.

My attention perks up at the message. Whose ego wouldn’t respond to such outlandish flattery? The adverb alone makes my dick swell, where it lurks within my terrycloth shorts.

I’m visiting my dad in Virginia for the week. Today I’ve been with him since the early morning; he had one of his semi-annual checkups with his oncologist at nine, and then a blood draw for a subsequent, different specialist, tomorrow. We’ve stopped at the pharmacy, where I’ve plumbed the mysteries of my dad’s several prescriptions. I’ve clipped his cats’ claws. I’ve navigated the complications of ordering a deli sandwich for his lunch, which involves reading each of the dozens of ingredients from the deli’s app, then listening to him expel air through his lips and ruminate before he approves or vetoes each one. I’ve bought and replaced a toilet seat for him. And it’s not even yet two o’clock.

Now I’m sitting in his living room, Grindr open on my phone, as he putters around his kitchen and listens to MSNBC at top volume. Thank you, I text back to the boy who’s caught my attention. But look who’s talking.

He’s got several pics visible in his profile. A selfie in his car, square-jawed, wearing a baseball cap, his cool blue eyes staring into his camera lens. Another in red flannel, equally serious, revealing straw-colored hair, cut with military severity. A third of his torso, emblazoned with a massive dragon tattoo across his left pectoral. He’s all of twenty-three, this young dreamboat, and he’s going out of his way to flatter me.

I feel unworthy.

You wouldn’t happen to be looking this afternoon, would you, Sir?

It just so happens that I might be. When I’m visiting my hometown, it’s usually my custom to take a break mid-afternoon to head back to my hotel to relax and decompress before meeting my dad once more for dinner. I definitely could be.

Would you like to trade some pics, Sir?

His insistent use of the capital-S Sir gives me wood. So do the more explicit photos with which he follows up. Two are of his cock, taken in a way that shows off the furry blond hair on his legs; the remainder are of his backside. My heart rate soars at the sight of his impossibly narrow waist. He’s chosen jockstraps in differing colors to accentuate the round globes of his ass. You are beautiful, son, I tell him.

What are you into, dad?

Eating and breeding hole, making out, oral, and open to much more. You?

Bottom here. Into kissing, oral, poppers, bondage, choking, kissing, kink, role play, voyeurism, exhibitionism, video taping, bb.

It’s quite a list. From the kitchen, my dad asks for the third time if I want either some of the cookies he’s baked, or a slice of cake. I yell no, and reply to the kid with a couple of explicit photos of myself: one in which my cock is impaling and stretching out a hole, and another in which it’s greased up and shiny as I stroke it for the camera.

I need that. Will you please breed me, Sir? Where are you staying?

I should go for this kid, right? I really want to. I give the boy my details and my phone number. I’ll be in my hotel room after three, I tell him.

I can’t wait, Sir. It’s been over a week since I took cum.

Although my father’s eyesight is bad enough that I could be outright tenting and he wouldn’t see, I adjust my shorts, make my promises to be back by dinner, and head to my car.

Back in my hotel room and after my shower, I lie on the mattress while a stream of air conditioning blows over my half-naked body. Now, my uncertainty rises. I’ve barely tiptoed back into having sex after a two-year hiatus. I’m older. My body has changed during the pandemic: my waistline’s a little more snug, my back feels creakier. I feel I’ve lost flexibility. In the half-darkness, as I review the shots the boy has sent, I’m assailed with doubts. Why in the world would a kid of this caliber want me? He looks as if he should be collabing with porn stars for his OnlyFans, or curating shirtless photos for his influencer account, not resorting to hitting up some near-geriatric for anonymous fucking in a sleazy hotel room.

Already I’m anticipating an expression of disappointment on his face, the moment I open that door and he sees the gray in my beard and realizes I’m over twice his age. What’s he going to do, I berate myself, when he shows up and sees what a fat fuck I’ve become? Two years have given me more of a belly. It’s made me slower. Perhaps it’s erased any skills I once might have boasted. Maybe I’m not the top I once was. Maybe this entire encounter will be nothing but disappointment for us both. Whatever I used to have—whatever might have made me stand out a little among the competition—I’ve probably lost.

Although the kid has already texted me to say he’s out of the shower and on his way, there’s still time to abort this doomed tryst. I could send a stupid excuse and opt out of meeting—I should opt out, in fact. How could I have been so stupid, to subject this boy to my gross corpulence? To him, I’ll probably look like some demon, straight out of the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch.

Then my reason takes over, as I look at his photos on my phone and play with myself. Come on, I chide. The young man had contacted me, after seeing one of my selfies on Grindr. I’d sent him more. He knows what I look like. He knows how tall I am, how much I weigh. I don’t lie about my age, so he’s aware of that, too. He’s smart enough to make his own hookup choices. If he wants to get naked with me, why deny him the opportunity? I’m reasonably sure I haven’t forgotten how to fuck. My tongue is as glib as ever. No matter what happens, I still have the skill set to give this boy a good time. I’ll focus on that, and let the cards fall where they may.

I hear a knock at the door.

He’s standing in front of me, now, kicking off a pair of flip-flops as he looks me over. “Wow, dad.” He looks me in the eyes. “You’re even more handsome than your photos.”

“Thank you, son.” I couldn’t be more sincere in my gratitude. His hungry eyes still bore into my own as he drops his basketball shorts to reveal the bulging gray jock beneath. He’s taller than I thought, nearly my own height—maybe six foot two. As lean as his photos. Beautiful. If I’d seen him on the street, I would’ve turned my head with a silent prayer he might meet my stare with his own. Yet here he is before me, telling me how attractive I am.

He’s about to take off his tank top with the same speed when I hold up a palm to arrest him. I sit on the bed’s edge. “Slowly.” I lean back.

“Yes, Sir.” The boy understands. He pulls himself to his full height. Runs the fingers of both hands through his short, blond hair, so that I get a glimpse of the corn silk decorating his pits. His eyes lock on mine as he crosses his wrists at the waist and, in one smooth, practiced move, slowly lifts his tank up and over his head. Once balled up in a hand, he uses it to mop moisture from his face. Then it joins his shorts on the floor.

There’s a half-smile on my face as I drink in the sight of him—that lean waist, the worked-out chest with its coiled Chinese dragon, the muscular thighs that shift his weight from side to side. I point an index finger to the ceiling and give it a twirl. Again, he knows exactly what to do. Looking at me over his shoulder, he turns. I draw in a sharp hiss of air at the sight of his ass. In the photos, it had been perfect. My impression is only improved, in person. Twin globes, pert, framed perfectly by the gray elastic. He watches as I lean forward with my elbows on my knees, appreciating the view. “Am I okay, dad?”

I chuckle. “Okay?” He’s not asking out of cockiness, nor from vanity, I can tell. There’s a genuine tinge of anxiety behind the question. I sit up and look him directly in the eyes. “No, son. You’re not okay. You are fuckin’ beautiful.” He opens his mouth to thank me, but I’ve hooked my pinkie and index finger in the elastic bands separating buttock from thigh. When I tug him toward me, he stumbles backward with surprise. I press the heel of a hand on the small of his back, and he bends.

“Oh!” is all he says when my mouth meets his pucker. He smells of soap. Though his legs are covered in blond fur, the pelt ceases where the jock begins. My hands run over the smooth skin of his back and chest and ass; his hole is completely hairless. The boy tastes so good. This isn’t going to be some lick ’n’ stick. I need to spend some time on this hole.

“Come here,” I order, as hastily I plump two of the pillows in the bed’s center. His hips grind into them as he flops in a diagonal across the mattress. Once he’s settled, I dive back in.

“Your beard…fuck,” he whispers. He’s grinding his hole back onto my face, mashing it hard as he can, trying to abrade my facial hair against the tender flesh. “May I do poppers, dad? Please?” I grunt to let him know I approve. I hear, rather than see, his lungs expand to accommodate the vapors from within the little brown bottle. Beneath my tongue, though, his ass blossoms.

For long minutes I apply heat and pressure to his pink hole, working in moisture, opening it wider. His hips rise and fall in tidal rhythm. His groans subside to whimpers, then rise in volume to become noisy pleas once more. My own cock lies, thick and hard, at an angle beneath my thigh as I grind it against the bedsprings. It can’t go unsatisfied for long. At last, I seize the boy’s ankles and pull them apart. Between his legs I slither up, until my dick juts against that wet crack. “Dad needs to be inside you, son,” I whisper in his ear. “You understand, right?”

“Yes, Sir,” he replies. His eyes are wet with adoration as he looks over his shoulder at me. “Anything you need.”

“Give me those poppers.” I hold out my hand as he scrabbles to find where they’ve rolled. Once mine, I unscrew the little cap and curl a thumb halfway over the aperture. “Head back now. Breathe.” He takes a tentative sniff as I force the bottle beneath his nose. “Breathe deep, son.” This time he obeys, huffing deep. “Other side. Sniff deep, son. It’ll get you ready for dad’s big dick.”

“Is dad going to bareback me?” He knows the answer, but as he takes another lungful of poppers, it’s clear he needs to hear the answer aloud.

“Dad is going to slide his raw dick up inside your tight little hole,” I promise, “and fuck his beautiful boy. Then he’s going to fill his son full of seed. How’s that sound, sport? Think you can handle a real man’s dick?”

He’s eager now, turned on by the scenario. “Yes, Sir.”

“Good boy,” I tell him.

I haven’t forgotten how to turn a bottom on. Not in the least. This perfect specimen of youth is arching his back. His neck is craning upward, his lips begging to be covered with my own. When our mouths meet, he exhales, the scent from the bottle still in his lungs. We kiss deeply. His eyes close.

“You can do this,” I encourage him. “Show dad what a good boy you are.”

“Yes sir.”

When my knob begins to probe at him, he whimpers a little. I need no more than a little more spit to slick him up. He opens for me while I slide deep, inch by inch. “You’ve got it,” I whisper, as it hits home. “You’re doing it, son. You feel so…damned…good.”

“Oh god.” His head hangs now. The pillows hold his hips at a perfect angle for me. I draw his legs together and surround them with my own, as I drive in. My hands wrap around his neck, applying a gentle pressure. He responds with gratitude, shoving backward onto my cock. “Yes, sir. Thank you, dad.”

“Good boy,” I whisper again. As I fuck, deeper and faster, I keep up a stream of filth in his ear. “That is one sweet ass, kid. Made to be fucked. Dad’s going to fill up that boyhole with seed, just because you show it off so well, son. It’s not right to tease your dad like that.” I lose track of my words, even as they continue. The sensations feel too good. The velvet of his clutch grips and milks my shaft; he knows exactly what he’s doing. “Tell dad you love his big cock.”

“I love it,” he gasps, his voice box vibrating between my palms.

“Say it.”

“I love dad’s big cock in my little boyhole,” he trumpets. “I love my dad fucking me. I love my handsome dad’s enormous—oh, Christ.”

Hearing the words force me to stab harder. At home, late nights after I’ve turned out the lights, raccoons fuck in the trees outside my bedroom windows, screeching like they’re being murdered. Those are the sounds we’re making, now—deeper, but just as loud and unbridled. This is no longer lovemaking. What we’re doing is mattress-bouncing, barnyard fucking, no less frantic and feral than animals in the moonlight. “Good boy,” I growl once more as I pound into him. My arm is now wrapped around his neck; his chin rests in the crook. “Take it. Take it. Take your dad’s cum.”

When I release into him, he’s ready for it. His hole opens wide to receive my gift; simultaneously he turns on his side and takes me with him, as I continue to convulse, so he can release his swollen cock from its elastic confines. Still shooting, I reach around to feel it, feverish and slick in my grasp. “May I cum, Sir?” he begs.

“That depends on if you want more loads from dad,” I warn.

Immediately he releases his cock. I, too, take my hand away, in case he’s too close. “I do,” he admits. “I do want more loads. I can wait. Can you cum again?”

“I can.” I grind my cock into his prostate, feeling the button press back against the head.

The sensation makes him close his eyes. “Oh shit,” he says. The words are urgent. “I’m shooting. Sorry, dad. I’m shooting!”

I’m lying both beneath and beside him, with enough clearance to peer at his midsection. He’s not touching himself, but his his erection pulsates and shudders. One jerk toward the ceiling. Two. Then, hands-free, as his hole contracts around my only slightly softened dick, semen shoots from the tip. The thick fluid arcs through the air and lands on his abdomen. Another jet flies onto the blanket, a third onto his forearm. The remainder oozes from the tip in a slow and inexorable gush.

“Sorry,” he pants, genuinely mournful. “I wanted to hold out. But you just made my ass feel so fucking amazing.”

“That’s what dads are for,” I say, as I enfold the boy in my arms and hold him close.

Maybe I haven’t lost my touch, after all.

Redneck Rim Artist

I’m face down, sprawled diagonally across a double-sized mattress, listening for footsteps and hearing nothing louder than the refrigerator’s purr in the corner. I’ve turned on the bathroom bulb and closed the door so that only a cupful of light spills through the crack; at the hotel room’s other end, I’ve slipped the security latch between the outside door and its frame, keeping it slightly ajar. I’m facing away from the sliver of illumination from the parking lot and third-floor outdoors walkway, angled in my direction.

I’m naked, legs spread, pillow clutched to my chest. And I’m waiting for a stranger to join me.

He’d messaged me on the apps only twenty minutes before. I’m a lil horny. U?

I don’t usually talk to profiles without photos, but it’s my first night in Richmond. After a six-and-a-half-hour drive and dinner with my dad, maybe my judgment was impaired. Or maybe I’m intrigued by his screen name: RimUDown. Me too, I’d told him.

Looking for some ass to eat, he’d sent me. He’d followed up the invitation with a photo that had made my heart beat a little more quickly. The shot had been of him in baggy denim and an open plaid shirt with the arms ripped out. He’s twenty-six, maybe twenty-eight. A backward trucker hat tames a strawberry-blond mane. His shoulders are broad and defined; his biceps bulge. His chest is lightly furry. A treasure trail leads down from his navel to the top button of his jeans. It’s not the photo of a man posing for a mirror selfie—he’s tousled and carrying a rake as he laughs at the camera, as if someone he knows has caught him walking up the driveway from taking care of the lawn. Really need to munch a fuzzy hole for a long long time.

My insides had unglued at his words. I don’t get many men offering to eat my ass, even though I always crave a good rimming. Most bottoms seem more intent on getting my mouth on their own rears as a prelude to fucking, though intellectually I know the act doesn’t have to end in penetration. This stranger hasn’t mentioned topping me, though, or insinuated it's on his agenda. So I’d taken his offer at face value, and replied, Haven’t been eaten out in a real long time.

Let’s change that right now, he’d texted.

I’d immediately clicked the location button at the screen’s bottom, to let him know where I was.

That was fifteen minutes before. Moments ago, he’d sent a message to let me know he was in the parking lot. Before planting myself prone on the mattress, I’d given him the room number and cracked the door. And now I wait. I look at my watch. It’s 9:35.

My eyes are squeezed tight shut when I hear the door open, then shut behind him. There’s one soft thud, then two, as he kicks off his sneakers so they collide against the hotel room’s chair. His hands, warm, callused, seize my ass cheeks, They squeeze, pull, appraise. “Turn over,” says the boy in a soft drawl. “Let me see the man I’m gettin’.”

I obey. My cock is rigid, erect at an incline from my body, a textbook example of an acute angle. The shaggy-haired boy standing at the foot my my hotel bed is wearing the same trucker cap and jeans as in his photo, but tonight his top is clad in an old NASCAR tee that’s seen better days. Again, the arms have been ripped at at the seams to expose muscles of which he’s obviously proud. “Fuck, daddy,” he says, leaning down to rub his hand over my beard. “You are hotter’n hell.”

When he looms close, in the twilight I see his cheeks and chin are covered by wispy facial hair. He smells of beer. The stranger removes his hat, and allows his wavy flow to hang on the sides of his face. “Thank you,” I say, a little breathless as he reaches between my legs to feel me.

“Damn, daddy.” His fingertips pry at my hole. “I bet you're gonna taste good.” I watch as he removes his shirt, but leaves his pants intact. His arms are a deep red-brown, while his chest is nearly as white as my own—a real farmer’s tan. The boy's deep drawl and his dress and mannerisms have a direct effect on my cock, making it even more rigid. I’ve landed a redneck after my ass, and the knowledge leaves me panting.

As his probing becomes more insistent, he once more leans in close. Long hair tickles my ears and chin as his lips press against mine, surprisingly soft. Usually I’m not aroused by the taste of cigarettes on a man’s tongue, but I’m already hungering for his man’s attention. He could smoke a pack and I’d not bat an eye. “Get that ass up,” he orders, his voice still quiet. “I need t’get in there.”

I’ve barely managed to roll over when I feel the sensation of his hands forcing apart my cheeks, followed by the tickle of his hair on my skin. When his mouth meets my hole, I gasp aloud. With only twenty minutes between his first text on the app and our meeting, I’d not had the time for a deep douching—but I’m glad I had the foresight to hop in the shower and give myself a two-finger soap-and-rinse to the second knuckle.

The boy grunts as he dives in. The sensation of his mouth on my hole is so sudden, so forceful, that without knowing what I’m doing, I arch my back. My head flies up as I let out a cry of joy, or of need, or of animal instinct. Perhaps all three at once. He places the butt of his hand on the small of my back and pushes down. I’m his to command, for the duration of what’s to come.

From time to time his teeth scrape against my ass cheeks in gentle, lingering bites. Otherwise, though, his mouth never leaves my hole. For long minutes he licks and abrades his bearded chin against its tender length. He grunts like an animal as he takes me with his tongue, sending it deep within. I gasp and shudder when his cupped hand collides with my ass in a loud smack. “You like that, daddy?” he asks, releasing his prey from his mouth for the first time. “You like gettin’ your ass whupped?”

“Fuck yes, I do,” I manage to gasp. “I like it…sir.”

He lets out a feral growl. “Callin’ me sir is gonna make me get aggressive,” he warns.

The redneck is clenching my butt wide open; he’s already given me the most thorough rimming I’ve had in years. If he wants to get more aggressive, I’m willing to let him bring it on. “Do what you want...sir,” I manage to say, as I look over my shoulder.

I’m rewarded by him pulling himself beside me on the mattress. The flat of his hand lands on my ass with another slap. “What I want is to punish that ass, faggot,” he growls, as he kisses me roughly. He spanks me again, harder. My flesh prickles and twinges as the blood rushes to the surface, but I don’t regret my offer. The room echos with the sounds of his hand against my butt, as he wallops it again and again, pushing me closer to my limits. “Then reward it.”

And again I’m over the pillow, ass stinging from his thrashing. The hotel room’s air conditioning blows frigid air over my over-warm flesh as his mouth probes its deep, protected center. My eyes roll to the back of my head. Drool oozes from the corners of my mouth onto the sheets.

I don’t know how long he’s in there. I just know that for endless moments I’m his. Once every while I’ll moan when he gives me a paddling, no doubt adding depth of color to an ass already scarlet from his punishment. “Love me some handsome daddy ass,” he murmurs with affection at some moments. Then, at others, “Gimme that hole, faggot.”

I respond to both endearments with equal fervor. If he wanted to fuck me, I’d let him. But he never makes that move; he doesn’t even unbutton his jeans, though with insistence he humps the bed’s corner and sometimes plunges his hands beneath his tight, narrow waistband. He’d doing exactly what he promised, by giving my hole the attention it didn’t know it needed.

At one point he grabs a bottle of poppers from his pocket, twists off the cap, and inhales deeply. One side, then the other. “Your turn, cocksucker,” he growls. Before I know it, he’s straddling my ribs, cupping my chin with one hand to tilt back my head. He holds my left nostril shut and hands me the bottle. I half-cover its aperture with my thumb and take a deep sniff. He repeats the gesture on the right. “That’ll loosen you up good,” he says, satisfied, as he lands another smack on my backside.

His occasional paddlings keep me from completely drifting away on the waves of pleasure his lips and tongue set into motion. These sharp bursts of not-quite-pain are my anchor to reality, between what feels like the endless attention he pays to my hole. I alternate between whimpering and panting, between moaning and simply huffing with pleasure. At times he’s so determined to dive deeper that he propels me across the mattress. I scarcely notice that I’m contorted against the padded headboard or am even dangling off the mattress and sprawled halfway onto the floor until, with his rough hands, he grabs my waist and hauls me like a fertilizer sack back into position over the pillows. I’m no longer thinking. I’m operating on sensation and instinct only. I respond to his every order: Back that ass up, daddy, or C’mon, faggot. Open up that pucker for me.

After what could be an hour, or perhaps even days, he lifts himself up and sits on the edge of the mattress. I hear him twist open the cap of the bottled water I’ve left for him on the bedside table. Still trembling, my ass sore, I twist myself around and try to summon words. “I…that was fucking amazing,” I say, feeling sheepish at accepting so much attention. It’s a rare luxury to take a deep dive in that vast reservoir of pleasure. “You really didn’t have to…”

Sweat is pouring down his face, but he cuts me off with a grin. “Oh, I ain’t finished, daddy. Just getting my mouth wet for the real rim job I’m gonna give ya.” With a shove, he pushes me back into the pillows. "Now hush."

I am helpless to resist.

I look at my watch when, at last, he flops his back across the foot of his bed. It’s 11:42. The fucker has been at it for two hours. Two hours. My ass cheeks burn mildly, as if someone’s holding a flame to the bare skin; I swear I can feel every scrape of my redneck’s teeth across them still. “Damn, daddy,” he pants. In the dark, I can see how slick with sweat is his torso; a tattoo of Tigger dances across one deltoid. The redneck stretches like a cat. “You fuckin’ wore me out.”

He’s got to be kidding. I’m the one whose brain is still on the centrifuge he set into motion. “Let me do something for you,” I whisper. I don’t know who I’m kidding. At this point, I’m pleading.

“Y’ain’t gotta,” he assures. But neither does he protest when I loosen the button at his waistband, nor when I tug down his zipper. From a thatch of ginger hair springs his cock. It’s not especially large, but when it lunges upward, released from its prison of ragged denim, the sight of multiple filaments of the ample precum that’s been flowing for the last two hours, binding cock to pubes, make my own erection harder. Each sticky rope looks Lilliputian, tiny tethers straining to contain the giant, Gulliver. “C’mon,” he says, catching at my wrist as I dive forward. “You don’t gotta.”

I do gotta. I engulf his cock to the base, and then some. It’s salty from the fluid he’s been leaking and natural tasting, as if he’s been freeballing in these jeans all day. I have to show him my gratitude, though, and neither a bit of scent nor traces of hours-old pee are going to stop me. I caress his nuts in my left hand, and encircle the base of his meat with my right as I throat his thick, cut cock.

“Suck it, daddy,” he whispers at last. Both thumbs flick against his nipples. “Suck that hog, faggot. That’s what you wanted all night, wasn’t it.”

I grunt and nod.

When I look up for his response, he riffles fingers across my short hair. “Just like that. C’mon. Fuck!”

I’m prepared to suck for as long as it takes, considering the attention he’s lavished on me. But I’m barely a minute into the blow job when he lets loose his load. Growling obscenities, he clutches the back of my head with both hands and drives in deep, holding me down on him as his cock pulses and contracts. His cum is bitter-tasting on my tongue, but I swallow it all with gratitude. After a gasp for air, I go down on his softening dick and nurse it until every last oozing trace of his seed is down my throat. Then I settle back on my haunches on the floor, waiting to see what he’ll do.

After a moment he stirs, then laughs. “Didn’t expect you to do that, daddy.” He sits up and helps himself to what’s left of the bottle, then checks the cap to the poppers and shoves them in his pocket. “But you sure are good at it.”

“Thank you,” I say. Then I add, for his benefit, “Sir.”

He growls once more with pleasure at the title, then stands and yanks me to my feet. The cock that had been softening swells as it jabs against my thigh. It’s the first time I’ve stood since his arrival, and I now see I’m a full head taller than he. He’s still the boss, though, when he grabs the back of my neck and pulls me in for a deep kiss. “Beat that cock off thinking about me when I leave,” he orders, as he pulls on his tee.

It’s the one order tonight that I disobey. Even though I still stink of his spit and cum and sweat, and jerking off would bring me release, I content myself with lying there in the dark, atop that strange bed, sleepily remembering everything that’s gone before. It’s rare that I’m treated like another man's hole. I’m in no hurry to cut short the novelty.

He messages me on the app the next day, while I’m in a doctor’s waiting room, waiting for my father to emerge from the offices within. Sorry for tuckering out last night, it reads. Had a long day at work and didn’t have all the energy I wanted for eating that daddy hole. If you’re around tonight late, though, I’ll make it up to you.

My short bark of laughter attracts attention from the waiting room’s other occupants. Beneath my mask, I clear my throat and compose myself. I’d like that a lot. I’m yours tonight, sir.

What kind of underwear do you wear? he asks.

Trunks, I tell him.

He sends me a sad-faced emoji. I really love daddy in briefs, follows. If I walked into that hotel room and found my daddy faggot in briefs tonight, I might just have to lay him over my knees and give him a real paddling before I go to town on his hole.

I manage to catch the sharp inhalation his words arouse, before anyone around me can hear. Understood, sir, my fingers stab out on the screen. 

There’s a Target between my dad’s house and the hotel where I’m staying. I can pay a visit when I’ve dropped him off after dinner. My cheeks are still sensitive to the touch, but the notion of further manhandling excites them. I hate wearing briefs and think they look ridiculous...this evening, though, my redneck with the farmer’s tan will enter my room and find daddy face down, wearing a black pair by Hanes, ready and willing for as much abuse and molestation as he cares to deliver.

Last night was the work of a tuckered-out man? What the fuck are his usual rim jobs like, then?

I’m itching to find out.

Babyface: Part 1

Autumn 1985

Babyface, they call me. All the grad students in the English department have picked up on the moniker. “Hey, babyface,” they’ll say, as they pass me on the fourth floor of the Hibbs building. “How’re classes going, babyface?”

The nickname’s not used without affection. I’m well-liked within the department, much to my surprise. By the first two weeks of my Master’s degree program, I’d spoken up in class more than all four undergraduate years combined; I discovered my peers respected my opinions. The academic reputation that had taken a bruising as a sophomore and junior is on the rebound. Dr. Levan is a notoriously hard-to-please professor who teaches our academic methods class. He’s such a stickler for the MLA style that in our first assignment, only I and one other student escaped failing by producing error-free bibliographies. When, at the end of another class scolding, he had brandished one of my essays, called out my name, and announced, “This is of a quality that should be published!”, I’d feared from the other MA candidates the same sort of blackballing a teacher’s praise might have gotten me in high school.

But no, they were proud one of their own had gotten such high commendations from the most fearsome of faculty. Ever since, I’ve been in demand for study groups. The MFA students in creative writing invite me to the Village Cafe for coffee, where in a crowded booth, I nurse a cola and read as they hunch over their journals to scribble. When they throw bohemian parties in their little apartments, serving shots of Midori in jelly glasses, cross-legged on the floor, I’m always on the guest list. For the first time in my life, I’m popular—or whatever passes for it, among a certain subset of teaching assistants in one of the most minor graduate programs at a big university.

But still, when I emerge from the tiny office I occupy in shifts with two other students, it’s always to my new nickname. “Babyface!” they’ll say, dragging me by the sleeve to the terminal room. “I think the computer ate my paper. Come see if it’s really gone?” And I, with five years’ experience of writing long essays in EMACS, will follow.

The pet name is my own fault. An urban university attracts an older, working demographic. Most of my fellow graduate students are in their thirties and even forties. When I’d enrolled in the fall and found myself surrounded by scholars twice my age or more, I’d attracted attention. “How old are you?” they’d exclaim during break, or after class.

They gave the distinct impression they regarded my youth as freakish, and I, wary of being ostracized, demurred. “Oh, I just have one of those young-looking faces.”

They’d pry, trying to learn more. Wasn’t I fresh out of college? How old was I, exactly? My inclination is always to push back against public scrutiny of my private business; I share what I want, when and how, and not because of peer pressure. Through evasions and some outright lies, I finally manage to leave an impression I’m twenty-five and back in school after a break, instead of really being a hair past twenty-one, with an undergraduate diploma so fresh the ink is barely dry. Most of my freshman writing students are older than I. However, in my instructor drag—pleated tweed trousers and pinstripe dress shirts from the Spiegel catalog, my dad’s narrow ties from the nineteen-sixties—I have no problems leading a classroom. I assume a podium as if all my life I’ve been speaking in public before strangers. I’m engaging. Confident.

But still intensely private. My closest friend these days is Rand, a gangly thirty-five-year-old from Kentucky who has spent most of his adult life in the military. At times I wonder if I’m friends with Rand because in him I see an older, alternate-universe version of myself, one whose hair had gone from blond to pitch-black, like my mother, instead of remaining fair. If I’d not worn braces in my early teens, my teeth might be as crooked at his, my overbite as prominent; if I’d not gotten contact lenses, my spectacles might be as thick and unavoidable. Rand, however, is undeniably, doggedly heterosexual, though. His crush on one female teaching assistant is the stuff of legend. Whenever she walks into a room Rand occupies, he’s all puppy-dog eyes and wagging tail, an overgrown amiable Labrador anxious to please his mistress. I suspect it’s this behavior that accounts for the time I spend with Rand at school: his crush is discussed so much that it distracts any curiosity about my own affairs.

Not that there’s any romance in my life. Sex…some. I’ve returned to the Business Building men’s rooms when I’m horny. They’re nothing like a decade before, at the height of the seventies, when the overflow of men cruising for cock would spill upward, story by story, and one might encounter five floors of restrooms crammed with men in the stalls and at the urinals, eyes probing, mouths welcoming, hands reaching out to connect. A decade ago, there were only two venereal diseases of note and they both could be treated with antibiotics.

A decade ago, catching something wasn’t a death sentence.

Lately the restrooms are nothing like they might have been even three or four years in the past, much less ten. The long-standing second floor glory hole has long since been bolted over with metal plates on both sides. The graffiti urging men to show up at certain times or at other campus hot spots has disappeared. In the past I could walk into the room, take a stall, and within moments have an erect cock and a pair of spread legs shoving beneath the partition, demanding attention.

These days, I grade papers or read for my own seminars, the lone occupant of the echoing restroom. Sometimes, after a half-hour or more, someone will push open the door next to mine, drop his trousers, and tap his toe. But it always takes a long while, and sex is never a guarantee. A hand extending beneath a stall used to be a gay greeting, harmless and welcome as a fist bump. Now it’s a risk. A threat. A reminder that any stranger potentially carries the virus that feels like it will kill us all.

So men stay away. I wonder what they do now, in this strange new world in which we’re not supposed to touch or hunger for each other. Do they pleasure themselves while thinking of times past, as I often do? Do they limit their fantasies to the two-dimensional images within the pages of Honcho or Inches? Or do they deny themselves altogether, and think themselves more virtuous for doing so? Many of these men never thought of themselves as gay. Perhaps they’ve scampered back to their wives and girlfriends, reformed for good…or at least until they slip up.

And I sit in my solitary stall, back cramped, ass growing numb on the institutional seats, lonely and bored, wondering why I am the lone holdout who keeps returning when he shouldn’t.

It’s after one of these lengthy sessions that I limp back to the fourth-floor English Department and my office, backside dead after sitting in a stall for ninety fruitless minutes, intending to drop off the cache of freshman essays I’ve graded before I return home. Rand is waiting at my desk, however, his lengthy praying mantis limbs folded over each other. “Let’s do something,” he suggests.

“Like what?”

His brow furrows. “Coffee? Early dinner?” I shake my head. I’m not a coffee drinker, and three-thirty is too early for the evening meal. “Record store?”

To the last, I happily assent. Weekends, Rand and I sometimes meet at Plan 9 Records in Richmond’s Carytown. We’re both diehard vinyl collectors in a world of cassettes and lately, compact discs. Compact discs are new, however, and much as I covet their shiny, jewel-like surfaces, I can’t afford the four hundred dollars or more it would cost to buy a player. Vinyl is cheap, and the burgeoning market in used LPs makes them even cheaper. Carytown is a haul from campus, though. Bohannon’s on Grace Street is closer, but it sells more drug paraphernalia than it does actual music. “Beezie’s?” He nods at my suggestion.

Beezie’s Records sits on the southern edge of our urban campus. My bedroom at home is bigger than its retail space, but the elderly owner trades only in used LPs. B.Z. himself is an elderly man with the long stringy hair and affectations of a former hippie, who communicates only in grunts and sighs. When I show up with an armful of promo albums courtesy of my college friend Carol, who now works in music promotion, B.Z. will flip through the stack with a practiced eye, express his lamentation with a deep exhalation, slam the big knob on his mechanical cash register with the side of his fist, and slide over a few bills that usually within minutes I’ll spend upon albums from his bins. The closest to actual speech I’ve ever gotten from him was the one time he rejected an album: Claudja Barry’s I, Claudja, which he separated from my stack of trade-ins and pushed back over the counter at me with a firm, nuh-uh.

B.Z.’s not behind the counter by the front door when Rand and I squeeze into the little shop. My friend immediately heads toward the bins of used albums that sit on waist-high tables in neat lines. I linger by the counter for a moment, glancing through a stack the store’s owner has priced, but not yet shuffled into place. My current passion is Canadian band Martha & the Muffins; I’d do anything for a hard-to-find copy of their release of a couple of years before, Danseparc. There’s nothing in the M bins, though, nor do I find anything new by Robyn Hitchcock in the H’s. I’ve slid down to the D’s, vainly hoping I might stumble across Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Goes to Washington, which I’ve coveted for a few years, when someone emerges from the store’s back room to sit behind the counter. It’s not B.Z. But even B.Z. Isn’t much of a presence when he’s there, so I don’t pay much mind to his stand-in.

“Babyface!” Rand calls from the corner. He waves a release by the Allman Brothers Band, which is far from the kind of music I listen to, but I give him a thumbs-up. “You find anything yet?”

“Still browsing,” I say, turning back to the bins. Then I look up, and see B.Z.’s replacement regarding me, steadily. The clerk is in his mid-thirties and wears a hole-ridden, oversized cardigan that signals defeat. His hair is thinning. His eyes are big and sunken. Despite his gauntness, I recognize him instantly.

In my teens, I’d done a lot of low-key sex work, much of it facilitated by a man named Earl, a fellow habitué of the parks where I’d cruised. Through Earl, I’d met dozens of men willing to offer good money and a comfortable bed for an hour or two of the same services I’d been offering on my knees among the pines, gratis.

Earl had helped me open my first savings account for the money I was earning between other men’s sheets. I’d hung out at his Northside home throughout high school; for a handful of years he seemed like the only man who really saw me for what I was. When I had anxieties about college and my future, it wasn’t to my parents that I turned, but to Earl. His doors were always open when I needed refuge. I recognized from the start that his motives were never entirely pure, but neither were mine. His agenda of pimping out boys when it was convenient for his business interests aligned with the acquisitive ambitions of a kid whose family had little money to spare. Our use of the other was mutual and agreeable.

My time in Eden came to an end courtesy of Earl’s younger boyfriend, Jim. Jim occupied a renovated attic in Jim’s house. Much of the time, when he was home and I’d be visiting, he’d manifest only as the muffled choruses of Fleetwood Mac on his turntable and the acrid smell of weed. Other times, he’d make his disapproval of me known with vicious put-downs—remarks about my gangly limbs, or my bony body.

Jim’s dislike of me came to a head when he blamed me for a vicious falling-out he’d had with Earl. When he found an opportunity, he locked me into a closet in his garret, unsuccessfully attempted to phone my parents to tell them their son was a cocksucker, and then left me me imprisoned for the better part of a day. That night, Earl returned to find a feral beast screaming and trying to beat down the bolted door. I’d lunged at Earl full of fury and eager to draw blood, and Earl had sent me away. I’d never returned to the house nor seen either man, since.

Now, sitting on a stool behind the counter that was usually B.Z.’s throne, Jim glowers at me. During his best days he had always been unkempt and rawboned—thirty dressed for sixteen in graphic tees too tight and short for him, his clothing and uncut hair smelling of pot. I’m shocked to see him in this state, in that threadbare cardigan and an plaid shirt two sizes too large. He looks like a boy dressing in his daddy’s castoffs. The malice in those eyes is all that remains of the Jim I used to know.

Rand is still talking to himself behind me, as he flicks through the bins. Jim sneers, then twists my friend’s endearment into what sounds like a curse. “Well hello, babyface,” he says.

(Continued in Babyface: Part 2.)

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.