Married Men

(In which a few things that you did not know about me are revealed.)

A few months ago, maybe even as long ago as last September, I was making out with a guy in his bed, and he said, "Did you used to be married?"

"Yes. I've been divorced for, um, I don't know, a little over five years now, I guess. Why?"

"Because you make love to me like you'd make love to a woman."

I rolled up on one elbow, smiled warily, and said, "I'm not sure how to take that. If I were making love to a woman, well, I don't even want to complete the thought. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

He stretched. "A very good thing. I want to follow you home and live with you. Do you think your partner would mind?"

"I don't think so: he's pretty easy. Unless you wanted some closet space. Then he'd have some issues." Then I rolled back over and bit down on his nipple, which rather shifted his priorities, and there wasn't any more conversation for another hour. When he didn't have my cock in his mouth, he was too busy moaning or grunting, and my mouth was pretty busy chewing his nipples and then eating his ass and then kissing him while I was fucking him, which always takes a fair amount of coordination.

After about ten minutes of fucking, he was too sore to continue, so I stroked him off while continuing to suck and bite one of his nipples. Then I stroked myself almost to completion, grabbed his hand and wrapped it around my cock, and shot all over him. Then we both lay back for a while and talked.

"So congratulations on your new worship hall," he said, out of nowhere. *

"Um. Thanks." I had to think for a moment. "How did you know about that?"

"One of my lesbian friends wanted to visit your church, and she took me along at Easter."

"Damn. It really is a small world, after all."

"Uh-huh. I was sitting a row behind you."

"And you didn't say hello?"

"I didn't know you liked ass, or I would have."

"I do like ass."

"I know. I'm going to be sore for days."

I smiled at him. "I'd apologize, but we both know I'd be lying."

He laughed. "And I wasn't complaining."

I thought some more. "So was I there with one of my kids? Is that how you knew I used to be married?"

He started to wipe us up with a towel. "No, you were there alone. I got that from the way you make love."

"It's the kissing, isn't it?"

"No," he said, "well, sort of. I mean it's mostly the attitude. Married men are good kissers, but they're never as good as you."

"Thanks."

"No, really, the pleasure was all mine," he laughed.

"Maybe not all." He was lying down again, and I put my arm over him and spooned him.

"I mean," he continued, "that you were taking your time and that you weren't shoving my head towards your cock or immediately trying to ram your cock up my ass. It was like you were trying to make me feel good."

"I was trying to make you feel good. It's more fun that way. I don't think that's because I was married; I think it's just that I'm not a douchebag." I paused. "Maybe I should put "not a douchebag" in my next craigslist ad.

"Why bother? It'll turn half the guys off, and the other half won't believe you."

I'm not sure to what extent B. (That was the first time I'd met him, but he's since become a good friend. We've only managed to have sex a couple more times since then. He claims that he's entirely comfortable with being friends and having sex, but he can rarely host because he rents out a couple of the rooms in his house, and what he really wants is a husband, so I've pretty much given up on fucking him. He doesn't have much sex generally, and it's a bit tedious never to be able to fuck more than ten minutes without him becoming too sore, anyway. Great nipples, though.) has a point about married and formerly married men. I'm not really unbiased here: it strokes my ego to think that I belong to a class of men that's better at sex.

I was still married the first time that I fell in love with a man. (As a tedious and unnecessary bit of explanation, I will say that I had already told my then-wife that I was gay and that we'd already decided to divorce. As a further unnecessary bit of even more tedious explanation, I'll also say that between the first and last times that I had sex with my now-ex-wife, I didn't have sex with any men, or, indeed, with anyone but her. I'm not claiming any sort of moral superiority because of this; after all, I have no qualms whatsoever about fucking a married man.) And that man was also married, though I didn't find that out until after I was already hopelessly in love. I don't want to go into the details of that particular affair. We're both divorced now, and he lives on the other side of the country, and I haven't had any contact with him in years. More to the point, the whole incident makes me look ridiculously naive, and I'm such a different person now from who I was then, that I likely wouldn't be able to explain how it all played out.

B&c was also once married, though it was many years ago now. He is older than I by a good bit, and his children are grown, so they're not around much. I get along well with them when they're in town, and I went to his son's wedding last year, though. But, frankly, while the first guy I fell in love with was pretty great in the sack, b&c needed quite a bit of training when I first met him (I hope that his men on the side appreciate how much better he is at sex because of his time with me, but the ungrateful bastards almost never send thank you notes.), so it's clearly not universally true that married men make better lovers.

A buddy of mine who does a lot of married men claims that he likes them because they're uncomplicated, predictable, and out the door ten minutes after they shoot. As he puts it, "If I hook up with a married guy, I know I'm not going to have to see them again. And I know they're going to want what they don't get at home: they're going to want me to suck their cock and then they're going to want me to fuck them. I would probably get a lot less action if they were able to have a frank discussion with their wives about the importance of oral sex and strap-ons."

I haven't looked at any statistics, and I don't know whether any even exist, but I'd guess that married or formerly married men must be a minority of the gay population. I'd also guess that the proportion of married men decreases as the age of the population decreases. In other words, in a group of thirty-year-old gay men, hardly any of them would have ever been married. In a group of forty-year-old gay men, the proportion would be somewhat higher.

The reasons for this disparity are obvious. A fourteen-year-old today has a lot more exposure to all things queer than did the fourteen-year-old of, say, thirty years ago. And while there is still a serious stigma associated with homosexuality in much of the country, it's not nearly so bad today as it was then. So while someone growing up in the late seventies might not have understood why he wanted to stare at the boys in the locker room but would have figured out quickly that to do so was unwise, someone growing up today would know exactly why he wanted to stare and would have figured out how to do so surreptitiously, so that he could enjoy it.

Men who've known that they were gay since they were twelve and who've inhabited a gay social circle for their entire adult lives might be surprised to learn that there are a lot of gay men with children and ex-wives (and, yes, plenty of men who've always known they loved cock end up with one or more children, but I'd be willing to bet that most gay dads were once married), but the therapist (more of an exit counselor, really) who my ex and I saw during the divorce assured me that married men coming out had reached epidemic proportions.

This last phenomenon, naturally, is entirely traceable to the Internet. Or, as the first guy I fell in love with (he was a Republican: oh, the humanity) used to say, "God bless Al Gore." If you were a married man back in, say, 1989, and it suddenly occurred to you that you were thinking about guys every time you masturbated (and you would have masturbated frequently), your options would have been limited. You'd likely have been terrified to go near a gay bar, provided you could even figure out where one was. You might have stumbled onto a bookstore or some other site with glory holes, but that would have been a very limited activity.

Fast forward to 1999, and it was a whole nother world. You could get online! You could log on to gay.com and nobody knew who you were, but you could chat with real, live queers. And with other guys who were in your same situation. You would very quickly discover that you were not, in fact, alone. And given this relatively safe way to explore the emotional side of your sexuality, you might easily (or more easily, anyway: it was easy for no one) have come to understand that marriage to a woman was something that you simply could no longer do.

Or at least that was my experience. God bless Al Gore.

But back to where I started. Does having been married make me a better lover? I don't know. I do think that having children has made and continues to make me a better person and, in turn, probably a more considerate lover. If you have kids, you learn pretty quickly to subordinate your own needs to theirs, and while that doesn't mean that you're not going to make sure to get your own when you're bedding another guy, it probably does mean that you're also going to try to make sure that he gets his.

I've certainly experienced plenty of queer-from-the-start guys who had no interest in anything other than what they wanted. I think this situation is exacerbated by the fact that there are plenty of other gay men who find selfishness very attractive. I don't, but it's pretty easy to avoid that sort of man, and that sort of man generally isn't very interested in me, anyway.

I don't, though, equate always gay with selfish. And God knows I've had phenomenal sex with men who've never so much as dated a woman. There are a lot of ways that you can learn to be considerate of other people, and you certainly don't have to have kids to figure out that other people matter. You can get that from having a partner or from having good friends. I do think that men who've never successfully maintained a relationship are probably bad bets. Or, as the second guy I fell in love with used to say, "If he's never had a boyfriend for more than a year, and he's never had a dog, then you don't want to date him, no matter how good a fuck he is."

Not, God knows, that there's anything wrong with a guy who's just a good fuck. At least in the short term.

*Yes, this really happened. Both the hook-up and the fact that this guy recognized me from church. We live in a world where unlikely coincidences are surprisingly common. Like the time one of my best friends and I found out we'd hooked up with the same guy. Not that rare, I know, but this guy lived in Morgantown, WV and my friend lived in Annapolis, MD. I'd hooked up with the guy in Gaithersburg, MD, and my friend had hooked up with him in Atlanta. That was weird. Neither of us thought he was all that, in case you're wondering.