Notoriety

The very first bareback blog on which I kept an eye didn’t last long. Somewhere between seven and ten years ago I stumbled upon a journal kept by a top in Manhattan who recorded several of his sexual adventures in vivid detail. The guy was a good enough writer. He knew how to set the scene, and had a good notion of how to describe the sex quickly and thoroughly.

I had a couple of beefs with his journal, though. One was that the guy only had sex every few weeks, and therefore his updates were sporadic. The other was that he had a severely overinflated view of his notoriety.

I wish I could remember the name of the blog, but it’s eluding my memory. We’ll call it That Bareback Blog. After only a very few entries, the blogger started to write a number of posts in which he’d step out into public and overhear people talking about his blog, which pleased him so greatly that he’d make posts about it that out-detailed the sexual encounters.

I remember one entry in which the guy was sitting at an outdoor cafe when he overheard two gay men gossiping in hushed whispers about how shocking That Bareback Blog was. “Everyone’s talking about it,” said one guy.

“Oh, I know,” said the other. “Half of the city is worried they’re going to end up on its pages!”

For a while, according to the blog, everywhere its writer would go, there would be little circles of titillated blog readers discussing him. In the gay bars. In the straight bars. In the clubs. In cafes, in bookstores, in the New York Public Library. With every new alleged eavesdropped overhearing, my patience grew a little thinner.

I think I lost my cool completely after reading a post in which the blogger was supposedly listening to two Macy’s clerks discussing his blog outside a dressing room while the author was within, trying on some pants. “Did you read the last entry of That Bareback Blog?” said one clerk to another.

“Oh my god yes,” said the other. “I have always wondered what That Bareback Blogger must look like.”

“I am sure he is a stud of the highest magnitude,” said the first.

“He has to be, with all the ass he gets. I wish it was me he was fucking,” said the second, no doubt with a girlish sigh. "The thought of it sends shivers up my spine!"

There was more conversation about That Bareback Blog, while the blogger stayed inside the dressing room with his ear to the curtain and his heart filled with devilish glee. Then the first clerk wandered off, and That Bareback Blogger stepped out of the dressing room, sans pants, and avec erection. “Now you know what the bareback blogger looks like,” he leered. And of course, instead of clubbing the guy over the head with a mannequin and calling security like any other department store employee might, the clerk murmured something about all his dreams coming true and letting the blogger take him in the dressing room, right then and there. Bow-chicka-bow-wow!

As I said, I kind of stopped reading the blog after that—I don’t think it lasted very much longer, anyway. It was obviously pure fantasy; the guy was trying to turn himself into a figure of public notoriety solely by the repeated insistence that he was being talked about all over the city. I highly, highly doubt that there were well-placed squadrons of gay men whispering in hushed cabals about a blog that was updated infrequently, never had a single comment, and lurked in one of the seediest and most obscure corners of the internet. You can't will yourself to be famous, that way.

Stranger things have happened, but I highly doubted this was one of them. When I started posting my own sex entries to this blog, one of the things I thought to myself was, Oh man, if I ever get like That Bareback Blogger, please just someone shoot me.

Well, gentlemen, get ready your pistols, because I've had my first taste of notoriety.

During the week between Christmas and the new year, I spent a night out on the town at a local gay bar to chug water from a bottle and stare at my favorite shirtless bartender while my friends drank themselves blotto. They guys at my table had been playing Scrabble on someone’s iPad and using their iPhones as tile racks—I KNOW DUDES, IT WAS A WILD AND CRAZY NIGHT—and we’d just finished the game when I noticed a guy watching me from nearby.

He was an attractive fellow in his late forties, short and narrow of frame, with dark eyes and a neatly-clipped beard that made him look somehow European. I was sitting next to a railing on which my arm rested with my bottle of water; when the Scrabble party broke up (I’m sorry, I can’t even pretend it was Dirty Word Scrabble, since the filthiest it got was when someone tried to make PHAGINA out of his rack—okay, it was me), a few of the guys at my table got up and walked away either to get drinks or run to the bathroom after all the triple-word tension. That’s when the bearded guy made his move.

At first he kind of casually leaned against the rail, only a few feet away, pretending to listen to the music while he took deep sips of his whiskey. Some of my friends returned and settled at the table’s far end to debate the merits of starting a new game, leaving me fairly unoccupied at the rail.

The bearded guy turned to me. “Is your name. . . ?”

The ellipsis in that last paragraph wasn’t to elide my identity. His voice actually trailed off in a series of almost audible dots. I raised my eyebrows, grinned a little at the thought he was coming on to me, and said, “You wanna know my name?”

The man was clearly nervous. “It’s just that I thought it might be Rob,” he said. “I thought you might be . . . Rob.” My eyebrows rose in surprise at the sound of the familiar name.

“Why do you think that?” I asked, curious.

“There’s a guy on the internet—he writes this blog,” he man said. He slugged back another mouthful of alcohol for fortification. “His name is Rob.”

I looked askance to see if any of my friends were eavesdropping. “I think I know what blog you mean.”

I thought I’d said the words with the appropriate amount of import, but apparently not. “It’s a blog about sex.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “That’s the one I was thinking about.”

“His name is Rob,” said the man. “He writes the blog.”

“Yes,” I said, enunciating slowly and with the weight of significance. “I think we’re both talking about the same blog, and the same Rob.”

“It’s a bareback blog. About sex.”

“Yeah.” By this time I’d grown a little testy with the guy, who didn’t seem to be picking up on what I was trying to signal to him.

“Bareback sex he has with other guys. In a blog. About bareback sex.”

The guy was loud, but not loud enough, I think, to be heard over the music and general commotion of the bar and the wild-ass Scrabble players. Still, he’d been talking to me long enough by that point that the others were beginning to notice. There were really only so many more theme and variations of ‘bareback sex blog’ that I wanted them to overhear. I shot up and walked around to the railing’s other side, where I could talk more privately with the guy. “That’s me,” I told him in his ear.

He nodded, then showed his utter incomprehension by saying, “This guy Rob, I followed a link from his bareback sex blog to one of his profiles, then I found his profile on Manhunt. He looks like you.” Up close, I could tell that he was way more inebriated than I’d first thought.

As I've admitted before, I don’t have locked photos on my Manhunt profile—I have a mixture of face and dick photos there because I don’t really have any compelling or prudish reasons not to let the two mix. I’ve had local guys recognize me in public before from Manhunt, and have written about it here. This is the first time, though, that someone was recognizing me as One Of Those Bareback Bloggers. “That’s because it is me,” I told him, talking much as I might to a particularly slow child. “That is my blog. I am the Rob you mean.”

“The bareback sex blogger,” he slurred.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s you?” Maybe light was beginning to dawn.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“You’re that Rob?”

“I’m that Rob.”

For a moment I thought I’d finally gotten through to him. Then he peered at me blearily and repeated, “Because this Rob guy, he keeps a bareback blog. On the internet.”

It was then that the guy with whom my bearded friend had come into the bar arrived to retrieve him. I clapped the guy on the back and wished him well, then slunk back to my seat. “Who was that?” asked my friend Matt.

“Oh, just some guy,” I lied.

“Was he coming on to you?”

Curious question, that. For response I settled on, “Of course.”

“Oh. So he was drunk?”

I turned my back on the wag and pretended not to have heard.

So, my bearded reader, if you’re out there and you remember what happened at the bar, yes, that was me.

And thus ran my first taste of public recognition from a total stranger about my blog. Oh, notoriety. How sweet you seem upon the branches of your tree! And yet how like vinegar you taste when you reach the lips.