Doing Without

As of this week, it will be six months since I’ve had sex. For me, that’s a very long time—probably the longest stretch I’ve gone without, since puberty.

A reader and friend of mine commented:

Sometime, I'd find it really interesting to read what you have to say about how not having sex for several months has affected you. I know I would be in some sort of catastrophic depression.

I can’t claim with one hundred percent certainty that I’m not depressed. I’ve been isolated in my home since March. The first couple of months were terrifying in my part of the U.S. The supermarkets were barren. Every trip out of the house felt like an installment in the initial chapters of a post-apocalyptic movie, right before everybody gets wiped out save for an unlikely (yet Hollywood-attractive) troupe of rag-tag survivors. During the initial few weeks, sex wasn’t really even on my mind.

With time the terrifying turned mundane. The supermarkets restocked. The weather turned warm and welcoming. I started not only wearing masks when I’d go outdoors, but wearing them in my sleeping dreams as well. That’s about the time the loneliness started to take its toll, and I’d find myself wishing I’d had the foresight to isolate with a perpetually horny bottom.

Sure, I’ve managed to distract myself during this terrible half-year. I’ve played video games. I’ve listened to music. A lot of music. (It’s a very good year for music.) I’ve streamed drag shows and supported friends whose lives as entertainers have been brutally interrupted. I’ve watched a lot of television and movies. I do all these things to distract myself, and at night I crawl into bed and try to pretend I’m content.

My dick, punching holes in the memory foam, tells me otherwise.

Every day I remind myself how fortunate I am. How lucky to have food in the freezer, a roof over my head. How auspicious it is that I haven’t been sick. How incredibly charmed my life must be that I’m to be able to hole up at home and be only inconvenienced in minor ways. I recognize that in a time of distress and disease and death and widespread fear, I am privileged. My libido has been a driving force in my life for decades, and having to pack it in mothballs has at times seemed cruel. It’s led to any number of self-pitying moments. But then I remind myself that in the larger context, a mere lack of ready holes to fuck is a minor inconvenience.

On Twitter and the various sex apps I’d see guys who were proceeding with a business-as-usual approach—they’d be advertising that they’d be ass-up and ready in a hotel room for all comers. Or they’d be hitting the cruisiest spots of a local park. Or they’d be hosting a small group at their home that night. Guys would hit me up on Scruff telling me to come on over, their place was free.

I’d resist. Some made it easy by flaunting their lack of concern for the virus; I knew I wasn’t going to take my chances with anyone who didn’t recognize or care about the risks. Others, those who had round and beautiful butts that made my cock strain in my shorts, were difficult to resist. Particularly if they assured me that they’d been isolated as well. But I resisted all the same.

I’ve somehow already lived through one pandemic more or less intact. But there’s a big difference between COVID-19 and HIV. An HIV infection isn’t going to spread casually throughout my household. An HIV infection isn’t going to leap from my body to dozens of others when I attend a social event, or sit in a bar, or sing in a choir. Someone taking risks with HIV in his sexual life is endangering himself only—not the well-being of everyone around him.

This was a conviction theoretical to me during the first few months of my isolation, but when my aging dad was diagnosed with cancer last month, the thought of potentially infecting him inadvertently, in his compromised state, distressed me greatly. Particularly because I’m soon going to have to live with him for a few weeks during his treatment. I can’t conceive of risking his life with my own personal need for contact. I’m just going to have to resist some more.

At first, friends commiserated with me. We all were in similar straits of needing touch, needing a mouth on our own, needing the physicality of another body next to ours—but at first we all were resisting. Then they began slipping. I’ve tried hard not to judge adversely their hookups—because even after six months of abstinence, who’s to say when I won’t have a moment of weakness and give in to temptation? Every big mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made with my dick. With that kind of track record, how likely am I to do what’s right? Perhaps I can extend my monkish solitude another six months, but it’s more likely I’ll succumb to some dude’s come-ons tomorrow, or next week.

But oh, god, how I have to resist the urge to judge. When a friend tells me about the strangers he’s sucking off in a park, even as my dick springs up, the rest of me recoils. When friends tell me about ‘calculated risks’ they’re taking that sound to me like business-as-usual picking up serial random dick on Grindr without any vetting, I have to shush the Mrs. Grundy that wants to lecture them, and instead listen with envy about the hookups. When buddies text me about the half-dozen guys they banged over a weekend, all I want to do it yell in all caps, HOW IS THAT SAFE? But I listen, and gnash my teeth, wishing it were me.

For a while, though, it won’t be.

How can I judge them? I’m no saint. Many are the times I’ve let circumstance carry me on unexpected adventures on the turn of a dime. All it would take to make me crumble would be a wayward smile or a certain stare as I passed someone. A text from a favorite. A come-hither photo. An opportunity. Any of those, and I’d lose any claim I might have to remaining virtuous during these trying times. So how can I blame anyone I know, much less those I like and understand, for doing exactly what I myself yearn to do?

Once in a while I think maybe this is it for me. Maybe I just won’t have sex again in what span of my days is left. Then frequently I wonder if once again in my lifetime, disease will redefine how, where, and when I have sex. Decades ago, fear of AIDS emptied the sexual field I’d known of its players. Tearooms that had been packed from noon until midnight suddenly were deserted. Campus cruising spots that had seethed with action in 1980, floor after floor of them, echoed emptily in 1982. Bathhouses shuttered. The scores of men who had spent their nights in unlit parks sliding among the shadows, congregating by picnic tables and near ponds to locate each other only by their glowing cigarette tips—vanished.

Maybe this second pandemic of my life, like the last, will fashion new ways I connect with men. Maybe, in the rear view mirror, this time of self-denial will seem nothing more than a hiccup. Until then, like everyone else, I stumble ahead, trying to survive. Trying to do the best I can.