Sunday Evening Questions: Department of Odd Stank Edition

I was at a bar in the Village a couple of weeks ago when the drag queen who was acting as hostess there, that afternoon, started to play a little game with the audience. The game in question was the traditional Never Have I Ever drinking competition. Typically it consists of people going around the room starting a sentence with the words “Never have I ever. . . .” and then finishing it up with something personal and maybe humorously scandalous they’ve not done, but they hope other people in the group have. Anyone who’s actually done the act has to take a drink. Hilarity ensues.

Well, in this particular iteration of the game, the drag queen was making all the statements, then forcing the somewhat rowdy crowd to hold up their glasses and take a slug if they’d committed the act in question. And all the questions, as you might expect in a gay bar in the Village where a drag queen was holding court, were all sexual. “Never have I ever . . . slept with a drag queen!” she’d bark out. Then while about three of us chugged our liquor, she took good note of who had.

“Never have I ever . . . had a threesome!” she said. I and quite a few others downed our drinks.
A few minutes later, it was, “Never have I ever . . . gone to a bathhouse!” A very few us admitted to that one, but I drank proudly.

“Never have I ever . . . taken two cocks in both ends at the same time!” Yeah. I drank to that one, too.
As you might guess, I ended up drinking to every single damned never have I ever that she called out. I’d never been drunk before. But I sure as hell was that night. I passed out in the cab, that’s how drunk I was.

“Honey,” said the drag queen afterward, when I was stumbling my way to the men’s room to take my fifth leak of the evening. “I was watching you up there during my little drinking game. And no harm meant? But you are a fucking slut.”

Point taken.

I haven’t done a Sunday questions in a long while, and I was noticing in my backlog I have several questions that begin not with never have I ever, but at least with the enticing words Have you ever . . . ? So in honor of my first total drunken episode, a couple of weekends back, let’s assay three of those.

(And a question to my readers: why didn’t any of you come take advantage of me in my vulnerable state? I’m so disappointed.)


Have you ever gotten revenge on a former fuck who pissed you off? I am in a situation now where a guy I used to see really upset me, and I know ways to fuck with his life. You seem like you’d have a level-headed way to keep me from doing it, though.

At this stage of my life, I honestly feel the best policy, when teased by thoughts of revenge, is simply to hold up your hands and walk away from the temptation. If you can possibly do so with your former fuck, I totally recommend you do.

That said. . . .

A very long time ago when I was thirty-six, I made friends with a local couple. Just friends. We met online somehow, and then at a bar for a social gathering. They were an oddball couple, ten years younger than I. One of them was a round, short, rotund little ball of lard-colored dough with squinty eyes. His boyfriend was a thin, lanky Canadian with a head of copper-colored hair that came straight out of a bottle. He wasn’t attractive in any traditional sense, but he was a live wire of sexual electricity. When I say the red-head was Canadian, I don’t mean he was originally from Quebec or anything. He was an illegal immigrant, in the U.S. without permission for years and unable to get any job except for those that paid under the table in cash. As I said, they were a little odd. But we used to go out to dinner together, or to the movies; sometimes we’d go shopping for CDs together or out to the mall for an afternoon. I enjoyed their company.

The red-headed boyfriend was slutting around behind the roly-poly one’s back, though. He was always taking me aside and telling me who’d barebacked him that week. After he saw a couple of my dick shots, he started begging me to fuck him. We wouldn’t have to tell his boyfriend. It would be our secret.

I resisted for quite a long time. Months, actually. I have my limits, though, and finally after months of being hounded and flattered, I reached them. I told the red-head that if he came over to my place and kept it from his boyfriend, I’d fuck and breed him.

The night came. The red-head got to my place. He’d barely been there for three minutes, though—I mean, the most I got him to do was kick off his shoes—when he got a phone call from his boyfriend back home. The boyfriend had seen a couple of the emails he’d sent me that afternoon arranging what time he was coming over, rightly assumed the worst, and called him up in hysterics to confront him.

Well, the red-head locked himself into my bedroom and proceeded to fight with his boyfriend for a solid ninety minutes. They yelled, they cried, they whispered, they yelled some more. I sat outside feeling awkward and a little bit miserable. Finally the red-head came out, shoved his hands in his pockets, said, “I guess I better go,” and shuffled out the front door.

I thought that was the bad part. But no.

The next day I got a phone call from the red-head while I was at work. He told me that my attempt at wrecking the relationship that he had with his boyfriend had failed, and that they were staying together after all. Then he said that he’d only offered to sleep with me because I was old and probably wouldn’t get any better offers, and because he felt sorry for me. “Are you telling me I’m a pity fuck?” I asked, horrified. He said that yes, that’s exactly what I was, then wished me a nice life.

Within a couple of weeks I found out that he and his boyfriend were telling people around town that I’d tried to break them up. I got cut dead by mutual acquaintances who informed me they didn’t want to talk to men who attempted to come between such a lovely, perfect couple. It was quite honestly one of the all-time lows of my thirties; I don’t know quite why I bought into the notion that I could only be someone’s pity fuck, but the insult cut deeply enough that I couldn’t shake it. And when I was being shunned for being a homewrecker, too—well. It put me into a rage.

Nowadays I think it’s all ridiculous. The red-head and his roly-poly boyfriend constructed some kind of fictional narrative between them that I was the bad guy who’d tried to become the wedge in their rock-solid relationship; the red-head convinced him that it was only his pity and his drive to be a sexual Good Samaritan, I suppose, that prompted him to give in to my disgusting propositions. I mean, look. I saw the red-head at the bathhouse, slutting around bareback without permission, basically every time I went, for years after. (I ignored him.) But at the time, I just ground my teeth helplessly.

Then after a few weeks of seething I gave in and left an anonymous tip about him on the Immigration Department’s hotline.

Pity fuck, my ass, motherfucker! (*mic drop*)

So yeah. I’ve done it.


Have you ever dropped a guy because of some little stupid thing that could be fixed, but it was easier to drop him than bring it up? I broke up with a guy over his cell phone case (I hated it, if you can’t guess). I guess I’m wondering if I’m shallow, LOL.

Oh sure, I’ve done it. Again, I’m not proud of it, but I’ve done it.

When I was in graduate school I started seeing a guy I met online. In 1989 or 1990, going online meant connecting your black and white computer with a phone wire into a ginormous 400 baud modem and signing onto a service like Prodigy, where you’d post cryptic notes about being straight-acting on public bulletin boards. Then you’d exchange two-line private messages with a guy until you’d agreed to hook up. So yeah, except for the fact that it would’ve taken hours to transmit even the grainiest of tiny photos over a 400-baud modem, not so very different than Scruff.

The guy I was seeing was married. Big dicked. Kind of a hot body. He liked to come to my graduate student apartment and take over the place. He’d strut in, whip off his belt, drop his pants, fall onto my sofa with his legs spread wide, then order me to suck his dick. If I was a good boy, he’d flip me over and fuck me hard on the floor. Then he’d pull up his slacks, button up, nod, and walk out the door. A few times a week, he might drop by. I dug his direct approach.

But there was one little thing that bugged the hell out of me. Whenever I would kneel to suck the guy, I would get a whiff of something. He was fine when we were standing; he smelled like the cheap cologne his wife liked him to wear. Down there on my knees, though, fuck. The smell would be so rank that I’d gag. It’s tough to describe the scent. It was a little bit like a swamp. A lot like an infected wound. Much like a corpse. It was just wrong.

It wasn’t his dick. His cock was very clean; the skin beneath his head was free of smegma. I was reasonably sure it wasn’t his balls. He didn’t have a funky ass smell. The odor that was making my eyes water was the kind of stank you might expect if a morbidly obese person got a small piece of raw beef trapped in one of the folds of his belly, only to have it emerge completely rotten at the end of a few weeks. But the dude wasn’t obese. He didn’t have folds. It was a complete mystery.

The one thing that turns me from sex hound to sex-averse on the turn of a dime is a nasty smell. I’ll lose an erection permanently if I get a whiff of something bad, mid-sex. I suppose I could’ve said “Hey, you stink. Can you fix that in the shower so I can get back to sucking you?” At the time, though, it just seemed a lot easier to drop him. So I did.

Years later I had a bad case of the flu during which I didn’t shower as much as I normally do. Toward the end of my time as an invalid, I casually stuck my finger in my navel and, as one does, sniffed it. (Oh, shut up. You know you do.) Immediately I reeled. The scent was so familiar from my days in front of that guy’s cock that I had flashbacks. It took a while, but I finally figured out that the dude simply never washed his belly button. Ever.

So if we’re every showing together and you see me lathering my navel for what seems an unusually long time, now you’ll know why. I scrub that fucker daily.


Have you ever had anyone shit in your mouth during sex? Intentionally or non.

Oh god, yes. It was totally non. Just to be clear.

A note to the weak of stomach: you might want to skip the rest of this reply.

I’m pretty sure I’ve discussed this guy before in these pages, but I had sex with a local guy a couple of years ago who was very aggressive about having me eat out his ass. We were having a good time about it. He was sitting on my face, grinding his hole on my beard and moaning while he called out, “Eat me out, fucker! Eat me out good!”

I was mumbling out an enthusiastic reply to the best of my ability with a hundred and thirty pounds of New Yorker on my face, when suddenly the guy bent over and—I think—attempted to push out his hole so I could get better access to it. Unfortunately, he pushed a little hard. The guy had attempted to clean himself out before coming over, and though he’d douched, he’d neglected to evacuate all the water still in his colon. So when he pushed, I got a partial mouthful and a definite face full of a brownish liquid that had a consistency not unlike thin diarrhea.

The guy was offended when I leapt up howling. And he never understood why I refused ever to see him again.

Another more recent occurrence was over the summer, when I was seeing someone who really turned me on for a few weeks. He liked to brag about his anal hygiene. “I’m always squeaky clean,” he’d say. “You can fuck me anyplace, anytime, and I’ll always be squeaky clean.”

Squeaky clean. Hah. I was seeing him for the sixth or seventh time over the summer and I had hoped to spend some quality time down at his hole, munching away. About five minutes into my intensive butt-eating, though, I sensed something was amiss. My face smelled, to put it bluntly, like a baby’s diaper.

As I said, bad smells have a tendency to make me lose my erection. I like to think I’m a little more adept at handling these things now, though. “Hey,” I told him. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I think you’re not as squeaky clean as usual.”

“I’m always squeaky clean!” he protested.

I wiped my face off on the towel he kept handy and showed it to him. He had to admit that not everything was squeaky clean.

So he took me into his shower. Once the water was warm, he washed off my face and soaped up his ass. He had one of those wand extensions installed, so he shoved it up his hole and douched out again. Then he had me kneel, while the water was still running (it was quite a large shower, custom built), pulled apart his ass cheeks, and had me inspect his hole once more. “Now I’m squeaky clean,” he said, pushing a little bit to turn his hole out.

Once again, it was a case of pushing just a little too hard. A hard little turdlet, about the size of a piece of dog kibble, shot out of his ass and hit me in the middle of my forehead with a ping! My patience tried, I told him what happened. He retrieved the still-hard kibble from where it had bounced, tossed it in the toilet, then turned around and started pissing on my face.

I think he still wonders why I’ve refused to see him again, too.

[bair-bak]

I’m writing a little today about words.

For about a year now I’ve had a mild crush on a minor celebrity. Wait. My puppy love has pushed the definition of ‘celebrity’ about a mile past the much-contested boundary where it already lies muddied by the present-day culture of Snapchat fame. This guy who’s been the object of my infatuation is the brother of a female minor celebrity who, despite being an actress in small roles on a couple of shows that watchers of cable programming might have seen at one time or another, isn’t exactly a household name.

(Of course, I could just skip all the mystery and name names. But I won’t, and I’ll ask my readers not to either, simply because I don’t want people typing in the guy’s name into Google along and having a sex blog appear at the top of the search list. I’m a gentleman, after all. Once in a while, anyway.)

The only reason at all I know of the actress’ brother is because he appears on YouTube with his sister once a week in a regular feature in which the pair of them play vintage video games. These short segments usually consist of the siblings shouting obscenities at each other at the tops of their pretty considerable lungs. Hey, as someone who has shouted plenty of obscenities at video games in his lifetime (I’m probably doing it right now, as you read), I find their antics pretty amusing.

What I’m leading up to, in my shaggy dog story of an introduction here, is that this last week in their celebration of retro gaming, the pair were playing some outdated cartridge-based game from the mid-nineties. The brother was trouncing his more famous sister pretty soundly. Furious, she started yelling at him that he was cheating by using the power-ups the game was liberally providing. The brother, scissoring his legs furiously, fibbed and denied it all. “I’m barebackin’ it here!” he shouted back. “I’m raw-doggin’ this mother, dude! I’m barebackin’ it!”

Well, lawks-a-mercy. Gracious me! Must fan myself at the memory.

Anyway, once the blood came back into my brain after that explicit little exchange, it got me wondering: how’s this dude know what barebacking is? And does he want to do it with me?
And more interestingly to my wandering mind, how often do straight guys use the word barebacking to refer to unprotected sex, anyway? I honestly don’t know, but I’d be interested in finding out.

The word bareback and its origins intrigue me because I feel a bit as if I were there at the start of its use. Long before sites like BBRT, long before bareback movies were their own profit margin, before bareback was reduced to part of an inane goddamned hashtag, guys fucked other guys without protection as a matter of course. Men were accustomed to sticking their dicks in each other’s holes for countless generations without wrapping them in latex. Condoms were never a consideration for gay men; not having to use them, ever, was considered one of the few perks to being gay in a less enlightened age. Only in the face of the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic did we start changing our behavior . . . or choose not to.

I was in college when the news about the gay plague started to spread. I had a standing subscription to the Village Voice that was my lifeline to a world larger than lacrosse, Lacoste, and the Greek pledge system that were the obsessions of the small Southern college I attended. I devoured its pages, memorized names and places as if there’d be a pop quiz at any moment, and drank in the New York sophistication. It was sometime during my sophomore year that I started reading about ‘gay cancer’ spreading through the community. Within months, they’d renamed the syndrome GRID. It was one of those moments in history when for a very long time the language we were destined to use for decades following was still in flux. We didn’t have the concept of HIV in the scientific realm yet; we didn’t even know the word AIDS. That vocabulary would be nailed down soon enough. For a while—a scary while—we didn’t even have the language beyond concepts like death and sickness and fear to discuss what was happening.

I think what most people fail to remember, or simply don’t realize, was how much confusion we experienced in those early days of the plague. Without a definite cause yet established, and with so many people throwing out theories of what could be causing the chaos, it seemed as if the rules of how we were supposed to protect ourselves changed daily. One week we’d be assured it was definitely something coming from overseas. We’d be okay if we didn’t fuck around with foreigners. Then suddenly a scientist would say something in the papers about how perhaps poppers were involved. It was something in the poppers, we’d rush around telling ourselves. A bad batch, maybe. Something that happened with poppers abuse. One week we’d be told there’d be a cure within months; the next we’d be gravely informed to dig in for the long haul.

The combination of half-informed scientific assertions and real fear led us to some real Chicken Little behavior, making us run around squawking that the sky was falling while indulging in superstitious nonsense in the hopes that we might be spared.

I felt remote enough from the epidemic’s center not to feel immediately threatened. That false sense of security didn’t keep me from reading the news, week by week in the Voice, to see what they were saying about it. It wasn’t too long before the epidemic was making national headlines, of course. When finally HIV had been identified, we were told by serious government officials that we were all to wear condoms and never exchange fluids, ever again. To a lot of lock-step millennials accustomed to obeying and never questioning the orders of a higher authority, the prescription seems reasonable. But we were a generation of men who were already flouting the law every time we dropped our pants with another man. The sex we were having was illegal in many if not all states. The ways we had to seek it was illegal. If we’d been listening to the state and federal governments in which we’d grown up, we wouldn’t have been congregating, much less copulating.

Enforced condom use—each and every time—was a sexual regimen that a lot of gay men couldn’t take seriously. Condoms had long been the things straight guys wore when they didn’t want to make babies. Condoms were for breeders. They weren’t something that any gay man had ever bought in his lifetime, much less use. Sure, it said on the box that they could prevent disease, but even youngsters like me knew those warnings was some real World War II shit. Straight men hadn’t used condoms to avoid syphilis since the Army handed them out to privates after the Liberation of Paris. Bosses bought rubbers to prevent their secretaries from having babies. That’s what condoms were for.

I first stumbled across the term bareback in the dawn of the internet age. Although I was using the computer to hook up as early as 1989 with the Prodigy system (gawd help me), it was a couple of years later when I started dialing into other networks that I discovered IRC—internet relay chat. IRC was a primitive network by any standards, though like roaches after a holocaust, it’s proved pretty much indestructible over the years. One joined channels like #gay or #gaysex to chat with and meet like-minded men. Although the channels usually never held more than thirty or forty people at a time, I had a pretty good success rate in scoring fucks. There may have been more local gay channels to join. My memory is foggy on that point.

I’m not sure how I found the channel. I think a trick of mine landed in it, or I was invited by someone I knew. But I landed in the IRC #bareback channel sometime in 1991. It was long before hashtags, long before bareback films, long before bareback web sites, and long before straight boys were shouting it at the tops of their lungs during video games. Bareback. It was a new word that only a few dozen people were using to describe something that generations of us had done when we’d shoved our raw cocks into another man’s ass. Bareback. It sounded masculine—the kind of thing that cowboys did. With stallions. Cowboys and stallions were more appealing, sexually, than anything that clinicians were coming up with.

The term authorities used for the act, unprotected sex, sounded cold, sterile unappealing, just like it was supposed to. No one was going to call up a guy and growl, “Come over and let me perpetrate unprotected sex on you.” If you got a phone call from someone demanding, “Let me bareback that ass,” though. Yeah. You’d hop in the shower and drive halfway across town for that, right?

As a new word for something very old, bareback had the advantage of sounding both wicked and transgressive. It got the point across. For a while, if anyone actually brought up the word, you could be pretty sure they were into it. Its abbreviation, bb, was a code that worked just as well. You like bb?, you could ask someone online. If they knew what it meant, they were into it. If they had no clue, it was easy to cover your ass and say you mistyped, or maybe were abbreviating the endearment baby. Something. Anything. They wouldn't know.

For a long time, it really felt as if the new slang word were ours—that is, it seemed to belong to those of us who were actually engaging in the act. And it stayed like that for years, until the mid-nineties, when web browsing overtook the world of homegrown dial-up bulletin boards and AOL and IRC. The web changed everything. We had sites like Bareback City, and the beginnings of Bareback Jack. Guys who’d previously only employed the word in secret corners and private bulletin boards were putting their bareback preference into profiles that many, many more people were seeing—and the safe-sex adherents were noticing. Visibility got the word attention.

Suddenly just as many people were using barebacker as a pejorative, a demonization of those who choosing raw fucking and its risks as the sex they preferred to have. The mainstream press started to write articles about the legions of dangerous, evil, gay barebackers who lurked online and perverted the innocent, conveniently choosing to ignore the fact that in real life, people of all orientations had sex without condoms. Straight people in particular were still barebacking each other in record numbers on a daily basis. A word we’d chosen—a word that had seemed so liberating and exciting in its early days—started to be used against us.

It still is, of course, by those who see it as a derogatory. And for those who see it as a badge of pride, it gets used in all kinds of ways. It’s just a word. A word we take for granted. I think it’s valuable to remember there was a time before this when it was new, and unknown, and not at all guaranteed to become the slang we use daily.

But by and large, though, except when it’s employed by the mainstream press for its shock value, I’d assumed that the gay population had largely reserved the right to the use of the word bareback. Hearing it shouted between brother and sister on a mainstream video channel, over the electronic, bleeping soundtrack of a video game from twenty years ago, got me thinking about how long the word has been not only been around, but a part of my day-to-day life.