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.

All Work, No Play

Work is vicious these days. I'm rarely out of here before 9 pm, so there isn't really time to hunt. Slick boy from last weekend has expressed interest in another go round, and this time I might get farther with him. Most likely, I'll just get really worked up and go home and fuck b&c, though. That's a win-win-win situation, if I can manage to find the hour or so (plus travel time) I need to spread the oil. But that hour is really hard to come by. I'm almost constantly horny at work, though I can now keep that in check a bit because every time I walk by the office of the higher up who responded to my craigslist ad for a bondage sub, I'm too busy trying not to laugh to be horny. Still, I'm horny 90% of the time. That's a conservative estimate.

Even jerking off (which, really, should be the national pastime) has become complicated. Typically, I'll yank one off to some porn after I get home while b&c's making dinner, but these days I get home too late for that, so I have to get up early, and since b&c's still sleeping, I can't turn the TV on.

When you're as skilled a masturbator as I am, you don't need porn to get off, but you do need some time to do it right. On some level, ejaculation is like eating: if you don't do it at all, your health will suffer. But fine masturbation is as much more fun than a fast one in the men's room as a great dinner is better than the McD's drive-thru. With plenty of time, you can bring yourself to the edge and keep yourself there for a good long time before you shoot. There aren't many better ways to spend an hour.

When you only have five minutes, you have to be efficient. That's easy with a hot porn scene to focus my attention. My memory and imagination are hotter than any DVD, but five minutes isn't even long enough to choose what to think about. Six or seven years ago, I'd have just thought about whoever I was dating or one of the limited number of guys that I'd had very hot sex with. Now, if I start remembering hot guy A, my mind shifts over to hot guys B, C, D, E, and F, and it's all good, but it's not getting the cum out within five minutes.

This is why I avoid those restaurants with twenty-page menus.

Ultimately, I manage, if not in five minutes, then in ten. Sometimes I think of the second guy I fell in love with. He wasn't that great in bed, but he had the most amazing body I'd ever seen, and all I had to do was put my tongue against his asshole or bite down on his nipple, and his whole body would jerk and he'd start shouting as if he had Tourette's. Sometimes I think about the guy who still emails me once a year but who I only fucked once, at his boss' house, a few months before his wife outed him and he lost his job. He was tall and smooth and cute, and he kissed well. He was sad, but he loved to suck cock, and he was happy for the three hours we spent playing. Sometimes I think about one of several men who have been tied to my bed and begging me to fuck them. And sometimes I think about that cute, naive, twenty-five year old boy from South Carolina who I took to the movies and then drove back to his apartment. It was late, and no one was around, and we started making out in the car, and when I reached down and squeezed his crotch, he shuddered and came, making a big wet spot in his jeans. He was so embarrassed that he ran out of the car, and I never heard from him again, but he occasionally still gets me off.

Slick

By Saturday afternoon, I just wasn't going to take it any more. I had gotten into the office at 7:15 (Starbucks wasn't even open yet), and it was getting on towards 3:30, and I was tired and cranky. I took a look at the craigslist ads, and one stuck out. It was a 32 year old guy who wanted a massage.

Like almost anything else that involves giving a man pleasure by touching his body, I love to give massage. I've never had any training, but I've always been good at it. I've received a few massages myself, and I've always paid attention to what the guy was doing. And it's just not that hard, really. You rub the right muscles the right way with the right amount of pleasure, and the guy melts in your hands. In fact, you know you're doing it right because he starts melting in your hands. You pay a little bit of attention, and the guy's body tells you what you need to do.

So why so many guys give such lousy massages is a mystery to me. I guess they don't like it. Perhaps they don't get as much pleasure from using their hands (unless their hands are on their dicks) as I do. For whatever reason, it's something that I very much get into, so much so that on a number of occasions I've had to say to guys, "Look, if you need to get up and get dressed and get out, then go ahead, but as long as you lie here, I'm going to keep doing this." Usually by that time, I've found a sweet spot that they didn't know they had. Oftentimes, those are post-coital massages, and since I've already made the guy shoot, the massage has a hypnotic effect.

Pre-coital massages, of course, are a great form of foreplay, most especially for men who are too shy to say that they want you to have sex with them. That was pretty clearly the case with S., my new acquaintance from craigslist. We exchanged a couple of messages, and I learned that he was short, dark, and slender. I will, with equal gusto, massage a guy who's tall, pale, and stocky, but it's good to know which you're dealing with in advance so that you can start salivating over a particular type.

S. was as he'd said. He was also Indian, with one of those very musical accents that many Indian men have, cute, and very shy. He showed me to the spare bedroom, said he was going to get the baby oil, and told me to make myself comfortable. "Make yourself comfortable" is, of course, a way of saying "take something off" without actually saying it, but I thought it would be fun to maintain the pretense of an actual massage for as long as possible, so I only took off my shoes and watch. I also pushed up my sleeves a little. He came back to the room, wearing only some boxers. I told him to lie down on the bed on his stomach, and I poured some baby oil onto my hands.

He really did need a massage. Tight neck, tight shoulders, tight back. About ten minutes took care of all that. I was doing a pretty good job on him, and he was practically purring. I'd been working on his lower back and the top of his ass, and I had his boxers about halfway down. It was a very pretty ass, and when I poured some oil into the hollow in the small of his back, I kneaded both cheeks and push the boxers the rest of the way over his ass and slid them off. I'm guessing he had a twenty-eight inch waist. He certainly had a nice bubble butt to set it off.

I had most of him nice and oily now (your skin is normally drier in the winter; having someone come over and oil you down is very good for your skin; and your mood), and I worked his lower back with one hand while my other squeezed his ass. I put some more oil at the top of his crack, and when it oozed down over his asshole, I slid a finger into him. So now we were at loose neck, loose shoulder, loose back, tight ass. It opened easily enough for a single finger, and he purred approvingly, but I figured that two fingers was about as far as I was going to get into that ass, and I didn't have a problem with that.

I worked on his legs for a while, bending his knees and kneading his calves, then giving him a nice foot massage that melted him further. Then I worked up and down the whole body for a minute and told him to flip over.

Not surprisingly, he had a small, uncut cock. Somewhat more surprisingly, it was soft, but he told me that he was nervous. I guess he doesn't do this much. I told him to relax and started to work on his chest and nipples. Then I told him that I wanted to kiss him. He said that would be fine but that he wasn't a very good kisser. Boy was he wrong about that, though.

I took off my shirt and lay next to him, and gave him a soft kiss while I worked an oily hand over his nipples. He responded (to one or the other or both: who knows?) and I got plump lips with just the right amount of resistance. Yum. I started to play with his cock, and he got hard, and we kept kissing. Then I sat up next to him and lifted his legs so that I could slide a couple of fingers into his ass while I stroked his cock. His enjoyment was very evident.

I kept doing that for a while. He was pretty worked up, and I was on a tight schedule, so I leaned down and kissed him again then started to lick and suck on his nipple while I stroked him harder. He started to breathe hard and speak in tongues, the inarticulate but sure indication of impending orgasm, and then he came all over his pretty chest. Semen on a dark chest is a beautiful thing, and it seems a shame to have to wipe it up, but I did. We chatted briefly, and he said that he'd like to get together again, and then I left and drove home.

I'm not sure whether he really wants to get together again or was just caught up in the moment, but I'm good either way. I really do need to get someone regular to massage, though.

Vanilla, Fatigued

I work a lot of hours at this time of year. My overlords expect me to put in sixty-five hours a week, which is actually quite a lot if you don't want to work Sundays and want to eat lunch, and if, as I do, you have responsibilities outside of the office that require you to leave the office by 7 pm a couple of days a week.

So when b&c got back from his little vacation late Thursday afternoon, I didn't really see him until late Friday night. I got home about 10:30 on Thursday, and he was already sleeping off the jet lag. At least, I assume that was him in the bed next to me. It was dark, and one guy is pretty much like another, right? To wind down, I played a little bit of Legend of Zelda on the Gamecube (yes, I know, terribly behind the times), read a few pages of a novel, and went to sleep around midnight. I had to be out of the house by 6:45 the next morning, so he (or whoever) was still asleep. I called him around 10 am and told him to meet me at 9 pm in Bethesda for dinner because that would allow me to work until 8:50 and then walk over to the restaurant.

So we had dinner, and he told me about what (and who) he did on his trip. Then he drove home, and I went back to the office briefly and then I drove home. By then it was nearly 11:30, and he was asleep again. I was pretty beat myself, having worked a thirteen-hour day. Plus, while b&c was out of town, I was slutting it up as much as possible, and most of the time I spent on that had to come out of time when I'd otherwise have been sleeping. So I was beat, and I really wasn't all that horny, and the temptation was pretty great to just get under the comforter and drop off. But sometimes you just can't, you know? There are times when no amount of tired and no amount of familiarity can overcome the desire to touch the man you love. And make him messy.

This is a fairly standard late-night scene for us, though it typically lasts longer and ends differently. I turned on my right side and put my left arm around him and spooned him. He was nice and warm, as usual. That can be challenging in the summer, but it was below freezing last night, so I got my cold self as close to him as I could and then I reached through the fly in his boxers and started to play with the head of his cock. I was gently running a finger over his frenulum and he was getting nice and woody. I worked my other arm free and used one of those fingers to trace along the outside of his ear, also very lightly. He likes that a lot. I do that sometimes when he's driving.

I took my left hand off his cock and started to rub his nipple between my thumb and forefinger. I always try to do that lightly, but I always get somewhat carried away. His nipple felt a little rough, as if someone he'd met on vacation had been biting it, so I figured I could be at least slightly more insistent. I hadn't really intended playing with him to be about me at all, but once I was working the nipple, I had wood. I had no intention of staying awake long enough to fuck him, but I know that he likes to feel my cock lying against his ass crack.

I spent a while alternating between cockhead and nipple, and b&c started what sounded a lot like a whimper, which kept getting louder. At some point he finally responded to my tugging and rolled onto his back, allowing me to get my mouth on his nipple. I was in a somewhat awkward position, but I still managed to suck his left nipple and flick my tongue across it while working his right nipple with one hand and his cockhead with the other. The whimpering continued to escalate, and when I started concentrating harder on the nipple play and let his cock out of my fingers, he started to stroke himself off.

Usually, b&c and I are all about the making out as the beginning of foreplay, but last night, I didn't start kissing him until he was stroking himself off. I have to say that they were pretty great kisses last night. I think he must have been past where he could think about it too much or put too much energy into it, because they were perfect soft kisses with moderate amounts of tongue. Awesome.

Ultimately, last night was really a quickie, though, and not long after we started the making out, he started to shake and breathe hard, and he came. I guess his nipples got very sensitive then because he took my hands off them. I lay back on his chest, and he wrapped an arm around my head. I was really hard, and I started to stroke myself off.

And then I fell asleep. I guess what I was after wasn't so much to shoot a huge load as to feel a certain level of intimacy, and once that desire was satisfied, it wasn't hard for the (very great) fatigue to overcome me. B&c is used to this: in March, it's not at all unusual for me to nod off while he's going down on me, no matter how great a job he's doing. And since I needed to be back in the office by 7:30 this morning, he let me sleep. He was still asleep when I left this morning. And I was still hard, so I let fly in the shower and then came to work.

Nipple Play

As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of metrics for sex. (And no, by that I do not mean that I prefer to measure a man's equipment in inches rather than centimeters.) Assigning ratings and statistics to your sexual encounters lessens their ineffable nature and leads to excessive consumption of cheeseburgers. But sometimes, when I'm not actually having sex, I amuse myself by coming up with rating systems that I then never use. The current example relates to nipple play.

You could, if you wanted to, rate nipple play preferences on a scale from 1 to 10 where a 1 means "don't even look at them or I'll start giggling uncontrollably and maybe cry" and 10 means, "bite 'em off; I'll grow more." I've never run into a 10, which is probably just as well because I don't think they really grow back, and if I ponder that any longer, I'll get a mental image that I really don't want to have but which would not have been out of place in Pan's Labyrinth.

I've known at least a couple of 9s. A 9 indicates that I'll work their nipples as hard as I'm comfortable with (anything short of blood, really), and they'll enjoy it. Or at least they won't complain. The first guy who ever asked me to tie him up was probably a 9. I'd actually leave bruises on his nipples, and he would complain about that, but only a couple of days later. And then when I'd asked whether he'd enjoy it, he'd say that he had but that now he was bruised. And then I'd ask whether he wanted me to kiss them and make them all better, and he'd ask me how dumb did I think he was, which I wouldn't answer because I still wanted to fuck him.

My favorite nip guy ever was probably an 8. I would work his nipples very aggressively. Nibble, bite, gnaw. And after an hour or so of that (interspersed with some other things, but his nipples were being worked for most of that time), he might allow that I had reached his limit of intensity, but then after I'd backed off for a couple of minutes, he'd be begging me to get him back to his limit. This particular guy was of European descent, and he had a somewhat huge head of hair, but he had no body hair. I'll take my guys either hairy or smooth, but there was something especially hot about a guy who was naturally hairless. I had always assumed that he waxed or shaved or something, but when I asked, he told me that he'd just never had any body hair.

Nipples on a smooth chest are very hot because of the way they stand out, (Nipples on a furry chest are very hot because you have to dig for them.) and this guy's nipples stood out easily half an inch, and more when I'd been working them for a while. I wish that guy and I still had sex, but he lives around the beltway, and it's too far to go. Also, the first time b&c and I ever had a threeway was with him, and he was a little weird after that, though I'm pretty sure I could get him to play again if I were going to be in the neighborhood. He always had a gratifying amount of enthusiasm for me.

I can only remember hooking up with one 1; unfortunately, the entire encounter was memorably dreary. I'd guess this happened about five or six years ago, and this guy (who was otherwise reasonably attractive) came over and proceeded to tell me about how awful his life was and how no one liked him and how he'd been dating a guy for eight months when the guy just stopped returning his calls. I was trying to be sympathetic, but there are limits, so I hurried him to bed, where he kept asking me if I thought he was attractive. Over and over and over again. He was a top, so anal sex was out, and he kept jumping away because I would accidentally graze his nipples (through his loose t-shirt) while we were making out, and it would send him into near convulsions. He told me that he couldn't even touch them himself. Then he asked me another thirty times whether I liked him and made me promise that I'd call him. And since I'd promised, I did call him a couple of days later, and he never returned the call. Which was just as well -- since I wouldn't have known what to say to him -- but annoying nonetheless.

My own nipples, alas, probably rate a 2. That means that you can play with them a moderate amount, but I won't feel anything, and if you play with them any more than that, I'll have to stop you because it hurts (without any compensating pleasure). Men are frequently surprised that someone with such a voracious appetite for nipples (if a guy puts his hands in front of them, I'll pull them away and say -- firmly -- "access to the nipples must remain unrestricted at all times!") has such inert nipples, but it makes perfect sense to me. Other guys think that since I'm eager to bite their nipples, I should be willing to have my own bitten. "Don't dish it out if you can't take it," they'll say. And I will invariably reply with something that I have found true in most areas of life, and which I will now put in a separate paragraph because it's one of my very best aphorisms.

In my experience, the more you dish out, the less you have to take.

I leave it for others to hypothesize whether and to what extent my enthusiasm for nipples is related to my own mother's failure to breastfeed me. (In fact, I may have to go find a shower just for having written that sentence. Ewww.) My nipple fascination is, to me, yet another area where I see no point in asking why. I am simply grateful.

This is all on my mind because of a recent hookup with someone who's nipple rating I appear to have adjusted. I have long known that a man's enthusiasm for having his nipples played with (Does that make him a nipple bottom because he's screaming in pleasure while I'm chewing on his nipples, or am I the bitch since I'm the one using my mouth? You see what an innocent I am; I don't even know the proper terminology.) can change over time. In the most depressing example of this fact, b&c used to be a 7 (back when he was still trying to impress me, I guess) and now he's at best a 5. On the plus side, he's much better at giving head than he used to be.

But sometimes you get lucky and come across a 2 or 3 whom you can elevate into something greater. I had my buddy B. in my bed over the weekend. I think it was the fourth time we've played. He's always been a good kisser and a decent cocksucker, so we've always had fun, but the last time (i.e., the time before this weekend) I had him over was the first time I got into concentrated nipple play with him. Previously, I'd sucked on them a little, but I hadn't gotten much response. But a month or so ago he came over, and after a decent period of nice kissing, I started to lick and suck on his left nipple.

At first there wasn't much of a reaction, but I decided to keep at it. I bit it very gently and then sucked it in between my lips and started to flick my tongue quickly back and forth across it, and there was suddenly a lot more interest on his part. So I mixed it up for a little while: first on one nipple, then the other. I pushed my tongue harder against the nipple then sucked with my lips while my tongue retracted. He was moaning then, and I went back to the suck-and-flick technique, concentrating on his left nipple. I got into a steady, fast rhythm with my tongue, and before long, his entire body was shaking. If I varied the intensity or the speed, he'd stop shaking, and then I'd work a little harder to make him shake again.

After about forty-five minutes of dedicated nipple play, I took a breather. He told me that he'd never experienced anything like that before and that it was like having a full body orgasm, only without the ejaculation. And then he said. "Wow. You can do anything that you want to me now." So I did. Up until then, he'd always claimed to be a top.

Anyway, this weekend was also a lot of fun, though I no longer felt like I was sailing into uncharted territory. He clearly wanted the intense nipple play again, and I certainly wanted to do that with him, but I wasn't having any more of this "orgasm without the ejaculation" crap. So after a nice long make out session, I worked his nipples for about fifteen minutes to get him nice and hungry for it, then I flipped him onto his stomach and ate his ass for a little while, and when I had it nice and wet and hungry, I took out the thinnest of my butt plugs and pushed it into him. Then I flipped him back over and started working his nipples intensely again until I got him back to the shaking point. I upped the intensity a little more then, and he started writhing and shaking, and then I grabbed his cock and stroked him until he shot. He shot a lot, and he shot hard.

At that point, he really couldn't do anything except lay there and glow, so I finished myself off by hand. He stayed the night, and in the morning I fucked him.

I'd like to play with him plenty more and see if I couldn't work his nipples so that they get bigger. That might happen, but it's not something I'll count on. He wants to be dating someone, and there's no good reason why he isn't, especially now that he's versatile. I don't reckon it'll be long before he's got a boyfriend and is off limits. Though I've been wrong about that sort of thing before.

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.