Sunday Morning Questions: Moments of Recognition Edition

Some questions about recognition—or lack thereof, in today’s occasional feature. Got questions for your friendly neighborhood sex blogger? Send them to the email in my sidebar, with a subject line of ‘Sunday Morning Questions’. Of course, if you have questions you don’t want answered on a Sunday morning, you can submit them the same way, of course . . . but I do reserve the right to use the questions and their answers in my blog sometime.


You really get recognized on a regular basis? What’s it like when some stranger comes up to you and asks if you are who they think you are?

The short answer: yes, and it’s okay.

A couple of points, first. Although I don’t show it on my blog, I’m not so rigorous on my various sex profiles about keeping my face anonymous. In fact, I’m adamant about keeping my own face photos unlocked, because I’m not really fond of guys who lock and unlock and dole out peeks like barkers at a sideshow. When people see me on a website or a GPS app and ask if I’m the guy who keeps this blog, I don’t lie about it. I say yes.

So quite honestly, it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes—or even much of a Scooby Doo—to see my face and say, “Oh, so that’s what he looks like. Okay.” There’ve been several times in the past, however, when guys have thought that they’d really stumbled onto the secret of the century and have attempted to use their knowledge of what I look like as leverage against me. Like that’ll get them anything.

Most of the people who’ve recognized me online, have been totally delightful about it. They’ll say hi, they’ll tell me they read the blog, I’ll thank them, and then we’ll each go our merry ways. My public encounters have been much the same—and I’ve had a lot of those as well. I’ll be in a Starbucks, or sitting in a theater, or in a bar, or on vacation, or in the mall (seriously . . . it’s happened at the food courts of malls, three times) when someone will approach me, half-smile, and nervously say something along the lines of, “I know this is going to be a weird question but. . . .”

It usually is a weird question, too. Unexpected, at least. Being recognized is great when it gets me a quiet compliment or two. My blog is a tiny sliver of my life, though; I’m not thinking about it or its contents all the time. So when someone approaches me, especially in a bar or at the food court, I’m most likely thinking they’re going to ask “Do you mind if I take this chair?” instead of “HEY DUDE, ARE YOU A FAMOUS SEX BLOGGER?” When the latter comes out of their mouths, particularly at an indiscreet volume (and it has), I’m likely to feel like a deer in the headlights, honestly.

There’ve also been times when I find out I’ve been recognized only after the fact. Someone will see me perform in a karaoke bar someplace, and three days later I’ll get an email saying “Nice blog! By the way, did you sing an Erasure song at . . . ?” Last week I took the L train cross-town and that night I had someone leave a comment on a past entry to the effect that they’d seen me but hadn’t wanted to introduce themselves. Also last week, I went bar-hopping with friends and had no less than three messages on Scruff from readers who asked if they’d really seen me.

My long answer, I guess is that yes. I get recognized. It happens fairly regularly—and sometimes it happens more often than others. Being recognized in public feels mostly fairly weird, because I’m never really all that sure of what people expect from me once they’ve approached me—and also because a handful of people are fairly indiscreet about their inquiries, even though I might be with friends or family or colleagues.

If you are one of those people who see me out and about, and you do want to walk up and say something to me, don’t hold back just because you think I’ll freak out. I would be much happier, however, if you were simply to hold out a hand and something along the lines of “Hi! I enjoy reading you online!”, instead of “HEY DUDE, AREN’T YOU THE BREEDER?”


I know everybody’s got to remember you after you’ve been with them but have you ever been with anyone you couldn’t remember after?

I really appreciate your confidence that I’m unforgettable. Sadly, that assumption has already been proven wrong, more than a few times. There have been several guys I’ve met up with who, months after the fuck, will contact me with a message of, hey guy hot pics maybe we should meet sometime.

A few years back I told the story of a stoner I used to fuck, sometimes weekly, for close to two years whom I stopped seeing after he started doing drug deals through the mail slot in his front door . . . while I was fucking him. (It’s pretty sad, and typical of Detroit, where I was living at the time, that he was not the only guy I saw who paused mid-fuck to perform drug deals through his mail slot.) When I encountered him in a bathhouse a few years later, after he’d gotten himself cleaned up, and we struck up our fuckbuddyship again, he had absolutely no idea who I was, nor that we’d been together countless times before.

I had another encounter with a guy with an unusual name from Maine who once flew to Detroit to attend a fisting party one of my best friends threw. He spent the weekend at my friend’s house, took not only my dick but both my fists and the dick and fists of my buddy, and posed for over three dozen photographs, most with his face visible, of me mounting and using him. Cut to ten years later, when a guy with the same unusual name from the same place in Maine contacted me online to ask if I’d like to get together with him when he visited Manhattan. Hey ——, I wrote back, using his unusual name. It’s ——. We met at my buddy’s —‘s house when you flew to Detroit and visited on Valentine’s weekend in 2002.

This guy wrote back to say he’d never met me and had never been in Detroit. I sent him his photos and asked, Aren’t these you?

No, he said.

Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I asked my host buddy if the guy online wasn’t the same guy we’d both bred a decade before. “I don’t know what that fucker is on,” said my buddy, “but if he doesn’t remember being worked over by you, he’s crazy in the head.”

Crazy in the head. I like that theory.


Did you get my birthday gift? Did you get a lot of birthday gifts?

I received several birthday gifts this year, thanks to my kind readers. I got a stretchy cock ring, several packages of underwear, some filters for my camera, a book, a game, two bottles of lube . . . and maybe something else I’m forgetting. But it was a birthday bonanza! Thank you guys!

There are many times when Amazon doesn’t inform me who has sent me a particular item—so don’t be shy about speaking up and asking me if I received something. That’s very often the only time I learn from whom it came.


I kind of think you must have a sad life if sex is all you have time to do or think about.

Ah, but sex isn’t all I do. It’s not all I have time for. Outside my blog, I have a life that has room for all kinds of activities—social, intellectual, recreational, and yes, sexual. I work, I volunteer, I spend time with family, I create, I teach, I share. I have hobbies, I travel, I’m a great cook, I take advantage of cultural opportunities. I have a rich and satisfying life that I am zealous about keeping that way.

So no. Sex isn’t all I do. It’s just something I do really fucking well.

I kind of think you must have a sad life if all you have time to do is jack off to my blog, then try to project how badly you feel about yourself and what you've just done onto me.