Blogiversary

It was on February 27, 2010, that I made my first entry in A Breeder’s Journal. Exactly one year and three hundred posts later, and here we are.

It’s been an interesting journey, as I’ve scrambled up the ranks from an audience of basically myself alone, to almost half a million unique visitors. The site now gets between five and six thousand different readers a day, more or less. The numbers humble me. They’re not record-breaking by any stretch of the imagination, but when I consider how very modest an audience I expected when I started writing, they’re pretty amazing.

Keeping a record of my daily life, even a record of my sex life, wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision for me, last February. I’ve been doing it for years. I first started keeping a journal when I was seventeen. Call it a thirty-year habit or call it discipline, but I’ve been scribbling down my thoughts on a more-or-less daily basis ever since. Over the decades it has been rare for me to go for more a couple of days without running to my notebooks to record my experiences and thoughts.

I’ve also posted in my blog about the obsessive, coded records about my sex partners I used to scribble in my teens. (Apparently there’s some kind of bookkeeping gene in my ancestry.) Sometime after I started keeping a diary, the two activities merged. I began to write, in very veiled language, about a few of my encounters. As I grew older and more confident in my abilities, both in and out of the bed, the accounts of my sexual exploits grew less mawkish and more accomplished. And I started to realize something. Not many people write about sex as it actually exists, out here in the wilds of the real world. In my journal I felt like an anthropologist charting a culture previously unrecorded, and it somehow struck me that such a record should be shared and given voice.

Culturally, we tend to find expressions of sex that are often so far removed from the reality that it’s remarkable we recognize it at all. On television and in the movies, sex is something that the beautiful leads get to do, under exquisite lighting, on expensive sets, accompanied by sexy saxophone music. We like our beautiful people to be deeply in love with each other. If they’re fucking, our pop culture likes them committed, or soon to marry, and unlikely to stray. It’s about as erotic as the sanitized for your protection strip on a hotel toilet seat.

Conversely, our society likes to punish those who enjoy sex. As a culture we brand celebrities who have extramarital affairs, or who enjoy the company of more than one partner, with the spurious label of ‘sex addict’—and do the same for men who hope to enjoy sex on a daily basis with a partner or spouse, or who masturbate to work off their normal, excess horniness. We slap the Scarlet Letter on those who transgress; we envision them justly riddled with both disease and regrets.

I don’t buy into either end of that cultural dichotomy. I’m not a sinner, nor a saint. Nor do I find my own experiences belong to the narratives of porn culture, where everyone is pretty and super-fit and in which people are reduced to a series of interlocking body parts. Sometimes my sex feels like that. But quite often with my partners—partners like Spencer, or Scruffy—there’s a genuine connection and emotionality one doesn’t find in outright porn. There’s a tenderness that one doesn’t find in a skin flick or a nifty archive story. And there’s a carnality based in the real world that one doesn’t find in a traditional romance.

Even when there’s no emotional connection between me and the partners I describe in here, there’s always something very real that I make as my focus. It might be a moment in which my partner opens up to me with a story or a moment of unexpected closeness. It might be something as simple as a gesture, or a sensation I want to remember. It might be a moment of awkwardness, of embarrassment, or even of insecurity and shame. It might simply be a funny story with a punchline, or a laugh shared during the sex act itself.

The sex I have is often good, and hot, and connected, and intimate. Sometimes it’s bad, or messy, or unpleasant. Sometimes the guys with whom I hook up are weird, or turn out to be assholes. Sometimes the sex is inappropriate but hot nonetheless. My point is that I really haven’t seen much writing about the kind of sex that I have on a very regular basis. Sex had by someone who was reflective, and self-aware, and honest—by someone whose agenda was not to promote himself as the ultimate sex god. Sex from the point of view of a simple, (sometimes) humble man who enjoyed his life and took advantage of its opportunities.

I already wrote from that perspective in my personal diary. Sharing those entries, and giving voice to that perspective to a wider audience, was my original goal. I simply didn’t expect it to become as popular a destination as it has become.

Beginning tomorrow, with your collective indulgence, I’ll be talking about some of the lessons I’ve learned over the last year: the good, the weird, and the ugly.