Your 2015 Resolutions

It’s the new year. You’ve decided you need to make some resolutions—get your life back on track.
I feel you. You’ve come to the right place. I’ve had all kinds of readers come out of the woodwork and ask me for advice in framing their declarations for 2015. I don’t blame them for trying. The first of January always brings a fresh new start. A clean slate. A new perspective. Three hundred and sixty-five pristine days ripe with opportunity.

Yet I’m afraid that some of you guys will squander the opportunity by coming up with resolutions that are . . . well. Let’s just say flabby. Underdeveloped, maybe. Every year I hear from guys, “This is the year I intend to improve myself!”

“Fantastic!” I’ll reply. “What are you going to do? Learn a new language? Read that volume of Proust? Take up the banjolele?”

“No,” they’ll say, blinking. “I mean I’m going to take care of myself.”

“Fantastic! So what, you’re going to learn to cook? Start an IRA?”

“Uh, no, dude,” they’ll say, looking at me as if I’ve suddenly sprouted an extra head. “I’m going to go to the gym and work out every day.”

Listen. I’ve got nothing against you guys who enjoy going to the gym. Quite the contrary. I have mounted many a gym bunny over the years. They can be fun. But I’m old enough and wise enough to know that improving yourself is more than just being able to take a better shirtless selfie.

Trust me on that.

Behind all the mania for gym memberships this time of year, for gay and straight men alike, is deep down a conviction that without that perfect body we’ve all seen in porn videos and on magazine covers and in cologne ads, we simply won’t get laid. Physical fitness is grand and the cardiopulmonary benefits are fantastic and the autoimmune response to exercise yadda yadda yadda, but at heart there’s a conviction so many people have this time of year: that nobody’s going to want you in bed if you can’t pose sideways in a mirror, lean back at the perfect angle, and snap a pretty shot of yourself in your best pair of name-brand underwear.

If you think that all you have to bring to the table is a good shirtless selfie for Grindr and maybe a V chiseled at your waistline, son, you are going to have a rude awakening down the road. There’s nothing wrong with being buff. I’m not saying it’s silly or stupid or trite. But unless you’re intending as well to do a little work on your personality, your outlook, and your brain, your chances of getting laid in 2015 are going to be about as much as they were in 2014 . . . and for a lot of you, judging by my email, that’s anywhere between average to dismal.

So here I am to offer up three simple suggestions for self-improvement.

You’re welcome in advance.

1. Try saying ‘yes’ more often. These days I look at profiles online, or at the descriptions of yourselves in the apps all you young whippersnappers are using, and I still shake my head and marvel how some of you manage to get your dicks wet. “No fats, no fems” still appears from time to time (what is this, America Online in 1993?). “No guys older than my dad!” “No blacks!” “No white men!” “No married men!” “No guys in a relationship please!”

And then there are the ‘you must bes.’ “You must take care of yourself.” “You must have a regular job like me.” “You must be HIV-negative.” “You must be all top.” “You must live within 9 miles of me.” They’re just another way of saying no. Of exerting a false sense of control. Of walling yourself off from experience, brick by brick.

Guys, step outside those little comfort zones. You can tell yourself all you want that your preferences are your preferences and that you can’t change them. The truth of the matter, however, is that the nests you’ve made for yourselves are often incredibly small (and small-minded). With every ‘no’ you utter, with every large subset of humanity or experience you reject out of hand, you’re just putting another brick in that wall.

So say yes. Have a date with a guy ten years older than you’d ordinarily consider. There’s no obligation to sleep with him, or to see him again if you’re genuinely not interested. Try topping instead of bottoming sometime—or vice versa—instead of stomping your foot and insisting you’ve got a role and you’re sticking to it. Say yes, you’ll go to that sex party you’ve been interested in attending but haven’t yet gotten the nerve. Say yes, you’ll try something different.

You want real self-improvement? Stop turning up your nose to opportunity and start saying yes to the many fantastic experiences that life has to offer.

2. Stop thinking about the sex you want. Start having it. You know what the problem is with most of you poor motherfuckers? You jack off too much. You pull up a website and watch amateur porn, you swipe on your phone and bring up a movie, you pop in a DVD and you whack off. Pbbbt. Job’s done.

I get it. It’s easier to jack than it is to make human contact. Meeting a guy is tough stuff. You have to clean up (and clean out). You have to get dressed, get in the car or get on the subway, travel. There’s that awkward conversation before and after. The sex might not even be good—it’s a crap shoot sometimes. Your hand and a good fuck flick is a sure thing. You can do it in your sweatpants. Your hand doesn’t care that you haven’t showered or shaved. You don’t feel obligated, while you’re getting dressed after, to ask your flushed palm about whether or not it had a happy childhood or how long it’s lived at its place. Five minutes, and you’re back to watching Netflix while feeling nice and relaxed.

But fuck, guys. If you’re jacking off three, four, seven, ten times a day (you know who you are) and using that as a substitute for any kind of intimacy with another guy, you’ve kind of lost the right to rant and rail against your lack of a real sex life. Masturbation is fine as a quick release valve. I recommend it for girls and boys of all ages. It is, however, a mere Tootsie Roll of sexual nourishment. And none of you muscleheads so intent on improving yourselves would ever make an entire diet of Tootsie Rolls.

So take your hands out of your pants and get the fuck out into the world. You can have the sex you want. In the immortal words of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: don’t dream it. Be it.

3. Get your asses on PrEP. If you’re HIV-negative and want to stay that way, and you’re barebacking, you should be on a prescribed course of Truvada, courtesy of your physician. Full stop.

PrEP, of course, is an abbreviation for pre-exposure prophylaxis, in which men (and women) who have tested as HIV-negative take a pill every day; it contains medicines that prevent HIV from being able to infect someone exposed to it. Its effectiveness is as good as, or better than condoms, depending on what studies you read. No, it doesn’t prevent one from catching other sexually-transmitted diseases, as many will be quick to point out. But you know what? Condoms aren’t totally effective against that, either. And unless you’re using a condom during oral sex—and no one is except for that one solitary weird guy without any photos on Adam4Adam who stridently insists on it in his profile—you can still catch those other diseases during your foreplay.

“But I’m not one of those barebackers,” says the man who does indeed bareback with his boyfriend, but doesn’t know his boyfriend is fucking around behind his back and exposing him to risk. Or, “I’m not one of those awful people who has unsafe sex!” says the fellow with the spotless online profile who has the date of his last test proudly displayed (“NEG AND STAYING THAT WAY!!!” emblazoned beside it) . . . and yet who caves in front of a cock like mine and tells me that although he doesn’t really fuck raw, he’ll make an exception.

Or maybe you’re one of those guys who admits that he barebacks and needs the intimacy and warmth of it from time to time, but thinks you’re doing the right thing by picking the guy on Scruff or Manhunt who has ‘neg’ listed in his profile and asking him to play raw with you. There are an awful lot of you out there, too. I’ve fucked you.

It’s time for some truth-telling. There are all kinds of sneaky little games you guys play with yourselves to enable yourselves to fuck raw, all kinds of voodoo calculations and self-delusions. It’s a new year, though, and we’re writing some resolutions for ourselves, so let’s face up to the facts: we engage in these unhelpful behaviors because we’ve convinced ourselves that barebacking is a bad behavior.

It’s not. People enjoy barebacking. Humans have barebacked for the vast majority of history. They watch bareback porn. They read bareback blogs. In fact, you know who’s barebacked? Your mama.
Guys bareback. You are likely going to bareback. Do-gooders can tsk and chide all we want, but it happens. Take responsibility for your behaviors, if you’re neg and truly intend to stay that way. It’s not up to your parents, or your doctor, or your husband or wife. It’s not up to the guy who fucks you. Admit what you’re doing, take responsibility, see your doctor, and get on PrEP.

But I can’t get on PrEP, I hear you whine. I’m worried about the side effects. You know what? We have all heard way too many god-damned people worrying about the god-damned side effects of god-damned Truvada. I have a friend on Facebook who went on PrEP (and good for him!) but who has, every day since, seen fit to announce to broadcast EVERY DAY the side effects. Not that he’s experienced any, mind you. On day thirteen he had a little bit of digestive trouble but it could have been, he readily admits, the Thai food. But for forty-odd days, now, I’ve been treated to daily recountings of hypochondria that rival Andy Warhol at his most paranoid.

Frankly, when my friends go on Ambien, or anti-depressants, or meds for high cholesterol, or pills for acid reflux, or aspirin, or any of the pills we take on a daily basis, none of them feel compelled to relate the side effects—or even think much about them. Combine side effects with PrEP, though, and suddenly everyone’s all concerned. It’s as if we’re still convinced that we have to pay, somehow, for a pill that might improve our sexual experiences. You know what? Shut up and take the damned pill. If you are the one-in-a-million person who experiences constant flatulence or kidney failure, you have my permission and encouragement to discontinue what is at heart a completely optional drug.

But I can’t get on PrEP, you’re saying. It’s too expensive! Yes. It is expensive. Very fucking expensive, if you ask me. But you know, unless you go to your doctor and discuss Truvada with him or with her—including its cost—you’re not going to know exactly how much out of pocket you may be. Your health insurance may cover a big chunk of it. You may be eligible for a discount from the manufacturer for a healthy portion. The state in which you live may have programs for which you are eligible that will help cover the costs.

Instead of sitting back and deciding for yourself that it’s out of your range, get up and make a few phone calls. Talk to your medical professional. Try your local gay and lesbian community center and ask them about potential programs. Search online. Don’t concede without a fight; do what you can to make it happen. Because you deserve it.

Now, if you’re an HIV-positive guy, you can amend this resolution to read that you’ll keep your asses on your daily antiretroviral regime that’ll keep HIV to an inert level. If anyone reading this is still convinced that their HIV-positive brothers on antiretrovirals are somehow tainted or untouchable because they carry a virus—even though it’s not doing them or anyone else any active harm—you know what’s another virus that stays in your bloodstream for life, virtually inactive, after you’ve been infected with it? German measles. And I don’t see any of you being all self-righteous and proclaiming in your profiles, “GERMAN MEASLES FREE AND STAYING THAT WAY!!!” So get over yourselves.

There. Now you’ve got a start on your resolutions. You can figure out the rest for yourselves. But you know what I’d suggest? Resolve to be kinder to each other. Resolve to be kinder to yourselves. Resolve to be honest, and responsible, and to treat every person in your life in the way you would like to be treated.

If you ask me, that’s improving yourself.

What are my resolutions, you ask? Why, it’s to be even foxier than I was in 2014 . . . Which admittedly is a high bar to set, since I was already pretty damned foxy. What else?

Alignments

New York City is a wonderful place to be alone. I know, I know—it’s a place where citizens jostle shoulder to shoulder in the subways and streets, where restaurant patrons should expect to be wedged together at tiny tables like pieces in a tight puzzle. It’s a city of noise and conversation . . . other people’s noises and conversations, that is. Welcome or not, they’re an unceasing white noise to the honking, the roar of the busses and trains, the clatter of construction. It’s a metropolis where you always seem to be swimming against the tide to get anywhere, against a crowd of faces you don’t recognize.

And that’s exactly why I find it ideal to become lost in. In a city this enormous, I’m a tiny singularity. A grain of sand in your bed attracts attention. You can’t escape that. But who distinguishes between the multitudes of grains of sand on a beach?

In New York, no one’s paying attention to me—they’ve got other things on their minds. Jobs, crises, sightseeing attractions, love affairs, worries, woes. Nobody knows my name, knows where I came from, where I’m going. I could appear—and have appeared—in the backgrounds of countless tourist photos in Grand Central or Times Square. Even then, captured and still in mid-stride, I’m not really there. I’m just part of the gray blur.

And yet, New York City is also the kind of place in which I’m always running across people I know, more so than the smaller cities in which I’ve lived before. I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop deep in an out-of-the-way neighborhood, when someone I know from Los Angeles will casually walk in. That guy I met at social party in White Plains will walk past me on the street and say hello. With so many millions of people crammed onto so small an island, the sheer probability is that two of them, familiar with each other, will collide at some point.

That was the case with me, this last week. I’d gotten tickets to a show with a couple of friends. Great seats, in fact. Close enough to the stage to be spat upon by the actors—always a sign of quality. I’d arrived early enough to get my program, take off my coat, check in on Facebook, settle in. I was coming back from a quick run to the bathroom (it’s easier to go before the show, than to try at intermission, trust me) when I resumed my seat, turned around to scan the crowd, and felt a flash of recognition. Someone I knew was sitting near me.

When I wrote in November about my hiatus from both fucking and my blog, I mentioned there was a guy I’d been seeing. One of the big reasons for my officially-declared Boys ‘R’ Stupid Month had been because of this particular gentleman. He was mature—younger than I, but old enough to have grey in his hair. Handsome as hell. Muscular. Successful. Every time we connected he made me feel special. Like I was more than just a fuck to him. He was romantic with me, and made extravagant promises of even more spectacular times together. Then he up and vanished. Didn’t return calls, texts, emails. There comes a point at which didn’t want to be That Guy—you know, the one who keeps sending increasingly forlorn texts out into dead space. So I stopped.

And there he was, my handsome former playmate, sitting not seven feet away. Well, fuck, I thought to myself.

That wasn’t the end of it. I was sitting there, rolling the Playbill in my hands and feeling hunched-over and miserable, when not thirty seconds later I saw someone else stroll down the aisle. He was dressed in a suit. Tall, slender long-haired, beautiful. The kind of man who stands out in any crowd. Heads turned to admire him as he passed.

I knew him, too.

I’ve never discussed this publicly in my blog before, but for about eleven months of 2013 I was seeing someone. And seeing him fairly exclusively, too. Although I wrote about him a few times in a casual way, I never really addressed the fact that I was heavily involved both emotionally and physically with the young man. I kept silent for a couple of reasons. One was that when I was involved with the dancer, Spencer, a few years ago, I eventually came to regret sharing so much of both the joy and the pain of it in the pages of my blog. I loved Spencer. Readers loved Spencer. Readers wanted me to end up with Spencer. When I didn’t ride off with Spencer into the sunset—even though our eventual separation was always a foregone conclusion—a lot of my readers treated me as if I’d done the unforgiveable. The rest of my readers understood, but always seemed to be waiting for me to generate a Spencer replacement to fill that void in my life.

This guy was not a Spencer replacement. We made passionate love several times a week. I was deeply fond of him. Many of my happiest memories of 2013 were of time spent in his company. Of walking down the street, holding his hand. Of lying in bed and attempting to help him with his many problems. I was protective enough at the time, though, that I didn’t want my readers thinking I’d found a replacement for Spencer. I was also wary about sharing too much information about him—or about my feelings—because at the time I was also just coming off a particularly scary incident with a blog reader who was stalking me in my real life. Sharing details just didn’t seem prudent, either from a practical standpoint, or for my emotional well-being. I kept quiet, for the most part.

Then, after many months spent in his company, this beautiful young man moved from a nearby apartment into one that was further away . . . though not out of reach. It might as well have been Siberia, though, the way it turned out. Because basically, after he moved, the affair was over. I never saw him again. I’d text him the way I used to, and get a delayed response. Then fewer responses. Then no responses at all. He didn’t return emails, or phone calls. I felt as if I’d been erased from his life with no warning and no explanation. It hurt me deeply. And I didn’t want to write about my despondence in my blog, either.

But there was this guy, in the flesh for the first time before me since I’d helped him pack his belongings into a U-Haul truck, walking down the carpet of the theater like a male supermodel, oblivious to my presence. He took a seat across the aisle from me, one aisle down. Well, FUCK, I thought to myself.

So I sat there in this massive crowd of people, friends on either side, a former trick immediately behind me, a longer-time lover ten feet to my left. And all I could wonder was what I had done wrong to deserve this weird conjunction of events. I wanted to sink into the ground, actually, and let it swallow me up for good.

But you know what? That black mood didn’t last long. With both guys I’d ended up feeling treated shabbily, but I hadn’t really done anything wrong to either of them. Theoretically, I already knew it; thanks to a quirk of fate or a twist of probability, having them both in proximity to me, like some kind of ominous alignment of stars, nailed home the reality. I hadn’t done anything wrong to them. There was absolutely no reason for me to be ashamed of my behavior. If anyone was to do the slinking down in his seat, it sure as hell wasn’t me.

So I sat up. I uncurled the Playbill out of the tight baton into which I’d made it. I moved my focus from the two unfortunate points behind and beside me, and started chatting to my friends once again. I damn well made sure that neither guy was going to ruin my show. During the intermission, I didn’t hide myself with hunched shoulders. I didn’t avoid turning around. Neither man saw me, as it turned out—or at least, they didn’t let on that they did. I was just part of the background blur. One of the crowd. And that was fine. I had a great evening after all.

I’ve always been convinced that the universe gives us what we need, when it’s appropriate to receive it. Sometimes it’s a reminder of former events gone wrong. Sometimes it’s a wake-up call. Sometimes it’s a person. I’m glad I received, in the handful of last days of 2014, a reminder of past disappointments.

Even more happily, I’m grateful to face the fears they stir and realize once and for all that not only have I moved on—but moved on for the better.

Here’s to 2015, everyone.

First Date

In my youth I never dated. I never experienced that first blush of embarrassment upon asking a girl (or a boy) out for a movie. I never had to work up the nerve to ask someone out to the junior prom. I never suffered from telephone paralysis trying to summon up courage to utter the words, “I was wondering if you'd maybe like to go out with me sometime. . . ?”

The whole dating thing, from my perspective then, was just a long and unnecessary preamble to getting laid. I could get laid. I got laid. To get laid as a teen all I had to do was bike down to the local park, skulk around the public men’s rooms in the woods, and collect as many loads as I wanted to take. A couple of hours later, I could be back home, satiated, to read a book or play with my Atari 2600 or practice my piano. To get laid, I could get a ride with my parents to the university at which they taught, telling them I had to do ‘research’ in the library for school. Most of my research I'd do in a kneeling position in the tiles of the library or campus center cruise men’s room, but the results verified every scientific theory I every had that men really, really, really liked to blow their loads in the mouth of a twinky blond cocksucker.

In college if I wanted to get laid, all I needed to do was walk to one of the campus’ many cruise areas—the student center restroom, the tiny park next to the tourist bus stop, the dark and isolated men’s rooms in the college library. I had a boyfriend of sorts in college, but we didn't date. We didn't even really eat together at the campus cafeteria. We pretended we didn’t know each other by day, and then fucked and declared undying love for each other in the dark shadows of night where no one else might see us and suspect our deep homosexual passions.

My cynical view of dating was deeply colored, however, by the fact I intended to live single, forever. At the time I considered myself not only unlikely in my lifetime to form any lasting emotional attachments, but unworthy of any such thing. All I have to do is look back in my journals of the time to see my convictions; I repeatedly attempted to convince myself that it would be best to live to an old age without ever declaring my passions to anyone.

I thought it would be kindest, both to my parents and to my friends and extended family, never to let them know I preferred sex with men to the more traditional arrangements they might have expected of me. I’d had sex on the sly for years; I reckoned to myself that I could continue that way for a few decades. Then one day, when I was exceptionally ancient—forty-five, say—I'd give up sex altogether and live the celibate life of a confirmed bachelor. A flat, a cat, and a lonely adulthood until I died with a saint-like smile on my face derived from the satisfaction of knowing I'd never discommoded anyone with my inconvenient lifestyle.

This was, of course, back in the nineteen-seventies and eighties—which might as well have been centuries ago, in terms of how far we've advanced with the rights of the LGBT population since. But I lived in the American South, in a very small, very conservative city. I didn't know a single out adult. I'd only been exposed to gay life as a subculture of secrecy and sneaking and fleeting moments of pleasure with as little emotional connection as possible.

I thought I’d made my peace with all that. I’d settle. I’d make do.

So perhaps it’s not wildly impossible to comprehend why I didn't actually go on an official date with someone until my first year of graduate school. I would have been about twenty-one at the time. I’d moved back in with my parents for a couple of years after college, but I was studying full time and teaching multiple sections of undergraduate entry-level classes. I lived in an apartment in the basement of their house, and had my own entrance. I’d won a scholarship. My grades were A’s, straight across the board. It sounds like I had my shit together. But in fact, I was a nervous and bumbling boob when it came to normal human interaction with anyone, especially men.

I don't remember the guy’s name. I barely remember what he looked like—I have an impression of him being slight of build, balding, bearded, handsome. Older than me by at least twenty-five years. Very attractive. We met—of course—in some kind of cruising place. Probably the second or third floor of the Business Building on campus, which had notoriously seedy men’s rooms that even in 1986 were packed to occupancy from mid-afternoon until the building was closed. After I'd taken care of this particular guy—through one of the glory holes, under the stall, I don't remember—he chased me out of the men’s room and spoke to me at length outside. He'd enjoyed being with me. He wanted to see me again. How about Friday night?

I'd had men chase me out of the tearooms before. They'd enjoyed my holes so much that of course they wanted more. That part didn't scare me. I was used to going home with men and fucking. What surprised me with this guy, though, was that when I met him in a campus parking lot for our date that Saturday night, was that he didn't immediately take me to his place. No, he wanted to get something to eat.

Almost immediately this strange turn of events three me into a tailspin. Eat? Eat dinner the hour of seven-thirty at night? My family usually bolted down its meals at five-thirty. The college cafeteria had closed at seven. I was vaguely aware that restaurants might have been open after the sun set, but certainly no God-fearing red-blooded Amurrican I knew would ever consider eating at that late hour. Not unless they were trying to prove how much more superior they were, like some kind of European or something.

I was also uncomfortable with the venue to which he took me. Eating out to me then meant chain restaurants. My dad loves his chain restaurants. Eating out, to me, involved a big colorful menu with pictures of the food items at somewhere like the Big Boy, where the family sat in an isolated booth and ate food that tasted like food from every other Big Boy anywhere else there might have been a Big Boy.

This guy, though, took me to a cute and tiny place where the menu was printed on a thick, unlaminated stock of paper that contained absolutely no pictures of the entrees whatsoever. There were no booths in the narrow little space. There were only tables lined up in what I naively thought was New York City-style restaurant seating—tight and cramped and intended to accommodate as many folks as possible. (Of course, having lived in New York for a few years now and having eaten quite a lot at its exceedingly cozy establishments, I’m aware that little restaurant in Richmond was airy and spacious in comparison. A New Yorker would look over the shoulder of the three strangers wedged in next to him, seen the actual elbow room between diners, and laughed in derision.)

What was worse was that this guy wanted to talk. During dinner. While I sat there staring at the solitary glass of water that was my meal (I’d already eaten at five-thirty, like a normal person), my date animatedly ate the food he’d ordered in enormous quantities while he peppered me with questions like, “So how long have you known you’d rather be with guys?” Or, “Have you come out to your parents yet?”

In public. Where people might overhear.

In my adolescent imagination, everyone was already gawking at the two of us and carrying on scandalized conversations behind cupped hands. Do you see those two over there? Confirmed homosexuals! You don’t say? Well I never! I think one of them is the son of that college professor! Oh no! What will his parents think? Wasn’t he a good student? Such a shame! Do you think his former Boy Scout leader knows? That kind of thing. They weren’t, of course, but I wasn’t accustomed to being out in public with any of my tricks. If he wanted to ask me questions like that, my reasoning ran, he should have done it in bed, behind closed doors. And maybe in a whisper.

At least a hushed voice, which is not what he used in the restaurant. I hunched over my water, glowered, and wished myself somewhere else. Anywhere else, in fact.

The dinner seemed to last forever. In my imagination, it had about fourteen courses, all of them exquisitely slow. Finally he paid his check, folded the napkin in his lap, and escorted me outside.

“Now,” he announced. “Let me take you to a movie.”

I had to endure dinner with a handsome guy? And then a movie? Oh god. I could’ve died.

We ended up at the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil at the Regency Mall. The theater itself was packed. I kept worrying that someone I knew would see me. And worse, the movie itself didn’t start until well after nine, and I didn’t know how long it was supposed to last. An hour and a half? Two? I spent the entire duration of the film miserable and trying to make mental calculations about what time the film would get out, and how long it would take to drive back across town to the campus where my car was parked, and what time I’d finally get home.

None of my calculations, even the most generous, seemed to indicate I’d make it back before midnight. Because of that, I was miserable. I felt like a sixth-grader staying out well past his curfew. I felt like a criminal.

It was an over-reaction, sure. And a silly one at that. Even though I was legally an adult and didn’t have to ask my parents permission to go out at night or stay out, I’d never actually been out that late before. Ever. If I had night classes I was still home by nine-thirty; I didn’t have that many friends in the area to do things with. My parents had never once known me to go out with anyone. My staying out past midnight was unprecedented. Inconceivable, really. I sat there in the dark theater, flinching whenever my friend would attempt to put his hand on my leg in an inconspicuous way, with a brain fevered by fear. Would my parents yell at me? Could they yell at me, at my age? Would they demand to know why I’d been out much later than I’d told them? Would they ask me with whom? Already I was trying to fabricate excuses and fibs about how I’d spent my evening. I couldn’t pay attention to the movie, in all its excess. I was too fucking miserable.

As I predicted, we didn’t get out until close to midnight. To say I was tense during that trip back to the campus where I was parked would be a massive understatement. I was rigid. In the passenger seat of his car, I had my right foot pressed hard against the floor where the accelerator would’ve been had I been driving, hoping I might somehow psychically influence him to take it a little faster. When finally he pulled up next to my car and turned off the ignition, I was so anxious to get going that I basically shouted, “WELL BYE!”

“I was hoping you might want to go home and spend the night with me,” he protested, rather mildly.

“I can’t,” I said. I was angry, at that point. If he’d wanted me to go home with him, he could’ve done it hours before.

“You don’t want to go home with me?” he asked.

“I can’t,” was all I could say.

He seemed deflated. “But why not?”

For the first time all evening, it hit home what a real ass I was being. “I just can’t,” I told him. Then I got out of his car, got into mine, and raced home like my life depended upon it. It was about twelve-thirty when I slunk into my basement apartment and directly into my bed, where I let the sheets cool my face and my embarrassment.

I felt badly about how I’d treated the guy for days—years—afterward. I mean, I’d been an ungrateful little shit. I’d been sullen, and childish, and had let my own provincialism trump my manners and good sense. I’d let fear cheat me out of an enjoyable evening, and a man who was interested in me as something more than a pair of holes. I felt embarrassed that as adult as I was by the legal definition, I wasn’t adult enough to manage a little civility. I wasn’t adult enough to be able to change the topic, to ask him questions of my own, or even simply to relax and be what I was without worrying about what others might think of me. I’d handled the whole thing badly from beginning to end, and hurt a man’s feelings.

I got an unflattering glimpse of myself in a mirror, and I decided I didn’t like what I saw. I never treated a date like that again. I grew from that night.

The irony of the whole thing, of course, is that the next day when I met my parents with glib lies about how I’d met some of my graduate school friends for dinner and how we’d all spontaneously decided to go see a movie together, it turned out they didn’t really give a crap how late I’d stayed out. They were thrilled that I’d been out socializing. In fact, they’d always thought it a little worrisome about how introverted I’d been since I moved back home. Didn’t I want to go out more often?

I never saw my first date after our abortive evening together. I don’t blame him for avoiding me, frankly. One good thing came out of that evening, though: after such a terrible first experience with dating, the only place to go was up.


A special holiday note to my readers: don't forget you can send me a thank-you gift for Christmas! Or even some holiday email would be awesome.

Secrets

Outside the bedroom window, dark muffles the city. Like a woolen blanket, it settles on the river and renders bridges into vague memories of their former shapes. It hushes the sounds of barking dogs, the scrape of thick-booted soles on the pavement, the distant hum of traffic.

Inside the apartment, the two of us nestle among a few stolen hours. The old radiator rattles and clanks into life. The heat it produces is nearly overwhelming. My boy has left the window open to compensate. Occasionally frigid air, sharp and thin as a blade, slices across out bodies, followed by those diffused, distant sounds from the dark metropolis.

I barely hear them. My focus is on the here and now, on the boy who has slithered his way down my torso to nestle between my legs. Kent’s hands clutch my waistband and toy with the button. “May I?” he asks.

Oh yes. He may.

At my nod he unbuttons the denim. I lift my hips; he tugs the jeans down to mid-thigh. My erection flops onto my stomach with a loud slap. Slowly, lingeringly, he cups his strong hand around my length. His lips part. When he opens his mouth, I feel the warmth from his breath, even more summery than the radiator that’s keeping the room toasty. It's like a furnace blast, his heat.

“Wait,” I tell him at the last possible second.

He looks up at me, his face a bewilderment of emotions. Confusion. Curiosity. The disappointment of a boy denied his favorite toy.

“I want you to memorize this dick tonight,” I tell him. My voice is soft, insistent. I'm dimly aware I sound as if I'm attempting to hypnotize the boy. “Really memorize it. I want you to know this dick better than anyone else’s. Understand?”

His fist keeps my throbbing meat pointed to the ceiling. “Yes, Sir,” he agrees.

I'm pleased not merely at his agreement. I'm pleased because he really listens to me. He likes the instruction. Thrives on it. When I stare into his eyes, he's right there with me, not breaking our gaze, hardly blinking.

For the thousandth time I think to myself how fucking beautiful this kid is. Not matter how much he attempts to slick down his hair, it tousles itself as it dries, then springs into a boyish curliness. Those eyes are as clear and pure as his thoughts and deeds are anything but. He looks wholesome—the kind of boy every guy would be proud to bring home to mom.

And I own his hole. Mine. That beautiful furry pucker is all mine. My dick leaps in his hand at the thought, causing him to hold it a fraction more tightly. “Son,” I tell him. “I want you to know every inch of that dick. Every bulge. Every vein. The way it curves. Every hair at its base.” He nods, absorbing every word. “I want you to know that cock better than any cock you've ever known in your whole life. I want you to know that cock better than any fuck partner you've ever had. Better than your husband’s.” I let that one sink in. “Better than even your own. Understand?”

He’s still totally with me. “That's what I'm here for, Sir,” he agrees. “Your pleasure, Sir. You own me.”

“That’s right. I own you. And your owner wants you to get to work,” I instruct. I lie back against the headboard, linked fingers providing a hammock for the back of my head. And I watch.

Fixated on my eyes, he lowers his head and moves his mouth to my balls. Our stares are still fastened on each other when his tongue darts out, makes itself broad and flat, and begins to lap at my nuts. Fuck. It feels good. He's going nice and slow and taking his time to wet them up. All the time he’s lapping at my tender flesh, he’s watching me, judging my reaction. It's tough to stay stoic under this sweet torture. I grab the pillow from the head of the bed, stuff it under my neck, lay back, and groan. As my eyes close, I see his narrow with satisfaction. He know he's doing his job—doing it right, and doing it with enthusiasm, too.

He opens his mouth. It widens and stretches to accommodate my girth. I feel a flash of warm breath, the tenderness of his lips on my shaft, and then wetness as his tongue and cheeks softly embrace me. My cock becomes his total focus. He breaks his stare with me, though he continues gauging my pleasure with quick glances now and again. Right now his entire universe can be measured in eight slick inches.

This is what I like best about the boy’s blow jobs: he's not fixated on my cock’s head, or so anxious to get to its base that he neglects what's in between. His is the first blow job I've had in ages—years, if I’m being honest—in which I've been able to appreciate his work along every fucking inch. I feel his tongue and lips below the flare of my crown, an inch below, four inches along the shaft. He's not just pleasuring one little spot, or a localized area. He wants the whole thing to feel good.

And it does. My legs are shaking from the intensity of his attention. He's taking my admonition to heart. He's not in a hurry to get me off. The opposite, if anything. Kent is making slow, lingering love to my dick, and relishing every moment of it. He’s not propelling me along to an orgasm. He’s eking out every shiver, every half-laugh, every sharp intake of breath and quick jolt of electric energy up and down my spine. He’s giving me indulgence for its own sake. Everything he does is for my pleasure.

I'm trying to relax, but he's making it impossible. It feels as if my shaft is growing more and more rigid by the microsecond. I alternate between sinking into the soft mattress and heaving slow, grateful breaths, or panting rapidly at the sheer intensity of the tickling, deliberate ministrations of his lips and mouth along my length.

He loves that dick. He loves my dick, because it belongs to me. He's memorizing it, just like I instructed. Every vein. Every bulge. Its gentle curve. His tongue is tracing the shape of my shaft so he can recall it later. He’s making his mouth my home.

There’s a big difference between this kind of treatment and an everyday blow job. I always tell my special men that I want to fuck them so well and fuck them so thoroughly that they will forever regret any dick that's not my own. He seems to have a similar agenda. Any other head I get in the future I'll be comparing to his. Every damn time. And every damn time the other poor sucker is going to come up short.

He’s already discovered secrets about my cock that even I didn’t know. God damn him for being so good.

It’s a long time later that I get my revenge. He’s on his back, legs held wide apart in the air. I’ve crammed a pillow under the small of his back so I can get his butt high and at the perfect angle for wrecking. “Go slow,” he begs. He means it. I’m large. He’s apprehensive. “Please, Sir.”

I smile down at him as my lubed-up head disappears into his glistening flesh. My cock is purple with engorged need; I watch it disappear inch by inch.

“Slow,” he begs. His eyes are half-closed. He’s turned his head to the side. He looks as if he’s falling asleep. The grunt of satisfaction he lets out when I reach the bottom, however, tells me he’s merely lost in the sensations.

“Sssshh,” I whisper to him. “You don’t need me to go slow.” I knew how his hole reacted when I jammed my fingers inside to lube him. I could tell by how he welcomed my shaft inside that he didn’t need any special treatment. This is only our second meeting, and already his ass is conforming itself to the unique shape of my dick. It’s reshaping itself, making itself ready for me and only me.

I’ve discovered secrets about his ass, too.

And he doesn’t know the half of them yet.

Wolf

There’s an expression men wear on their faces in certain naked moments. It’s a look of religion; it’s the look of truth about to be told. The young man lying on his back with his legs spread apart, his ass positioned up in the air, laid bare and open for my erect cock—he wore that expression. His eyes were wide, his voice breathy and full of wonder as he spoke. “Your eyes are so intense,” he said, raising his head to meet my eyes.

I stared back at him, steeping myself in his beauty. His muscular body. The breadth of his shoulders, the supple curves of his biceps. The narrowness of his waist. The perfect globes of his ass. His white, unblemished skin. And most of all, the masculinity and boyishness of his face, from the solid squareness of its shape to the hint of a snub at the tip of his nose. Of course I’m intense, I think to myself. I’m trying to memorize every detail of this boy. The head of my dick nudges against his hole, jumping at the warmth of it.

Then his lips part again. When he speaks, his words sound like prayer. “Looking into your eyes is like . . . looking into the eyes of a wolf,” he whispers.

My own lips close. I recognize the truth of what he’s told me. In actuality, at that moment I feel like a wolf. I’m a predator, closing in on prey crippled by the chase, too weak and limp to escape my slavering jaws. Only moments before I’d had him face down on the bed with a pillow shoved roughly beneath his pelvis, clutching at the bedclothes as I slobbered and chewed at the pucker of his ass. I’d eaten him out like I was a starving thing. I’d snorted and snuffled at him, pawed and probed, taking satisfaction in the cries he’d rasped out in the quiet of his Brooklyn apartment bedroom. Each of my growls was feral. Every grunt was of pure, satiated, animal pleasure.

I give him a smile. My lips part. My fangs show. I begin to slide into him, parting soft flesh with hard. “Slow,” he begs. “Please. Slow.”

I’m already one step ahead of him. I’m pushing softly, entering only as quickly as he allows. His ass speaks to me as fluently as his lips; I know exactly how quickly I can go. His eyes close. When they open again, they’re lidded, hazed. He still sees me clearly, though. The look he’s giving me is unwavering, full of awe. It’s just as intense as anything I could muster. I’m occupying all his focus.

At that moment in his life, there’s only me. No job worries, no husband, no dog waiting for a walk, no dinner to cook or shower to take or text to which he has to respond. Just me. My raw cock. This fuck.

“You feel so good,” I tell him, when I reach the bottom. “You’re mine, now.”

“Yours,” he echoes softly. “Only yours.”

“This is my hole,” I tell him, beginning to slide in and out.

“Your hole. It belongs to you,” he says, with a look of utter and absolute love in his eyes. “Do anything you want with it.”

“I will,” I tell him. My face is a foot above his. I’ve got my fists planted in his mattress as I piston my meat in and out of his slick, smooth chute. “Because it’s mine.”

“Because it’s yours,” he agrees. His handsome face has softened, gone slack as he melts into the sensation of my cock stretching out his hole. “Please load your hole, sir,” he begs. “Load your boy’s hole.”

“I’ll get there,” I tell him. “We only have one first fuck.”

I intend to make it last.

Sex at its best strips men down to their essences. Rabid wolf. Prey. Our connection, flesh to flesh, purges all the inconsequences and bullshit of our two everyday lives. All we are, all we want to be, is happening in that moment. Sadist. Sacrifice. Engorged flesh. Soft, pliant opening. My gift to him is of his own purity. I give him the chance to be what he most truly is; I provide him moments in which he can unburden himself of himself, to become what he wants more than anything. His most authentic self. He’s my boy. My hole.

And like a miser of flesh I take it for myself. I covet that hole. I’m greedy for it, anxious to conquer it. I need to plant my seed inside it, to mark it as mine. All mine. No one else’s. Mine.

“Please,” he begs, his eyes blazing into mine. That face—so honest, so full of need. He’s so beautiful.
I’m nearly ready. But not yet. “You know why I saved this load for you?” I ask. I’d known we’d have this afternoon together a week before, when we’d made the date. I’d kept it in my pants since them.

He shakes his head slowly. I feel his ass clench down on my cock. It nearly pushes me over the edge. “Why,” he says, the desire for it naked in his expression.

In a soft voice, I explain. “Partly it was to flatter you,” I say. “Sure it was. But that’s not the real reason. I did it because I knew it belonged to you. I did it because I wanted it to be you.” Our lips meet. We kiss softly. Wetly. “I saved up a seven-day load because I knew you would be worth it.”

“Am I?” he asks. “Am I worth it?”

I nod. “Oh, son,” I sigh. “You truly are.”

He lets out a gulp of pleasure like a sob. At the sound, my load gushes inside him. I can feel it pumping out of me, molten as lava. It coats him thickly, painting itself onto the walls of his guts as I spray what feels, in that moment, like an unending stream of the gooey, sticky stuff. My cock feels the difference immediately. It’s coated by my own semen. It glides more smoothly than any bottled lube.

He’s beating his own cock. His eyes beg me for permission to blow. I nod slightly. He erupts. A spurt of his cum arcs onto his chest, splashes onto his abdomen. Another follows, its path nearly matching the length of the first. My load’s buried inside him, but I know if I’d pulled out, it would puddle onto the sheets as copious, as thick, as glistening as this.

For a long, still moment we remain where we are, he and I. We stare at each other, hearts still thudding.

Then, as the blood clears from our heads, he reaches up, and pulls me to him. “Your hole. You own it,” he whispers, as he kisses me deeply.

I recognize the embrace for what it is: a promise that we are connected forever in this moment. A recognition of how thoroughly we’ve reduced each other to our bottom lines—our alchemic essences. Cock. Hole. Giver. Receiver. Sir. Boy.

Wolf.

Willing prey.

Hole

It’s a chilly morning and my breath unfurls in frosty curlicues before me. The sun’s on my face as I walk toward the man’s apartment, however, and I’m still toasty from my car. I’m a little surprised to find him sitting on the building’s steps in gym shorts. His legs are spread, his smile broad as he recognizes me. He’s got one hand thrust into a lightweight jacket pocket. The other holds a cell phone. He lifts his chin in greeting, says something in Spanish to the person on the other end, then ends the call. “Come on inside,” he says.

This neighborhood is filled with apartment buildings like this. They look like single-family residences from the outside, once inside they’re a warren-like complex of tiny flats crammed into every available space. I let him maneuver around me in the tight stairwell once I’m inside, so that he can lead me down into the basement. There are three white wooden doors at the bottom of the steps. He opens one with his key, and escorts me in to a clean, surprisingly sunny residence. I pull off my jacket and toss it on the sofa as I glance around. There’s a tiny kitchenette, and a sofa where he’s tossed a Playstation controller, and a large television hung on the wall. Before I get a chance to look at more, though, the man puts his hands on my hips, and pulls me to him.

Our lips meet. The guy kind of looks a little bit like a brute. His shoulders and broad, his chest deep and developed. His Latin features are hewn rough on his face; his eyebrows are broad charcoal smudges. But his kisses are light. Wet. Soft. His mouth tastes sweet, like honey water.

While he holds the back of my head, refusing to let my lips pull away, his free hand unbuttons my shirt. I kick off my sneakers as he stares hard into my eyes. When I put my palm to his crotch, I feel the hardness there. For a split-second I worry that my hands are too cold from the raw morning. But he grinds forward at the pressure, and uses his wandering hand to grab the small of my back and yank me closer.

The rough treatment makes me let out the smallest of gasps. He hears me, though. He knows I like it. His hands move up to my shoulders, and push me down.

He helps me pull his shorts to his ankles, letting them and his underwear drop in one smooth, swift motion. His uncut cock is dark, chocolate-colored. The sheath covers almost the entire head; only the slit peeks out. Already it’s glistening. When I open my mouth wide and take the six inches to the root, he grunts.

Within seconds, my saliva lets my lips glide back and forth along the whole length of his shaft. I feel him shift from foot to foot as he spreads his legs and lets his balls dangle more freely. Then he seizes my skull and yanks it down, roughly, until his cock head is plugging my throat. I’d taken a deep breath at the appropriate time, though. I’m prepared to relax and let him savor the sensations as he impales me for a long moment. When I back off, though, and his cock slithers out and drops heavily from my lips to my chin to point to the floor, I’m gagging and gasping for air. My eyes sting from the tears he’s drawn with that thick, dark ramrod.

He likes the sight of those tears, too.

He enjoys watching me as I dive once more for my prize. Holding me at arm’s length, tilting my head as I suck and slobber. The man forces me to look at him as I go deep on his meat. His dark eyes bore down. Though I feel water filling mine every time he stretches my throat, I strive my hardest to keep from blinking. Only when I’m awash in my own tears do I finally squeeze my lids together. Rivulets stream down my cheeks.

When he moves me into the bedroom it’s nothing more than a rush of blur and motion—a few seconds of deprivation and an empty mouth. Then I’m lying on his high queen-sized mattress, rumpling the primly-made bedding, and he’s straddling my face. One of his big hands grabs the back of my head like a basketball, yanks it up, shoves a pillow beneath. Several times he shoves it down, craning my neck upward, until he’s satisfied. He doesn’t give a shit about my comfort. He’s just trying to get my open, begging mouth at the perfect angle for his dick. That dick is his only concern for the moment. His dick, and the wet mouth that he’s using.

And I’m not so much sucking him anymore as getting the hole fucked. I keep my jaw wide and my throat loose and my teeth wrapped with my lips. I want to stay out of his way as much as possible, basically, as he pounds my mouth. He bones it like pussy. He plants his palms into the mattress above my head and rests his weight there. His knees are splayed far to either side. The bony parts of his hips bruise my cheeks as he thrusts hard, in and out. My nose is full of the sharp, musky smell of his black pubes. It’s my responsibility to gulp breaths when I’m able—not his to facilitate it. I know what I’m there for.

I can tell he’s getting close when his precum begins to flood my mouth. It’s salty, slightly sour, slick enough to make the passage of his inches even faster and smoother. I feel his hips buckle, his legs twitch. Then he drives in to the back of my throat, smothering me with his pelvis, grinding those hairs so hard into my skin they abrade. I feel his meat swell and subside, grow and shrink, several times over until he’s finally dumped the entire load.

When finally he pulls out I’m both choking and trying to get air into my lungs, but I’m gracious enough—and proud—not to let my distress show. I swallow that thick, pungent semen and lick both it and his precum from my lips. I blink away the moisture from my eyes, and wipe my nose. He climbs off me, his mostly-hard dick swinging like a pendulum as he hops off the bed and pads into the bathroom.

I still have on my shoes, my pants, my shirt. Nothing came off. All I have to do is crawl off the bed and make sure everything’s tucked in, check my hair in the mirror. He emerges from the bathroom and tosses a lukewarm washcloth at me. While I wipe my face with it, he studies me. Taking it back, he comments, “Pretty good cocksucker for a white boy.”

I nod, grateful for the praise, then turn to go. “Hey,” he says, grabbing my forearm with a strong grip. Then he pulls me into another kiss—just as deep and passionate as before. “Come back sometime,” he whispers, looking into my eyes again. I nod again, and grin. He guides me to the door, undoes the chain locking it, and lets me out.

It’s still cold outside when I trip down his steps and onto the sidewalk. I can still see my breath on the air. But my hands are a little warmer, my face a little redder, and my throat a whole lot more sore when I make my way down the street with my long shadow dancing down the pavement before me.

A Long (and Relaxing) Silence

Two years ago I took my blog on hiatus for a few months because of a pretty severe encounter with a stalker, who was also one of my readers. As you can imagine, the experience left me wary for a while of sharing any details about my personal life. And it doesn’t get much more personal than a sex blog.

A year ago I took something of an enforced break from writing when my health faltered. For a couple of weeks, I couldn’t even really sit up, much less have sex or have the energy to write about it.

Recently I’ve taken a break because . . . well, to be perfectly frank, I’ve been having something of a snit. I admit it. The reason sounds childish. But there it is.

My bad mood started sometime in August, when two ominous fronts collided and created the conditions for a perfect storm of massive pique on my part. I’m not really quite sure what happened on the first front—whether Mercury went into retrograde or not, or whether there was something in the local waters, or whether all those shirtless photos Nick Jonas was flooding onto Instagram made everyone feel inadequate about themselves. But for a while there, just about everyone I was cruising for sex was being a total dick.

Without going into too much detail, in my personal life there were a couple of gentlemen I took to bed with whom I had incredibly intense and connected experiences. I would’ve been okay if they’d been one-time encounters. Honestly. But both of them, as we lay there in post-coital entanglement, made elaborate plans how how we should be seeing each other regularly. One was a young guy with a sense of sexual adventure who told me about the places and parties he wanted to take me, so we could show off our fucking to others and have them join in; the other was a more mature, more passionate lover who wanted me to spend weekends with him at his cottage in the country, screwing like rabbits. I liked both men. They appealed to the pig and the romantic in me.

Of course, I never heard from either of them again, after I drove home. I sent emails and texts that got no replies. After a couple of weeks, and with a lot of disappointment, I just gave up on them both.

Online I wasn’t encountering just the standard assholery, either—the guys who unlock their photos for a hot second and then immediately lock them again before I’ve had a chance to look at them, or the ones who commit to a date a couple of days in advance and then stand me up before 48 hours have elapsed. No, I’m used to them. I’m used to the guys who hit me up hard and horny on Scruff, who want to wheedle their way into my pants one minute, and who ignore my existence the moment they’ve jerked off. These guys went above and beyond that already-low bar of behavior.

For example, this exchange, reproduced verbatim, was pretty typical of what I encountered:

SOME GUY: You have a really great smile! And dick!
ME: I appreciate the compliments. You’re really handsome as well.
SOME GUY: I didn’t say you were handsome.

There was the guy who said You’d almost be hot if you weren’t so old. And there was the guy who gave me the back-handed compliment (I think?) of You look like the creepy pervert who hangs out at the high school stadium staring at the cheerleaders but I find that kind of hot in a way. I could go on for quite a while, but why revisit each and every affront? August was a month in which guys managed to put my ego to the rack and pillory in just about every conceivable way.

Normally I can shrug that shit off. It’s just part of the crap with which one gets spattered when one’s dredging the local waters for sex. At the same time, though, I was getting stressed out by a fairly sizable contingent of my readers.

Most of my faithful followers know that over the years I’ve been plagued by a handful of trolls, ill-wishers, and the downright psychotic. Hurtful though their responses can sometimes be, lately they’ve been nothing compared to burdens put on me—and I say this as gently as possible—by readers who would consider themselves well-meaning, upbeat, and positive. And I had a lot of those this summer.

The common theme between them all seemed to be that I owed them all something. They read my blog, was their implication, so now it was my turn to give back. For example, I had what turned into a contentious discussion with one reader who at first chided me on Manhunt for not replying to his mails there more quickly. After all, he read me all the time, so I should be responding to his messages first, and immediately. Then he asked me if I could give him the name of my blog and its URL. When I suggested that if he really were a regular reader, he should have the thing bookmarked instead of bugging me about it (I probably worded it more tactfully, but that was definitely my implication), the guy blew up. I should be more nice, he complained. I really needed to go more out of my way for my readers. I owed them that kind of courtesy. (I blocked him, and good fucking riddance.)

Then there were several readers who were going to be in my area, some quite close, some not so much. Many of the former expected—didn’t ask, just expected— me to show up and provide stud service on demand, simply because they were readers and they wanted it. Many of the latter expected—didn’t suggest, didn’t negotiate, just expected—me to drive up to two hours away to fuck them because they said so.

There was one reader who started sending me drafts of his book, a 300-plus-page memoir, for critique. At first I attempted to make some vague comments about the opening first pages while strongly suggesting that he find a local writing group or someone (not me!) who was actually willing to commit a huge chunk of time to reading the damned thing. When those hints didn’t take and I outright told him that it was tough enough finding time to read the books I wanted to read, much less the unpublished projects of aspiring writers I had no desire to slog through or critique in detail, especially when I hadn’t ever, ever asked to see said projects, I was rather huffily told that it was curious I should expect people to read my blog and never do anything in return for them.

I had a handful of readers who would send me very, verrrrry long emails. Ordinarily when a reader sends me an email, if it’s short enough, I’ll respond back relatively quickly. If it’s long, the reader usually will have to wait a longer time for a response, because it’s more of an investment of my time to do the reply justice. If it’s very, verrrrrrry fucking long, he’ll be waiting a while. A couple of these wordy readers, however, started to send me follow-up emails to their original verrrrrrrry long inquiries that were variations on the following:

1) Did I get the original email? Because they could send it again.
2) Hey, they’re just wondering, did I get the emails to check up on whether I got their original email? Because they sent an email and I never replied. Just checking!
3) I still haven’t replied to the original email or the follow-ups. Would I like a copy of the original email again? Because they could send it if I didn’t get it.
4) I hadn’t responded to their emails yet, was I dead? Or was my email not working?
5) They’ve decided they must have said something terribly wrong in one of their several emails, because I haven’t replied. They were very sorry if that’s the case. If it wasn’t, could I respond to the original email?
6) They were sorry if they was inundating me with emails. They just wanted me to read their email!
7) HELLO???? AM I GETTING THEIR EMAILS????

Look. There are times I have lots of free moments to answer emails. And there are times when I’m busy with work and life and fucking and my time with my laptop is at a minimum. I try to answer email when I can. But the one best way to guarantee I’m going to postpone answering your email is to badger me with follow-up emails asking me why I haven’t answered your email. The one best way to guarantee I’ll never answer any of them is to send so many that I start grinding my teeth and actually feeling my blood pressure elevate whenever I see your name appear in my inbox.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was the reader who told me he didn’t believe I was married. Nope, I was just saying that because—well, I don’t know why. Apparently he just didn’t seem to think I was a bill of goods anyone would actually buy. My word wasn’t good enough. The fact that I’m always wearing a wedding ring doesn’t matter, because anyone could wear a cheap ring. Of course I should’ve just rolled my eyes and told the guy that it was a shame he didn’t take me at my word. But no. I have a morbid curiosity that gets the worse of me. I caved and asked him what would constitute acceptable proof? A scanned copy of my marriage certificate, he informed me. Oh, and an immediate Skype tour of my bedroom, so that he could see there were two clock-radios and proof of living arrangements for two people, and not just one.

Never mind that asking someone to do such a thing is, in my opinion, horribly invasive, inappropriate, and offensive. I owed him a copy of that legal document.

I’m fully aware that anytime I complain about fans of my blog I sound like I’m some refugee from a formerly-popular-but-recently-dissolved boy band who makes a solo album that’s chock-full of songs about the pressures of stardom and how he wishes his fans would just leave him alone so he can chill, yo. But the fact is that while running a sex blog of some popularity has allowed me opportunities to meet and correspond with all kinds of fantastic people, there are nearly just as many times that fans have made my life a misery. Not all of them are bad as the time two years ago that one of my fans used my blog to stalk me in real life—but often close.

I’ve always felt that writing my blog is a gift from me to my readers. I don’t earn money from it. I rarely get presents out of it. I don’t ask readers to support advertisers or buy my T-shirts. The bargain between us is simplicity itself: I’m supposed to have fun seeking out sex and having it. I’m supposed to have fun writing about it. I’ve spent countless hours doing so over the course of several years so that I can share it with thousands of people. That investment of gas and lube and sweat and the long periods of time it takes to write about it is supposed to be a sweet giveaway from me to the strangers who are kind enough to take their time to read me.

Rather than take my gift at face value, there are a handful of readers—and again, I recognize they might think they mean well—who seem to assume that I owe them more than what I already was giving. Either their numbers surged, or I was in a bad enough mood that I allowed them to overwhelm me. Because suddenly, around summer’s end, none of it was any fun anymore.

I told a couple of close friends that I was declaring August and September to be ‘Boys R Stupid Months,’ and just withdrew. I gave myself permission to stop blogging until it felt like it would be fun again.

And you know, a couple of times it almost felt like it might be. I posted a couple of entries, hopeful that the old joy in sharing would return. Almost immediately I got reminded why it had become un-fun, as guys who’d never before commented would leave comments like Nice blog post but here is a list of typos I found EXTREMELY off-putting. . . or This doesn’t sound like the blogger I expect! or, god help me, Welcome back I guess but why haven’t you written about the Landscaper?

You know, being somewhat anonymous the past couple of months has been pleasant. I fuck, and don’t feel compelled to capture every little detail so I can recount it later. I don’t feel as if I’m having to be sexy, 24/7, in order to fulfill a reader’s expectations. An inbox full of reader emails? I’ve enjoyed seeing it as an option rather than a bundle of little obligations that add up to a prescription for anxiety and tense obligation. Being selfish has been, on the whole, a hell of a lot more relaxing than being giving.

Now, nobody can make writing fun for me again. That’s not anyone’s responsibility save my own. If I am to continue—and to be honest, I haven’t entirely decided whether that’s the case yet—the impetus for it has to come from within. It’s a decision that only I can make.

But readers, if you’ve gotten this far, there surely are a lot of ways that you can refrain from making my experience unenjoyable. It pains and even surprises me a little that I have to ask: but maybe a few of you could actually think about that, before adding to my to-do list? Maybe you could think of me as a person first, and an erection second? Perhaps you could ask yourself whether it’s appropriate to want copies of my legal documents, before making the demand?

Because that could make the going all the easier, trust me.