Fit to Be Tied

The picture to the left is not the guy I had tied to my bed last night, though I did tie this guy to my bed and take this picture of it. Just not last night. But it is my favorite picture of a guy tied to my bed. I like the lack of focus, and I like the memory of that particular guy. You can't tell it from the picture, but he's 43 and could easily pass for 33. He's also very handsome: nobody rocks the jeans-halfway-down-the-bare-ass look like he does. But I won't give any more of his particulars. It should be fairly obvious that no one could identify this guy from this picture, but men are a little paranoid about seeing Internet pictures of themselves in compromised positions.

This is a picture of the guy who I had tied up on my bed last night. Again, it's a picture that I took after I'd tied him up, but, again, I didn't take it last night. I think this is from last summer. I only feel bad about putting this picture up because when I took it, he'd been working for maybe twenty hours straight (not on my bed, at his job -- before he came over), and he normally looks a lot better than he looks in this picture. I would have taken a picture of him tonight, when he looked a lot better, but I never got the chance.

Submissives are some of my very favorite people. Or at least my very favorite people to have in my bed, at least on an occasional basis. I don't have much use outside the bedroom for people who want me to call all the shots about everything. Of course, many subs are only submissive in a sexual context, and I'm sure that some of the people that I've tied down would be perfectly fun folk to hang out with. But for most of the subs I've played with, submission is a shameful secret, so interacting in any other context with someone who's dominated them is unthinkable.

I don't really get the shame: people generally have very little control over what they find sexually exciting, and there is no logical reason to be ashamed over something that you can't control and that doesn't hurt anyone. But, of course, I don't get submission, either. The idea of entirely ceding control to someone else is not really repulsive to me, it's just foreign. I'm sure that the psychology of submission has been carefully studied and elucidated by someone and that I could learn a lot about it if I were willing to do some research, but who wants to spend his time reading serious studies of sexuality when there's so much porn to read?

I can't speak for other (occasional) doms, but in my case, a very large part of what's exciting about dominating another person is the fact that the submissive has willingly put you in control of himself. That act of surrender is exceedingly intimate and conveys a great responsibility. You are witnessing and participating in a very profound moment. Plus, submissives tend to be terrific cocksuckers, and many of them have misplaced their gag reflexes.

The other big part of what's exciting about dominance is the immense excitement that the submissive gets from it. That guy in the first picture? He lets himself into my house and puts on a blindfold, then I put restraints on his wrists, clip them together, and march him upstairs. From the moment he gets the blindfold on, he's hard as a rock, and he's still hard when he leaves, even though he's ejaculated. The man in the picture at left (Submissive #3, come on down!) might have enjoyed sex more than any other guy I've ever been with. He wanted two tops, so I invited over an immensely hung black friend of mine who hammered his ass while I fucked his face. Every time I left his mouth empty, he screamed for more. He never screamed from pain, though. I gave his nipples a very rough workout, and he never complained. I guess he must have enjoyed it. God knows I did. There's something very thrilling and powerful about being able to bring that much pleasure to someone.

As I said before, a lot of submissives are ambivalent about being submissive. On the one hand, they're ashamed; on the other, they have the greatest time ever. The ambivalence makes it difficult for a lot of guys to commit to submission. These guys fantasize about it a lot. I'm sure that when they jerk off, they imagine being bound and gagged. (I guess to some extent you have to fantasize about it, since actually jerking off is, well, complicated, when you're tied to the bed.) And they play at being submissive. If you, say, put an ad on craigslist looking for a submissive to use, you'll get a ton of responses from men who will be panting while they respond to your ad.¹ But then, for most of them, a lot of questions will come, and if you answer these questions in a series of emails, you're generally just giving them one more bit of data to throw into their fantasies.

A true submissive will tell you his limits, ask enough questions to make sure that he'll be safe, and then get down to it and leave the rest to you. True submissives don't want to know what's going to happen because the experience is more intense if they don't know because then they have even less control over the situation. It's likely that some of the faux submissives are moving along a path towards actual submission and that they simply need some training. The sad fact is that I'm not a sufficiently accomplished dom to train subs, and, if I were, I wouldn't have the time.

As it happens, I had this exact conversation yesterday afternoon, except that I had it in French. I will confess that one of my very favorite things to do on gay.com is to seek out a Frenchman and try to carry on a chat with him in his own language. (One of the best hookups I ever had was with an avocat from the World Bank. I tied him down and worked him over for a while, then I ate his ass and fucked him hard for a while, and finally I finished off with a half-hour-long face fuck. He shot his load when I came in his mouth, and then I drove him home, and we conversed, in French, all the way. It just can't get any better than that.) And yesterday afternoon, I found a very nice, very cute French submissive who told me that when he submits to a dominant, he empties his mind and focuses entirely on the will of the dominant. It sounds very zen, doesn't it? It also makes clear a lot of the parallels between submission and religion and, perhaps, explains why I was always such a lousy Christian.

If Mr. Yesterday Afternoon had been local instead of twenty miles from the Belgian border, then he would likely have been the one tied to my bed tonight. But since that wasn't to be, when I got home, I got online and saw the guy from the second picture, whom I hadn't actually seen in the flesh for several months. He was, uncharacteristically for an evening, free, so I told him to come over, with the usual instructions: commando in jeans, come inside, remove your shirt, put on the blindfold (most guys will only blindfold themselves before seeing you if they've already seen you on a previous encounter, which this guy had), and announce that you're ready.

He did all that, and I buckled the wrist restraints on him and clipped them together behind his back. Normally, I'd march the guy upstairs at this point, but this time I unzipped his jeans and pushed them down over his ass and pushed him down on the stairs and started spanking him first. When I had his ass nice and red, I pulled him up and marched him upstairs. A little more spanking with him laid sideways across the bed, and then I unclipped the wrist restraints and tied his wrists to the corners of the bed. (My bed is really not all that well adapted to this purpose, but b&c is resistant to the idea of us buying a bed with actual posts.)

Submissives tend to come in a fairly Vesuvial fashion. Sometimes, alas, before they ought to. Tonight, for instance. His wrists were tied to the bed, and his legs were up in the air, in a pose very like what you see in the picture of him. At this point, I took my belt and ran it under his nose, and then I spanked him a couple of times right where the backs of his thighs meet his buttocks. Then, I looped the belt around his cock, which had been soft until then, and pulled back on it, and he got hard and shot like a fountain. All in about three seconds.

This unfortunate turn of events (he was good for nothing after that, and I had to untie him and send him on his way) is my fault, of course. It's up to the dom to keep the sub from coming too quickly. In my defense, I'll tell you that this guy had never been a quick shooter in the past, or I would have told him that he'd better not cum without permission and that if he were unwise enough to do so, I would fuck his brains out anyway. (There is no point in coming up with original dialog with a submissive: the cliche is your best friend.)

He tried to pass off his rapid firing as an inevitable consequence of my immense skill, but when he said "I couldn't help it, you were just so good," I just rolled my eyes and laughed. Bitch, please.

I don't have it in me to be angry over something like a quick-shooting sub, and, in any case, it was pretty late when we started, and a two-hour session would probably have left me exhausted this morning. As it was, he was gone less than ten minutes after he walked in the door. I read some, jerked off to porn, and went to sleep, and those are all good things.

¹I apologize for the footnote, but I didn't know how else to work in the fact that when I most recently ran a craigslist ad seeking submissives, one of the replies came from one of the head honchos at my firm. He was seeking some particularly intense spanking and pounding. Given what I know of this guy, it wasn't exactly a shock that he's a sub, but it was surprising to hear from someone I know and who has indirect control of my paycheck. I exchanged a couple of emails with him just to make sure that it was really this guy, but I had to abandon it after that. I'm sure he wouldn't have recognized my address, and he would have been blindfolded for the entire encounter, but I thought there was too great a chance that either the blindfold would slip or that he'd recognize my voice. It's kind of a shame that I couldn't follow through with it, though: if anyone deserves to be punished, it's this guy.

Failure To Communicate

I watched two gay DVDs this weekend. One arrived from overstock.com mid-week, and the other was one that b&c gave me for Christmas. I watched Presque Rien for a second time after watching Broken Sky.

I buy far too many DVDs. I'm not as bad about it as I used to be, but my experiences from the pre-Netflix era, when I would routinely run up late fees in excess of what it would have cost to purchase the movie outright, have gotten me in the habit of just purchasing any movie that I might be interested in seeing. Fortunately, I don't have as much time for watching movies as I once did, or I'd probably have rooms (instead of bookcases) full of DVDs. And as extravagances go, shelling out $20 for something that looks good is not so bad. I always tell myself that if b&c and I saw it at the theater, we'd have paid a lot more, especially after you factor in the popcorn. Mmmmm, popcorn. Also, a lot of the gay movies double as porn. But porn with artistic merit. Because I care about that, right? Actually, I do, but my rant about why I have to get movies with subtitles in order to find a film that both makes me think and gives me wood is for another time. For right now, I'll say that these foreign (Mexican and French) movies caused me to spill a lot of seed.

Anyway. Both of these films are about the fragility of young love, and about the inability of young lovers to communicate. This theme is most forcefully brought home in Broken Sky, a movie that is almost entirely without dialog. There's a bit of narration, but none of the central characters says more than twenty words during the course of the movie. Instead, they spend a lot of time staring smoulderingly at and past each other. And an equal amount of time fucking. The movie clocks in at 140 minutes, which would probably seem like an awful long time if I hadn't been stroking myself for 120 of those. The movie is also a little bit artsier than it ought to be, but sometimes that works pretty well. There's a scene that takes place in a section of bleachers that's particularly striking and made me wish that I had a really big TV. (I also wished that because I couldn't read the credits for the music at the end. The soundtrack is pretty good, and I would have liked to find some of the recordings.) If you don't like cute, young, smooth, dark, full-lipped, naked Mexican men, then, well, I just don't know how such a thing is possible, really, but the pornographic element of this movie would be lost on you, and you might not want to bother because there's a lot of flesh here.

The lovers in Broken Sky fall apart, basically, because Jonas kisses a stranger on the dance floor while Gerardo is off fetching them beers. Jonas falls instantly in love with the stranger, who is whisked off, perhaps by his own boyfriend. So what Broken Sky is saying is that you should fuck as much as possible and that a really good kiss can change your life completely. These are obvious truths that are nonetheless worth repeating.

Fernando Arroyo has a great ass.



The protagonists in Presque Rien spend plenty of time talking to each other, but they never seem to communicate on any level other than the sexual. There, they seem to get along just fine, but be warned up front that Presque Rien is really a much more mainstream movie than Broken Sky. By that I mean, there's more dialog and less flesh. There's still plenty of flesh, though, including a particularly hot, albeit brief, scene where Mathieu fucks Cedric in the dunes. You see a lot more of the emotional development of a relationship here than you see in Broken Sky (where Jonas and Gerardo are pretty much fucking from the get go), so you get to see the boys fall in love. You spend a lot of time watching innocence (always touching when it's done well, as it is here) . You also get to see a lot of innocence lost and the relationship's dissolution. Exactly why Mathieu and Cedric break up is never satisfactorily explained, but many relationships end for no very good reason, and I suspect that's one of the points being made.

Here again, if you don't like cute, young, smooth, full-lipped, naked Frenchmen, then, well, what the hell is wrong with you, anyway?

Stephane Rideau has a great ass.

Long Times Between Drinks

I think I once saw most of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Daniel Day-Lewis, looking as yummy as ever) on TV, but I mostly remember reading it when it first came out in The New Yorker. That must have been a long time ago. B&c bought me the 8-DVD set that has eighty years of the magazine, so I could go and look it up, or I could search for the publication date online, but doing so would probably just make me feel older than I am. [For future reference, when I say that I would search for something online if I weren't too lazy, I almost always do search for it, about five minutes later. But in this case, I'm really not finding it. I'm almost certain that I read it in TNY sometime in the 80s, though.]

Anyway. If memory serves, the main character [Tomas. Thanks, Google!] of TULoB was a big-time womanizer (chacun à son goût, I reckon) who had a limited tolerance for sleeping with the same woman. He would either have sex with a woman a number of times, then never see her again, or have sex with a woman perhaps once a month, in which case he could continue to see her indefinitely.

Tomas' emotional make up is nothing like my own. I suppose it's because I have b&c at home, but I can fuck a guy any number of times and only want more. I can have dinner with the same guy, and he can come to dinner with b&c and me, and I'm still cool. And I'm not cool because I'm an unemotional bastard who cares about no one. I just don't mind a modest amount of emotional entanglement. Since I already have a primary emotional and sexual relationship that I'm pretty secure in, I'm unlikely to develop an unhealthy level of attachment. But if you're hooking up with me and you develop a little crush on me, I'm not seeing a problem, and I may return the favor.

I realize that since I have a partner, if the other guy doesn't, then the situation isn't necessarily symmetric, but the other guy's always fully informed, and I tend to be interested only in men with the emotional maturity necessary to handle the arrangement and/or the sense to walk away from it if and when it isn't working for them. Besides, I'm busy, and they're busy. Nobody's got time to sit around becoming all I-won't-be-ignored about anyone else. In other words, as I've said on a couple of occasions to b&c, almost every time I have good sex with someone, I'd be happy if he became my best friend, fell in love with me (while still respecting my relationship, natch), bought me a nice car, and put me in his will. None of that really ever happens. Well, ok, maybe the best friend part, but I'm not in anybody's will, except my parents'. I'm not even in the will of my very good friend J., who has tons of money and no real heirs. For years, I've been trying to get him to leave me his sofa, but to no avail. I used to sleep on that sofa all the time, and it was damned comfortable. But no luck so far.

Anyway. If I fuck a guy only intermittently, it's usually because our schedules never match up, and there have been a number of guys over the past five or six years with whom I've had sex every couple of months or so. Most of these people were FWPs, or friends with privileges, which is really what I'm hoping for every time I have sex with a nice guy. It's not something I expect: the FWP relationship is difficult to maintain. Typically the guy will be single, and then suddenly he'll have a bf, and the bf won't want him fucking around with anyone else. Selfish prick. It's mildly depressing when one of your FWPs becomes a FWOP (or, in extreme circumstances, stops interacting with you altogether, though when that happens, you probably really had a fuckbuddy, not a FWP), kind of like when something bad happens to your favorite pair of shoes. But it's nothing like a tragedy: you just get new shoes.

Though there are exceptions. Two years ago, I invited my two favorite FWPs (I'd been fucking each of them for over a year) to our holiday party, and they started dating, and then they became a monogamous couple. And did I get so much as a thank you note for having brought them together? NO. I DID NOT. And, really, that would not have been sufficient. I sincerely believe that, under the circumstances, the appropriate way to express gratitude would have been to invite me to a three-way. That would have been very hot, and the "top" in that relationship would have had one more chance to feel my cock up his ass, which he loved. He was Indian (but with a British accent, YUM) and compact and solid and hairy, but he had a pretty small cock. Still, the other guy (sweeter and younger and probably the best cocksucker in Montgomery County) was probably just as happy only taking a small cock. It would take me forever to squeeze into his ass, and he never came until I pulled out and chewed hard on his nipples, anyway. They both had fat lips, and they knew how to use them, too. Sigh. We still hang out from time to time, but to be honest, they're less fun now that I'm not sleeping with either of them.

Has anyone seen my train of thought? It seems to have left the station without me.

Oh yeah. So usually, it's somewhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of months between repeat visits, but sometimes it's a lot longer. I think that my personal record is four years.

Sometime late in December, b&c was up in NJ, visiting his family, and I put an ad on Craig's List. I got a response from a guy who said he was black, 28, 6'4, and 220 pounds. Yes, please! When I responded to his reply (that email address has my real name), he wrote back to say that he knew me, and that we'd hooked up about four years earlier. And I wrote back and said, "Dude." Well, what I really said was that given his stats, I was pretty sure that if he and I had hooked up (back when he'd been 24, yet), I would have remembered it. Then he wrote back with some pretty specific details about my life and said that we'd hooked up several times before he'd moved away. Then I wrote back and said "Are you sure," and he wrote back with several more details, and I thought long and hard, and I wrote back and said, "So, the last time we fucked, did we break a bed?" Bingo.

He was a little put out that it had taken me so long to remember. And with good reason because once I remembered, I remembered a lot, all of it very, very good. I was afraid that he was going to be too annoyed to come play again, but he asked, "Do you still like to eat ass as much as you did then," and I said, "More," and he was hooked.

He came over, and it was two hours of heaven. To be honest, I don't typically go for guys under thirty, though there have been notable exceptions. But 6'4, 220, black, totally smooth, and with an ass like two perfectly firm-ripe cantaloupes? Well, he asked so nicely that it would have been rude to refuse. Great lips, great kisser. Great nipples. GREAT ass. When I remarked (again) about that last, he said that he was thinking about having plastic surgery to have his buttocks reduced. I did my best to talk him out of that, and I hope I was successful. Otherwise, I might have to fly to Seattle and throw myself in front of a scalpel.

Anyway, lots of making out, lots of nipple play, and, of course, a hyperextended rimming session. And I must say that he was highly appreciative. He told me before he came over that he hadn't been fucked (i.e., that he'd been topping; unsurprisingly, he's also very nicely hung) in over a year, but that he really wanted it. He really wanted it a lot more after I was done eating his ass. He wasn't lying about not having been fucked in a while, though, and it took a lot of patience and lube to get from "stop stop stop wait" to "harder!" And worth every minute. I e-mailed him a couple of weeks after he went back to Seattle, and he wants to hook up again when he's back in town. I wouldn't be too surprised if it's another couple of years before that happens, though.

It was probably five years ago that I first fooled around with the guy I fucked last night. It was only the third time we'd gotten together, and it's probably been eighteen months or so since the last time we played, which, not coincidentally, was one of the few times that b&c and I have ever participated (together) in a threeway. In A.'s case, the long interval is due not to scheduling problems but to the fact that he's got some issues and tends to be a bit of a tool from time to time. To be fair, after the first time we messed around, I'm not sure that I even tried to have a repeat, though I likely would at least have said hello to him once or twice online. But then a few years later, I was chatting with someone who looked like fun, and he said that we'd played at his place a few years earlier, and after a few details, I knew who it was. (As long ago as high school, people whom I have not known and/or remembered have known and/or remembered me. I am always amazed when this happens, and I have the decency to be embarrassed about it.) And he was fun to chat with, so I invited him over for sex and dinner with b&c and I. That was back when we still thought that threeways might be an okay idea for us. (Another post, I reckon.) So he came over, and we had some decent, albeit somewhat brief, sex. Then we had dinner. And we invited him to our holiday party, and he came, but then he and I were supposed to go to a movie one Friday night and then head home to fuck, and he stood me up. With one of those explanations that wasn't offered until two days later and that make you say, "you're not even trying to lie convincingly, are you?"

And I really couldn't tell whether he was depressed (it seemed likely) or just didn't want to have sex with me anymore and just wanted to be friends (possible) or just didn't want anything to do with me (also possible, though unlikely), but he wasn't letting me know, and it didn't seem worth finding out. This is the sort of thing that I think about thoroughly, but without any emotional involvement. Every once in a while I'd see him online, and I'd say "wanna fuck?" just to rib him a little, but I didn't invite him to last year's holiday party, and he was off my radar screen.

But then last night, I was home alone and tired and hungry and horny, and he came on, so I said hi, and he said he'd been working, too, and he was hungry, too, and I said that I could get some takeout and come by and have sex with him, and, to my (mild) surprise, he went for it. So I called the restaurant, headed over, picked up some beer, picked up the food, and went to his place. I almost didn't recognize him because he was in a great mood, something I'd never seen from him before. Apparently, he finally got out of his horrific old job and into a great new one, and now everything's coming up roses. Or whatever.

So I had my hot and sour soup and a couple of steamed dumplings, and he had his chicken wings, then we went into the living room and sat on the sofa and watched a few minutes of Grey's Anatomy while we chatted and I stroked his hair. His short-cropped prematurely gray (he's 37) hair. Woof. To complete the picture, A. is latino and furry chested, with fat lips. I'd guess 5'11 and 185. Yum.

As soon as I started on the serious kissing, he suggested that we go upstairs. I had wanted to wait a bit because he has a history of being kind of a quick lay, but I followed him up the stairs, holding on to his very nice ass all the way. He was out of his clothes before I had a chance to remind him that removing them was really my job, so I pushed him down on the bed, got on top of him, and started in with the more serious kissing.

I think that A. is technically versatile. Or at least when he was at one of our parties, he recognized another of the guests (PJ), and when I asked PJ how he knew A., he said that they'd hooked up and that A. had fucked him. Then I asked him how it had been, and he said that A. came too quickly. I know from personal experience that about five minutes of hard thrusting will push PJ over the edge (and you never get any warning; he shouts out "I'm cumming!" only after he's begun shouting, and his moans don't really escalate prior to that), so I infer that A. came so quickly that PJ didn't get off.

Anyway. The point is that I'd never actually fucked A. before. The first time we'd played, he said he'd only get fucked if I'd also let him fuck me. And when we had the threeway, I wasn't 100% confident about his anal hygiene, and, in any case, b&c kind of hopped on my cock and monopolized it. But I'd had him pinned down on the bed for only a couple of minutes of skilled kissing last night when he started saying "Fuck me, Ted." I told him, as I tell most men, "Oh, I will. In good time," and I went back to kissing him. If A. has a physical flaw, it's his nipples. They're tiny, and they're not very responsive, which is a shame because pronounced, sensitive nipples in the middle of a hairy chest are what living is all about. So since I couldn't really give his nipples any serious oral gratification, I spent about five minutes going down on his ears. At that point he was really begging me to fuck him, and it had become pretty clear that he wasn't interested in much else, so I told him to glove me up. After he got the condom on me and handed me the bottle of lube, I pushed him onto his stomach, worked some lube into his (clean, thankfully) asshole, and put some on the rubber. Then I lay down on him so that my cock was wedged into his asscrack, and I started working on his ears again. I slid my cock down so that the head was up against his hole, and I pushed. He told me he needed me to go slow, so I did. He was very tight indeed, so it took a while to get into him, though I think that continuing to suck on his ears helped matters along.

After maybe ten minutes, I was able to thrust freely, and he got very loud with the "Fuck me!"s. I'm usually a (very) slow shooter, but he was so tight and working me so well that in a surprisingly short period of time (less than ten minutes from when he loosened up enough to let me plow hard), I was having trouble holding back. He had been fucked into his happy place and was panting and enjoying. I slowed down a couple of times, but then I couldn't hold back, and by the time I pulled out and took the condom off, the semen had begun to flow. Still, there was plenty left to spill a healthy load over his back.

I flipped him over and started stroking and kissing him. He asked me to finger him, so I did, and he began stroking himself and shot his load in about a minute. We lay there for a couple of minutes, then wiped up, and then we spent about another half hour chatting with his head on my chest. It was nice. I imagine that we'll socialize and fuck again.

To be honest, though, while it's gratifying to know that I can find plenty of decent sex without an indecent amount of effort, I'll be glad when b&c gets back and I don't have quite so much opportunity to play around. The variety has been really nice, but the cheeseburgers are starting to get to me.

More Sex

Major déja vu on Thursday night. There's this guy who lives not far from us, and he responded to my Yahoo profile (I've had that thing there forever: I was still single when I wrote it) a week or so ago. I read his profile, and it made him sound like he was in the LTR market, so I wrote him back and explained the situation and what I was and wasn't available for. And he wrote back saying that a boyfriend wasn't the only thing that he was looking for. He's a man of few words in his emails, but he managed to convey, without saying so, that he was looking for local friends and some HQT*. The HQT always comes first, chronologically, but I figured that, ultimately, friendship was more important to him. Whatever: I'm easy.

Anyway, after a refreshingly small number of emails, we'd agreed to meet at Starbucks at 9 pm, which meant that I had to push hard to get out of the office by 7:45 so that I could rush home and shower. I got to Starbucks maybe two minutes before 9, and he was sitting in the back, in one of a pair of overstuffed chairs. I waved, put in my drink order (grande skim decaf latte, my standard evening Starbucks order), then went back and sat down.

I think that a large part of the reason that I'm fairly successful at having a healthy amount of sex with a healthy number of men (though almost always one at a time) is that I find so many different kinds of men attractive. When I'm out with a friend, and he sees a guy and says, "Oh, he's cute," my response is typically, "Yes, he is. Of course, all men are cute -- until you get to know them." This is nothing more than dumb luck on my part. To a very large extent, you really can't help what you find attractive, and there are many very unfortunate gay men who have very specific tastes. This is not such a big deal if your very specific taste is, say, twinks, but if your very specific taste is something rarer (small-dicked black men; men over 6'6 with shaved heads; red-headed Catholic priests; amputees), then you can have a tough time finding gratification. That these specific preferences exist is something that you need to understand and accept. And maybe laugh at. I have, at various times, been rejected by men who were otherwise interested because I am too smooth, too hairy, too tall, too short, circumcised, uninked, unpierced, balding, and not bald enough. I have also been rejected for being an Aquarius, having the wrong Chinese Zodiac sign, eating meat, being a liberal, being only moderately opposed to the death penalty, being too dominant, not being dominant enough, not being a good dancer, and having handwriting that slants the wrong way. None of those rejections really trouble me (and I can entirely sympathize with rejecting someone for not being able to dance: I have turned guys down for having an ugly voice, though only a couple of times, and they had spectacularly ugly voices), and I have to think that the experience of being turned down for having handwriting that slants the wrong way is far more entertaining than the sex with that guy would have been. My real point is that there's really nothing on that list that would be a deal breaker for me. [Sometimes I tell people that I would summarily turn down a Republican, but a) that's a big lie because I've actually dated Republicans (always a mistake), b) there aren't that many gay Republicans to reject, and c) the appropriate way to deal with a Republican is not to refuse him sex but to bend him over and fuck him hard. Without lube.]

Anyway, my Thursday night guy had short, salt-and-pepper hair, and that's always something that I find attractive. He was otherwise attractive enough, but I find it fun to focus on one feature, so while we were having a very friendly, very easy conversation about our complicated lives, I was thinking about running my hands through his hair.

After 45 minutes of conversation, I stood up and said that we should probably be moving along. Starbucks closes at 10 (ah, the suburbs), and I knew that we both had to be up early the next morning.

That was when I remembered having almost the exact same conversation, in the exact same Starbucks, about four years ago with b&c, back when he was just some stranger from gay.com. Then we went back to his place, and I fucked him, and we became partners. Yes, I'm omitting some of the details. It took a few months to play out.

Back to Thursday. We walked out to the sidewalk, and he said that we should get together for dinner sometime soon, and I said, "You wanna have sex?" Then we had the thirty-second discussion, the upshots of which were that he was a vanilla top who loves to kiss. Oh well. One out of three will do, if it's the right one. (Also, he said that he was "mostly top," but from the way he said it, I could tell that he was probably qualifying based on one time, fifteen years ago, when he got really drunk and let some very cute bodybuilder with a tiny dick fuck him for twenty seconds. )

As it turned out, he was a talented and affectionate kisser with a decent amount of imagination, adequately responsive nipples, a cock that was easy to go down on, and an adequate willingness to reciprocate. We thrashed about for forty-five minutes (we both had to be up early) before shooting our loads, then he got dressed for bed, and I went in search of a cheeseburger.

I'm pretty sure we'll get together again. I project four or five more play dates before it settles into a FWOP** situation. Like I said: whatever, I'm easy.


*Horizontal quality time. That's my phrase, not his.

**Friends without privileges.

Osculatory Technique

I hear a lot of men whine about how awful most other men are in the sack. I don't know how much validity there is in that complaint, really. I think many of the complainers maybe aren't as skilled as they think they are. Physician, heal thyself. And, as I said in an earlier post, learn not to hook up with guys who don't want the same things you want. And learn to recognize guys who are going to be lousy lovers. And avoid them.

Otherwise, when you're hooking up with a guy, find something that starts both your motors running and do that for a while. Then you can branch out, or not, depending. For me, most often, my engine runs on making out. I've said this to many (many) men: if the kissing's good, we're going to have a great time. The unspoken converse is that if the kissing's lousy, the sex won't be worth having.

Back before I learned to ask specifically whether a man likes to make out and to kermit* whenever a man says no, I encountered my share of poor kissers. And even now, I run into too many guys who love to kiss (or at least say they do) but who have no idea how to go about it. I guess that many of these men get gratification just from feeling their lips and tongue up against someone else's, but I can't help but think that they're missing out on the thoroughly transformative and revelatory experience that a good kiss can and should be.

It has been a good many years now (eight years and four weeks, but who's counting) since I first kissed another man with the object of physical gratification, but I remember it vividly. Not so much the actual kiss (though it was very nice) but the sensation of the scales falling from my eyes. My eyes have long since been thoroughly descaled, but there is still no quicker way to melt me (and, simultaneously, make me sproing) than to give me a good kiss.

If you're not getting that water-in-the-desert feeling when you kiss someone, then one or both of you is doing something wrong.

While on the one hand I will tell you that you shouldn't bother hooking up with guys who don't share your sexual tastes, I will nonetheless say, with the other tine of my forked tongue, that if a guy can't do something well, he can often be taught, assuming that he's willing to learn. Men who are put off by the entire notion of kissing or who think that they can only kiss their current or future husband are not worth bothering with. Men who want to be good kissers but fall far short deserve a chance to be guided to the promised land.

Case in point. When I and the b&c first met and hooked up, it was clear that he was a fine person with whom I had much in common. But his kissing wavered between uninspired and downright distasteful. When it became clear that we were going to be more than fuckbuddies, I had to have the talk with him. The talk goes something like this: "Look, I really like you, but we have got to do something about your osculatory technique." This is not an easy talk to have, and that's why you don't bother to have it with a trick. But it's easier to get past your fear of telling someone that they're lousy in bed (which, sadly, is what you're saying) than it is to spend the rest of your life feeling like you're kissing Rover.

B&c's particular osculatory issues are not especially relevant to this discussion, but I would like to go over a few of the more common errors that one commonly finds among unschooled osculators.

1. Whoa Bessie! We all understand that when you're kissing a hot guy, it's easy to get carried away, but there are better ways to display your passion than via lingual assault and battery. The tongue is an important osculatory tool (I briefly dated a guy who couldn't stand to use any tongue at all, and that was no fun; unsurprisingly, he wasn't very good at anything else in the bedroom, either), but it is not a substitute for good technique. Kissing is communication. Kissing is a dance. Kissing is foreplay. However you characterize it, your tongue needs to take its time getting into the game, and once you're using it, try, try, try to think of it as a third lip, not as a second penis. There is nothing in this world that is hotter than an open-mouthed, soft-lipped, tongueless kiss that slowly evolves into the shy and flirtatious interaction between two tongues. Don't forget that.

2. Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover. If you want to use your mouth as a vacuum cleaner, save it for the blow jobs. If someone tells you that he wants to "suck face," pray that he does not mean it literally. Those guys who place their lips all the way around yours and inhale sharply, well, I can't even bring myself to complete that sentence. Gentle suction does have its place. When you're well into the a hot make out session, there are times when sucking on a man's tongue can be a good move. And sucking gently on a man's lower lip is really one of my favorite things ever. But remember: that move pretty much only works on a guy with a full lower lip, and you really do have to be gentle. Patient, light sucking on a lower lip will puff it in an aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable way. Anything harder than that just hurts.

3. Psycho. You know that music that plays during the stabbing in the shower scene? Don't kiss that way. You want your kissing to be legato, not percussive. You want your companion to feel as though he's a cello that you're playing. Nobody wants to be a xylophone. The fast, periodic flicking of your tongue is a fine way to treat a man's nipple, but it's no way to treat his mouth. Press your lips against his, leave them there for a moment, then pull them back and smile at him and maybe run your tongue slowly and softly around his nips before kissing them again. Mixing up the action is good; stabbing is bad.

If you're not a good kisser (Approximately 80% of the men I hook up with make a point of telling me that I'm a good kisser; I'm not bragging: it's just something I'm good at; there are also things I'm not good at; nobody, for example, has ever remarked that I'm a good cocksucker. If fewer than one man in three compliments your kissing, then you could probably use some work), then find someone who is and practice.

If you are a good kisser and you encounter someone who isn't, there are ways of dealing with that. If you're a dominant or even semi-dominant top, then it's pretty easy. If the guy starts to use his tongue too avidly or kisses in a pokey manner, you just hold his head down and kiss him the way that a man ought to be kissed. He'll follow suit, especially if he's submissive.

If you're a bottom (I usually refrain from giving advice to bottoms because, well, what do I know?) you can't use that technique, but you can be aware that even tops tend to mirror what their partners do (except for that thing you do where you roll over onto your stomach, spread your legs and beg to be fucked; we don't mirror that, fortunately) and if you kiss a guy right, he's at least somewhat likely to return the favor.

If the above approaches are some combination of impossible and/or ineffective, then you really have to say something. I don't mean the full-blown talk I had to have with b&c. I mean a simple "whoa," "easy," or "relax." You know, the kind of thing you say to a guy who's gotten a little out of control and is being too rough on your nipples. (If you've never had the experience of thinking that someone was being too rough on your nipples, email me: I'd like nothing more than to try to be the first.)

I have more to say on this topic, but I feel like I've already said more than enough for today. Writing about kissing is amusing, but the real thing is a couple of orders of magnitude more satisfying, and as it happens, right now there's a pair of lips with my name on them (You can relax: I'm speaking figuratively.) and it would be rude to keep them waiting.

*To kermit is to run away screaming, with one's arms flailing above one's head. The etymology should be obvious.

Submissive for Your Approval

The b&c (my partner, to whom I refer, mostly affectionately, as the ball and chain) is in Cleveland on business most of this week, which means that it should be easier than usual to hook up. But it's also the end of the quarter, so I've been at work a whole lot, and I really haven't been the slut that I'd like to be. But I did manage to have a guy over Tuesday night. He even slept over.

Do you have a rating system for your sexual encounters? I'm not talking about a serious record-keeping system where you make a note of every guy you sleep with and then rate him on several criteria. I just mean something like a scale of one to ten, or maybe letter grades?

These days, I often forget to rate my tricks, but when I remember, I have a three-star rating system that I developed back in the day. It works like this:

One star = that was fun; I'd probably do him again
Two stars = that was hot; now I need a cheeseburger
Three stars = dude, you have to leave right now so I can call my friends and brag

You'll notice the lack of a category for bad sex here. That's because I don't have bad sex anymore. Yeah, I'm sure once a year or so there's an exception, but any guy who's been having sex for long enough to know what he likes has also been having sex for long enough to learn how to ask for it. If a guy's not into what you're into, then don't have sex with him. (If a guy claims to be into it but when you get to his place, he says he's not really into it, then pick up and leave. There's a de minimis rule here. If you leave within ten minutes or before any of your clothes come off, it's non-sex, and you don't have to rate it. ) I, for example, won't hook up with any man who isn't willing to kiss. I used to make exceptions for particularly gifted cocksuckers, but not any more. You got issues with kissing men you're not dating? Fine, but find someone else to throw you down on the bed and bang your brains out.

It's pretty easy to make sure that a guy meets your minimum requirements, but anything beyond that is somewhat dependent on chance. Careful questioning can increase your odds of getting from one star to two. It also helps if you have pretty broad tastes and know how to enjoy yourself. Plus, it's really not that unusual for me to want a cheeseburger, so if I were keeping track, I'd guess that two-thirds or three-quarters of my hookups are two-star affairs. Three-star hookups are pretty rare, in part because most of my friends got bored with my bragging a couple of years ago, but mostly because a two-star hookup is already pretty damned fun, so a guy really needs to press my buttons to get the third star.

Last night's guy was decidedly one star. For a while, I was concerned that he might not even make that, and I spent some time trying to remember when the last time was that I'd hooked up with someone who hadn't passed the baseline. I never did figure that out, even after at least three seconds of concentrated thought. Oh well.

I've been chatting with this guy for nearly six months, off and on, but we'd never been able to arrange a convenient time, and I wasn't sure we'd ever actually hook up. Boy's got issues. He was all about chatting me up and calling me "sir" and saying that he was submissive and wanted to be ordered around. And I wasn't sure that I was buying that act, but I do love a good sub bottom, so it seemed worth taking a chance. And, to be honest, we'd chatted enough that I figured if the sex wasn't all that, he'd at least be worth talking to, and if that was the case, I could always chat with him for a while, then kick him out and pull someone else off the Internet.

He also told me that he hadn't been with a guy in a long time. (Boy's got issues.) He wouldn't say just how long, which always means a really long time, so I was also getting that doesn't-know-what-he-wants vibe. But he said that while he rarely drinks, if he has a few stiff ones (!), he turns into a real submissive. He was still being a little wishy washy about coming over, so I got really strict with him, and that closed the deal. I told him I'd liquor him up and then he could sleep over afterwards if he needed to. I also told him to show up in jeans, commando.

I made up a pitcher of a strong punch recipe that I got from an e-buddy and put it in the refrigerator. I'd only seen a somewhat blurry, somewhat old picture of this guy, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but when the doorbell rang and I answered it, I was very happy. He was 45, and had graying hair that had been clipped short. He was 6' tall and weighed 200 lbs, but he was SOLID. Wherever I grabbed him, I felt something hard.

I told him to come in and take off his shirt, and he did. I got him a drink and told him to drink it, and he started making conversation. I couldn't tell whether he wanted me to bark more orders at him or really have a conversation, and I was a little confused by the situation, but he had really nice nipples, so I tugged on them for a while, and when he'd drained a large tumbler of the punch, I topped him off and told him we were going upstairs, and he agreed. He tried to bargain for a cigarette first, but a) nobody smokes in our house, and b) nobody smokes when I'm about to make out with him.

I'd left some porn playing in the bedroom, and he could hear it as I was pushing his ass up the stairs. He asked what it was, and I told him it was Folsom Filth. In case you don't know, Folsom Filth is a pretty hard-core leather video, at least by my standards. It's not something I'd have bought for myself, but the b&c got me a few pornos for my birthday, and one of them was FF (I'm not sure whether there's any actual FFing in FF; it's a long video, and I've only watched a bit of it). A week or so after my birthday, the b&c apologized for the video. He'd watched it (apparently the gift was as much for him as it was for me) and had been appalled by the content. I acknowledged that it was pretty hard core, but told him it was no big deal. I didn't tell him that I also thought it was pretty hot. The b&c is all about the vanilla, and while he knows that I occasionally tie a guy to the bed, he doesn't know the particulars about my kinks (which, in any case, are a lot tamer than a lot of what's in FF.)

Anyway, issuesboy was really into the DVD and kept saying how hot it was, which makes me think that if I'd gotten him really drunk, he might have turned into a real submissive. As it was, though, the orders he was willing to follow were pretty limited. Still, we made out for a while, and he could handle some moderately intense tit work, so, like any time when my mouth is sucking on a lower lip or a perky nip, I was very hard. When I ordered him to suck my cock, though, he refused point blank. I figured that this was a typical bitchy sub move, so I straddled his chest and pushed my cock in his face, but he really just wasn't interested. He told me that he only sucks cock when he's really drunk, but my guess is that even then he doesn't do much more than lick. Basically, this guy pretty much wants to be gotten wasted then shoved on his stomach and fucked silly.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but maybe let me know up front so that I don't discover it after half an hour of messing around.

Whatever. He did have great nipples, and he had a totally hot, very rimmable ass, so I put him on his stomach (facing the TV, of course) and ate him for an extended period. Then I put him back on his back and worked his nipples for a while. He was verbally unresponsive (boy's got issues), but he did have a good time, and after about ninety minutes of play, I was stroking his cock with one hand, fingering his ass with the second, and chewing on his nipple, and he blew his load. But he was really nonverbal, and he was a pretty light cummer, so I kept on stroking him and working his nipple after he came, and he got very sensitive and finally started making some noise, so I said, "Oh, did you cum?" and he said, "Yeah, I came really hard," which totally cracked me up. I couldn't stop laughing for a couple of minutes. Then I stroked myself off and showed him what a real load looks like.

So, not really the greatest sex but still one star. Partly because I had an idea going in that his lack of experience and general shyness meant that this would be a low-intensity encounter. And partly because I'm intrigued with the possibility of getting him drunker and/or teaching him to loosen up a little. Besides, we talked for a while after sex and before we fell asleep, and he was pretty interesting. He has a Ph.D. and reads a lot. And it was really a nice body to sleep next to.

The next morning, he said goodbye and said that he'd call to let me know he'd made it home safely. It's not that uncommon for guys to do that, but for the life of me, I never know why. Am I sitting around worrying that the sheer power of my sexual presence has left them too weak to drive and fearful that they'll wreck their car now that they know that their peak sexual experience is behind them? Not so much. I think maybe this guy just wants somebody to talk to. He's 45 and he's never had a boyfriend (or a girlfriend), so he's obviously very shy: he's certainly attractive enough. Anyway, he called when he got home and said that he'd be in touch when he gets back in town from his conference. He also said that sometime it'd be hot for me to arrange to have a bunch of tops over so that he could get fucked by all of them. I was noncommittal on that last request. It's not really my scene, and until the guy demonstrates that he can get fucked by me, I'm not likely to invite a bunch of other tops over to get disappointed. In any case, it's kind of a toss-up whether I'll ever hear from him again, and if I don't, it's not great loss.

On the other hand, if I do, I'll likely invite him over again, and if we become friends, then maybe I'll invite a bunch of guys over to fuck him on his birthday. That would be more personal and less expensive than buying him his own copy of Folsom Filth.

Loud

I've fucked my share of loud bottoms. A bottom who just lies there and takes it is a lousy bottom, no matter how tight the ass. A bottom who just lies there, takes it, and moans or even screams is still not a great bottom, but he's a lot better than the guy who's not making any noise.
My blog title is inspired by the loudest bottom I ever had, a guy I dated for a month about six years ago, when I was first out. I was living in an apartment then, and after every time we had sex, I worried that the neighbors would complain. I didn't worry about it during sex because he was a great lay.

There is pretty much no kind of guy that I don't like, but there's always been a special hard spot in my groin for Asian men. Robert was half-French and half-Vietnamese. He was born in Vietnam but raised in the U.S. Unfortunately, he didn't have an accent (I love guys with accents), but he did have pecan-colored skin, almost no body hair, full lips, and a tiny uncut cock. I've never been a first-rate cocksucker, and I was even much less skilled back then, but I could handle his. He was such a bottom that he had (despite being much more experienced than I) hardly ever been sucked off, so when I put his cock in my mouth and shoved my tongue between his tight foreskin and his tiny cockhead, he'd shoot his load in about forty-five seconds. Every man should be that way. He and I were (and are, I guess) polar opposites: a guy who wants to eat my load had better be prepared for at least a half hour of hard labor, and even then, I might have to help him out by jerking myself off nearly to the point of ejaculation.

Robert was a pretty good cocksucker, but mostly he wanted soft kink and hard fucking. He was the first guy to ask me to tie him up, the first guy who could take a really intense nipple chewing, the first guy who liked to involve food in our play. Most of all, he was the guy who taught me that a bottom who's screaming anything other than "stop!" is really saying "more!"

Sex is all about getting beyond your conscious mind. You can talk about sex, and you can write about sex, and sometimes reading about sex can be really hot, but you always know that the words are just a shadow of the experience. That combination of joy and ferocity that you get when your body is fully engaged is truly ineffable. In part, that's why so much of what people usually say during hot sex makes so little sense. Words are inadequate, though they're often appreciated.

As it happened, those apartments must have been very well soundproofed. Maybe it helped that I lived on the top floor, too, but the only time I ever heard anything coming from another apartment was when I was coming up the stairs, and I could hear the voices of people in their living rooms, coming through their front doors. The only noises I ever heard in the bedroom were noises that I made or that I made someone else make.

Good thing, too. There were several times when I had Robert's wrists tied to my headboard, and after having eaten melted chocolate or warm raspberry sauce off his nipples (and having fed him whipped cream off my cock), I'd keep chewing, and he'd start screaming. Then I'd keep twisting the nips and start licking his ass. He'd start to get louder and heavy moans would be interspersed with increasingly urgent requests for me to fuck him. He was a fairly small guy and his ass was really tight around my thick cock, and by the time I was halfway inside him, he'd be on the verge of screaming. At that point, I couldn't help myself, and I'd bite down hard on his nipples, and that would start the real yells, which made me drive all the way into him and fuck him hard until I came.

Afterwards, he'd be hoarse.

Robert and I had nothing in common, and we would never have seen so much of each other for a month if the sex hadn't been amazing. My own skills and tastes have evolved a great deal since then, and I certainly wouldn't say that he was the best I've ever had, but he helped me get going in some directions that have turned out very well, and he'll probably always be in my top ten.