The Tenth Anniversary: Last of Reader Questions

I’ve been super-grateful for the many kind notes you guys have sent me since I started this trio of anniversary questions and answers. I have to admit that writing this blog over the last decade has often left me feeling like a crazy Lear howling his madness into an uncaring gale. Knowing that there are people out there who care, and who have even benefitted in the slightest by anything I might’ve said, really gives me solace.

While this might be the end of my anniversary-edition questions, I’ll still be making more entries in the future—and next week I’m hoping to prepare a retrospective of my most popular posts, with perhaps a little commentary as appropriate. So be sure to tune in.

(I wouldn’t mind more of those congratulatory notes, too. And ass pics. Those are always welcome.)

Where are your sex positive blog peers? Why aren’t there many many more in this app/blog-rich age; is this country stalled out in terms of sexual liberation?

There are still thoughtful and sex-positive blogs out there—I try to keep the list of those I follow updated in my sidebar. (If you’re running one that I may have overlooked, send me a note and let me know.) I think these days many men are too impatient to write blogs; as I said in the last set of questions, it’s not fashionable any longer to share sexual experience in long-form writing.

The online world has shifted over the last decade. It’s infinitely less effort, and more gratifying, to post a shirtless selfie on Instagram and get a thousand likes than it is to sweat over a two-thousand word piece of memoir for three comments (three if I’m lucky). It’s hotter and sexier to throw a thirty-second clip of oneself stroking for the camera on Reddit or on Twitter for the upvotes and woofs than it is to attempt a creative essay. It’s easier to monetize one’s torso than it is serious writing.

All that is fantastic, of course. I don’t begrudge anyone their thumbs-up icons or heart emojis. But I do think that when gay male sexuality is reduced to posed photos and videos by fitness models, its audience tends to think that only hot muscle jocks and pretty Instagram boys are worthy enough to find bed partners, and to enjoy a life that’s fully sexual. And that’s bullshit. Regular dudes like me have an excellent time too, when we’re looking for it.


Any regrets or negative feedback from posting your interactions as a 14 year old with adults?

I do not have any regrets.

I grew up in an entirely different era. My mom and dad didn’t helicopter-parent me, or really supervise my free time at all. Unlike today, it wasn’t widely assumed that any kid who stepped outside the boundaries of his front yard would be immediately kidnapped and molested—so as a little kid and teen I had free reign to roam where I wanted. I lived in a time in which gay sex itself was illegal. However fucked-up a concept it might be to us nowadays, then the penalty for gay sex with a fourteen-year-old kid wasn’t really any different than it would’ve been for butt-fucking a guy in his mid-thirties.

We are so sensitive these days to any whiff of intergenerational impropriety that it’s difficult for a younger generation to conceive of a time in which gay life was already so marginalized, and its actors already such literal sexual outlaws, that not once was my age an issue for any of the men with whom I had sex. We were all criminals, and criminals together.

My intent in writing about that part of my life has never been to normalize that kind of interaction, nor certainly not to apologize for it. I’m merely giving testament to my own lived past.

What I’ve discovered, though, is that my experience isn’t unique. All the feedback I’ve ever received on my history-tagged posts has been one hundred percent positive; I regularly have men write me to say that they, too, were sexually adventurous with older men in their teens, and how affirming it is to have their own experiences validated.

As inappropriate as they might have been or as we might see them these days, my youthful sexual experiences were something I sought out. I relished every encounter with an older man. I never felt abused, or exploited—neither then nor to this day. I think my fondness for those memories shines through when I write about them, and readers have responded in kind.


Anyway your profile says you're married and a dad....so wondering if you'd ever disclose anything about that sphere?

Nah.

That was kind of a smart-ass response. I know. Honestly, though, if I haven’t discussed something in a decade, I’m hardly going to start now.

Keeping a blog in which I divulge and explore my own sexual experiences is fine and good. Exposing others who haven’t necessarily consented to appear in it, though, is something I’ve always avoided. When it comes to my sexual partners, I do my best to change enough details that they can’t easily be identified. When it comes to my nearest and dearest, I simply don’t expose them in an way whatsoever.


Do you prefer the pizza in New York or Chicago?

A question near and dear to my heart! I prefer Connecticut pizza.

Seriously, Connecticut pizza is amazing, and Connecticut regularly has its pizzerias clustered at the very top of the best-of lists. New Haven pizza makers like Frank Pepe, Modern, Sally’s? Yes please. The hot oil pizzas of Fairfield County? Yum. (One of my friends was working in Stamford last week and made fun of a sign on a local pizzeria advertising its hot oil pizza, but when I explained it was a thin-crust pizza on which has been spooned a ladleful of olive oil infused with hot peppers, he had to concede that it sounded pretty good.)

For my birthdays I always have a choice of where to go for dinner. I always choose the oversized, misshapen, charred pies at Frank Pepe’s. Seriously, it’s worth trying their white clam pizza once in your life.


I would love to know how you lost your cherries and how old you were. Getting fucked, fucking, getting sucked, sucking and swallowing. Asking for all of us here.

I was twelve. On the same day. For all of them except topping, which I didn't discover until much later.

I’d spent a long year attempting to seduce my sixth-grade homeroom teacher without any real success. Basically the week school let out and I realized that Mr. Goldberg was not going to be the fellow who would relieve me of my virginity, I set out to lose it to someone else as quickly as possible. Considering that I’d spent the previous year and a half in the cruisiest restrooms in the city, I knew exactly where to find someone to do the deed.


I have been a fan of your blog for years, one of my favorite part of your blog is the hotel hook ups. How many have you experienced and have you enjoyed a gentleman from the hotel groups on his own?

I’ve had a lot of hotel group sessions over the years—way too many to count, actually. Back in Michigan I used to attend blackout parties in which the host would rent a hotel suite and make sure that the inner room was so pitch-dark that rarely could you see whom you were fucking around with. (I really miss those.) Back there I’d also regularly attend a fist-fucking hotel group, as well as a pretty sleazy ongoing session with a group of guys from BBRT that met at different skanky hotels on the outskirts of the city twice a month. And FelchingPisser’s hotel gang bangs, sometimes.

Since my move, the ongoing hotel parties I’ve attended included the one exclusively held for married suburban men (the host’s reasoning is that ‘a group of married men fucking each other is ‘safer’ than anything else,’ which is utter bullshit, but the sex was good), the Manhattan married men’s group (same host, same philosophy, same bullshit, but the sex was even better), and a sleazy group of motley men out in New Haven on occasion. And yeah, I have often been notorious for getting the phone numbers of other attendees during the groups, and hooking up with them after.

I think of all the hotel groups I’ve been to, the one I enjoyed the most was the blackout group. The sex was hotter on average, and the anonymity of the dark room forced guys to make judgments not on looks or perceived age, but on dicks and holes and how well the guys attached to them were using them. One of the things I don’t like about larger sex parties in general is that there are usually wallflowers who lurk around the edges of the room, men who are too frightened to participate but like the idea of watching; I think the notion of a total blackout scared away the voyeurs and left only the guys who were there actually to fuck.


Which of your college experiences holds the fondest memories for you sexually? Was it a specific location? A bottom? A top?

Okay, I have to explain to my readers that the fellow who asked this particular question—a friend through the blog—attended the same college as I. We both had a lot of sex with the same French Professor. (Not at the same time, as my reader started at our alma mater the year after I left, I think.) So this query isn’t coming out of nowhere.

Despite the hours and hours I spent sucking on, and getting fucked by, the French Professor, and the fond memories I have of him, I think the single sexiest college encounter I had was with the president of Kappa Alpha—a notoriously redneck and homophobic fraternity whose leader that year was a steamin’ hot cup of good ol’ boy with a John Oates mustache. (Trust me. It was verrrrry hot in 1983.)

The frat boy picked me up in the cruisy restroom of the campus center and drove me in his truck (yes, there was a Confederate flag sticker in the rear window) to an amphitheater in the woods on Lake Matoaka, where he fucked me in a dressing room there. Primarily I recorded the experience because I’d had an opportunity twenty years later to thank the frat boy for giving me that afternoon of unbridled animal sex. It’s not all that often that we chances to thank people for good memories they gave us decades before, and at the time it was important for me to commemorate that.

Well. That was all good and high-minded of me, but there’s more to that particular story. Frat boys, it turns out, are all fine and dandy when they’re only personalities on Facebook, but they’re fucking annoying when they leech on to you and don’t let go. For about three years after that, the former frat boy turned to me whenever he wanted something—an article edited, a reference for a job, a cash advance. I realized I was being used, but I had such a soft spot for that fucking he'd given me at Lake Matoaka that I would help him out with just about anything when I could. Except the cash. I'm not that soft a touch.

The turning point came when the frat boy decided that that he needed to move to Manhattan. Did I know of anywhere with cheap rent? I thought I was doing him a solid when I hooked him up with a friend of mine who was seeking a roommate. The frat boy lived with my friend for four months. He never paid any rent. Eventually just moved out and left all his trash and crap in his room for my friend to clean up. Then to me he badmouthed my poor friend, who is a saint and really didn’t need, want, or shouldn't have had to clean up the aged frat boy’s discarded laundry and crusty cum rags.

I learned my lesson about being nostalgic about old tricks, after that, because some grown-up frat boys never leave the Kappa Alpha house, apparently.

The single most poignant experience I had in college was the night before graduation, when I hooked up with a shy boy named Jefferson for whom I’d longed since I first saw him my freshman year. He always stared at me with such hunger when we passed on campus, yet it wasn’t until right before we were about to depart the campus forever that he took a chance and decided to meet with me, only to announce, after I’d spent the night making him happy, ‘this isn’t who I am’—then fleeing.

I never have been able to find out what’s happened to Jefferson. There’s literally no trace of him to be found, either in the annals of the alumni records, or anywhere on the internet. I hope he finally figured out who he was, though.


Was wondering, have you ever found a trace of Earl?

No!

My mentor Earl was very much a center of my teen years; he taught me a lot about sexual responsibility as well as sexual abandon—and sexual depravity, to boot. When his partner’s jealousy of me came to a head, though, Earl made the decision for me that I shouldn’t see him any longer. I never did. I was heading to college soon thereafter anyway; although I considered attempting to contact Earl during my visits home or during the holidays, somehow I was unwilling to poke a potential hornet’s nest.

When I returned to my parents’ home after college to attend grad school for a couple of years, Earl was gone. Someone else was living in his house. I didn’t really know anyone at that point who could tell me where he might have moved—hookups in that time didn’t really keep each other in their contacts book, and we didn’t have an internet to search.

By my thirties, I'd forgotten Earl’s surname. It finally surfaced in my rusty brain when I started to write memoirs about him in my late forties. Even then, I couldn’t find a trace of him through Google, nor that partner of his, either.

I’ve always been baffled, I have to admit, by people who have zero presence on the internet whatsoever. I mean, even my elderly dad can be found on Google, despite the fact I’ve forbidden him to join any social media—and he's a man who thinks that when I talk about his information being stored in the cloud, that I actually mean there’s some cumulus formation somewhere packed full of binary numbers.

I’d love to know what happened to Earl, but I think at this point I’d have to hire a private detective.


What’s the most profound thing you’ve learned about human sexuality that you didn’t realize before you started writing the blog?

Oh good, a big-picture question I can end upon.

From the age of twelve, I started having a lot of sex. Sex in parks, sex in restrooms. Sex in houses, sex in hotels, sex in dorm rooms, sex in alleys, bars, bathhouses, bookstores, and bedrooms. I had sex whenever I wanted, and often. I had sex with a lot of partners.

So I think my biggest surprise, when I started to write about the sex I was having, was how much of an outlier I apparently am—because it seems as if a hell of a lot of my readers don’t have sex at all.
My eyes were opened wide when I began to realize that the majority of men, it seems, prefer dreaming about sex, or masturbating to images of sex, to actually engaging in it.

Their lack of sexual inertia has become even more apparent in the digital age; it appears that more and more men are creating profiles and taking photos not so they can connect up with someone, but in order to receive a little validation or praise when finally they are cajoled to unlock their nude album. These are the men who disappear when you attempt to set up a date with them, or who at long length keep prospective tricks on the hook while never committing to meeting.

I’ve also been saddened by the number of emails and messages I receive from men who have decided their looks work against them and that they’re unfuckable, or by the men who have painted themselves into a closet corner and have decided to live vicariously through me, while never attempting a little human contact with someone close at hand. As recently as a decade ago I always assumed most other men were having as much sex as I; the most profound thing I’ve discovered is what a distinct minority I seem to be in.

At the same time, though, the best missives I’ve received have been those from men who’ve decided to take chances and start to explore their sexuality, or the men who’ve resolved to rearrange their relationships, or start new ones, to accommodate their sexual needs as an integrated part of their lives.

Sexual pleasure is a gift with which we’ve all been blessed. Honor that gift, before it’s taken away forever.