Sunday Morning Questions: The Felching Edition

One of the more annoying things I do in a social situation—though to my slight credit, I usually wait until people know me slightly, so they catch on that it’s a joke—is to pretend ignorance of sexual slang, just so I can get a giggle out of watching someone try to explain it to me. Last night, for example, I was at a potluck with a bunch of gay guys and someone was looking at a picture of Sam Elliott in his early-eighties heyday wearing a sleeveless T bearing the legend MUSTACHE RIDES.

I crunched my eyebrows, screwed up my face, looked at the guy with the photo on his cell, and asked, “What is a mustache ride?”

“SERIOUSLY?!” he shrieked. Then, when my expression didn’t change, he started stammering, “Well, when a guy has a mustache, and he um, gives oral sex to someone, it’s called . . . OH YOU FUCKER.”

Because by mid-sentence, of course, I will be giggling like a Japanese teenaged girl and the proverbial jig will be up. Later that night, the same guy was telling a story about going to a straight strip club for a colleague’s birthday party and how one of the strippers did an acrobatic stunt that ended with her muff in his mouth. While everyone was laughing at the tale, I stopped it briefly. “Now, by muff, do you mean one of those fur accessories women insert their hands into to keep them warm in the winter?”

Automatically, just because I have one of those faces that would never, ever lead anyone astray, he started to stammer out again, “Um, a muff is a. . . . A muff is. . . .” Then he remembered the mustache rides incident of earlier, laughed at himself, and yelled at me, “Yes, her muff was a circular hand-warming fur, because I WENT TO A STRIP CLUB FOR GOD-DAMNED VICTORIAN ICE SKATERS.” And we all laughed about that one.

So late in the evening, a bunch of the guys were playing some Cards Against Humanity/Apples to Apples-like party game tailored to gay guys, in which in response to a question, everyone around the table has to hand in a card with a comic response. (Apparently ‘double-headed dildos’ will win every time.) I was standing behind a friend watching the game proceed, when the friend started reading out cards in response to his question, What’s that dripping sound? “A lesbian wedding. . . .” he said, flipping over the first response. “Pat Robertson’s dentures. . . .” he read, to minor titters around the table. “Fletching. . . .”

He’d already started to toss that card on the table when I stopped him. “Felching, sweetie,” I said. “Fletching is something you find on an arrow.”

He looked at the card again. “What’s felching?”

“Oh, ha, ha, ha,” I replied, thinking he was trying to pull one over on me. “I’m not fooled that easily, mister.”

“What?!” he asked. “What’s felching? I’m serious.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, playing along.

“No, I mean it!”

Then I realized that he did indeed mean it. “Felching is when one ejaculates inside another’s anus or vagina and then licks it out,” I told him.

In the way that gay guys do when confronted with real-world mention of an act that they’ve secretly gotten off to while watching internet porn countless times but don’t want to admit it, every man in the room went ewwww! or gross! My friend with the cards, however, looked at me with horror on his face. “How do you even know what that is?”

I shrugged. It’s a rough job, being perpetually innocent.

Let’s get to some responses to questions I’ve received recently. If you’ve got questions of your own to ask, either leave them at my formspring.me site, or email them to me at the address in the sidebar. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the questions I often get—they give me the chance to spout off on topics I wouldn’t normally address in my blog.


Does sex always involve intimacy?

Nope. A lot of sexual transactions feel less intimate than withdrawing cash from an ATM.
But a lot of the best sex involves intimacy.


Are you generally more interested in sex in the spring?

July is the month in which my hormones suddenly shift into overdrive. Yes, even more than usual.
I figured out the pattern when, a few Julys ago, I was ready to write an entry in my journal about how inexplicably horny I'd been. Before I started typing it out, though, I had a vague memory of writing something similar the year before. Sure enough, I'd written a "Why am I so horny?" entry in July. There were other July horniness entries in my journals for several different years.

Sometimes keeping a journal over a long period of time helps to identify these patterns. But it still doesn't get anyone on my dick any quicker, come 7/1, yo.


Hi, this is Jim. Long time reader. You mention having great success with instagram. How does that work in finding guys?

Hey Jim. I don't believe I ever said I had 'great success' finding guys on Instagram. However, I have had regular old economy-sized success. Considering that the g-rated photo-sharing service of Instagram is not intended in the least to be used for picking casual sex partners, I suppose any kind of success there at all is a great success.

There's a whole subculture on Instagram of guys who take photos of themselves for other guys and gals to admire. They don't take art photos. They don't take photos of their vacations to post. They stand in front of a mirror, point their camera phones at themselves, and snap shots of their muscles. The photos are shirtless, often. They're pretty photos of pretty men.

I don't take a lot of these photos myself—I take and share the arty crap—but I do follow a handful of the men and boys who do. And by handful, I mean dozens. There have been a several times when I have commented on these photos and found my comments met with an encouraging response. A couple of times these encouraging responses have come from local guys. Men within driving distance. And on those couple of occasions, I ended up getting together with the guy when I pointed out how close we were.

If that's great success, I'll still take it.


What is something you remember happening when you were in Grade 1?

I lived close enough to my first grade school that I walked to it in the mornings from home. My dad would make my lunchbox, then get me across the street to the baseball field that separated our apartment complex from the school, and then watch as I made my way across the field to the school's back entrance.

One morning, we were late in getting me off. I don't mean five minutes late. I mean, laaaaaaate. Maybe my dad overslept, maybe something adult was going on that I wasn't aware of—but I remember being woken up and crammed into my clothes and dragged out the door with my lunchbox banging at my knees, and then propelled against that baseball field toward the school.

But when I got to the door, it had been locked. Apparently they did that, after all the kids were inside. I looked back to see if my dad was still watching, but he'd gone home. So in a panic, I had to go all the way around the school, trying doors. Which were all locked. It was only when I finally got around to the front door about fifteen minutes later that I was able to get into the building at all.

When I got to the classroom, I was red-faced, panicked, and sweaty. The teacher shushed my excuses and made me sit in the back of the classroom as a punishment.

It's been forty-three years and whenever I'm late to something—anything—I flash back to that day in first grade and I'm that little boy with the lunchbox and the fear in his eyes all over again.


Given your enjoyment of Gilligan's Island, do you think the TV series Lost should have ultimately been revealed to be a Gilligan's Island spin-off series?

First off, let me reassert that my enjoyment of Gilligan’s Island was limited to my prepubescent years. For adults, the show is pretty much unwatchable. If I have to watch Bob Denver, give me the smart and bittersweet Dobie Gillis every time.

Now, about Lost. I think any resolution would've been better than that load of steamin' doo-doo I wasted five years of my life watching. I am still somewhat angry that a show that started with such promise devolved by the third season into something I was simply shrugging my indifferent shoulders to (time travel to the 1970s? Okay. Nuclear bomb? Sure, why not? Crazed chess-playing gods who never appeared in any other season? Might as well be, I suppose). Lost and Battlestar Galactica taught me that simply because I want a science fiction series to be as good as its original premise doesn’t justify the hours and DVR space I put into it, when it’s obvious it’s going down the toilet.

I learned that lesson well, believe you me. I ditched Once Upon a Time and Revolution and Falling Skies the minute they grew tiresome, and haven’t had a regret about it.