Blueprints

While I was taking my blog vacation (which went well, thank you—I survived family, heat, black flies, and a number of other surprise hurdles), I met up with a reader in Manhattan for an afternoon of fun. Nice guy. Sexy ass. Great mouth. And most importantly, on a blistering hot New York City afternoon, working air conditioning.

We’d fucked for a couple of hours and enjoyed ourselves immensely and then, in the casual and comfortable way that two men will, when they’ve enjoyed each other’s bodies and are basking in an afterglow of intimacy and confidence, started swapping stories. We talked a little about some of our old lovers, and griped about the vagaries of guys online. Somehow we started talking about escorts. After listening to one of his stories on that subject, I laughed a little and mentioned that I met up with a guy every few weeks who would drop a whole lot of cash just to watch me jack off in the back of his van.

His eyebrows went up. Not for the reason I thought. “Yeah,” he said. “I read about that.”

“Oh,” I said, laughing again. I’d forgotten that he was one of my readers. I felt kind of dopey, to be honest. It’s very easy for me to forget that when I meet readers, they usually know a hell of a lot more about me than I ever learn about them. Most of the time I forget that we’ve already met, so to speak, on opposite sites of the computer screen. “Sorry.”

“But . . . but that was for real?” he asked. His eyebrows were still sky-high. “I mean, that wasn’t just a story?”

I had to explain that no, it wasn’t just a story. This blog is not fiction. I make that statement right there in the sidebar. But as I gear up again to start sharing some of my more recent experiences, I think it bears repeating. So here goes.

What I write in my journal, and what I post publicly in this blog, is what happens to me in my real-life fiction. It’s not made up; it’s not fabricated. I change some details in order to protect my partners. They don’t ask (usually) to be represented here. They don’t always know that I keep an online record of my sexual encounters, when we meet. So I change their back stories a little, if I put them here. I alter the descriptions of their houses a little, so that other readers don’t say, “Hey! I know that house in the Bronx with the two concrete lions out front!” and immediately know their neighbor’s a big ol’ fist pig. I change the descriptions of their tattoos, or sometimes alter their hair colors or speech patterns, if it would help mark them as one of my sex partners. Those little amendments that have no effect whatsoever on the thrust (so to speak) of the material, I feel free to alter.

That’s all the liberty I take, though. When I write here about my sex life, I share just about everything. The amazing, the rotten, the confusing, the romantic, and the downright nasty. It’s all fair game to me.

We don’t talk about our sex lives honestly enough, I feel. A lot of us have amazing encounters—either with one chosen partner, or with multiple fuck buddies—but we feel compelled not to talk about them openly or honestly, especially not in front of polite audiences. We stick to the polite narrative that we’re all too busy to enjoy carnal relations of the sort we all fantasize constantly; we think ourselves as good boys and good girls who would never have sex with strangers, much less talk about it.

For a lot of us, that’s bullshit.

It’s important for me to discuss one of the most vital and important aspects of my life in an open fashion. I wish more of us did so without fear of being shamed or slighted. Keeping silent about sex is assenting to its oppressors; stepping out into the daylight and saying I am a sexual being, and these are the things I do is, these days, a bold—and yes, liberating—act of assertion that, in the eyes of the more conservative and of politicians, is something akin to civil disobedience.

We live in a culture of must nots and can’ts. We’re a population, increasingly, of want tos and don’t dares. My sex life, and my blog, aims to be a record of yes I cans and why don’t wes and why haven’t yous. My not so secret aim is to change the world, one fuck at a time.

Won’t you join me?