love gay sex

It always amuses me that, if you type the name of most male celebrities + ‘gay?’ into Google, you’ll quickly find this question posted again and again, along with fiercely debated discussions about their sexuality and some people claiming to be the authority on the matter.

I don’t see the issue of whether famous people should publicly come out as a black and white one. There are the ones who’ve made it an open secret, obviously out to the people around them, just haven’t confirmed it in the media - we all know some of the names. Then there’s the ones who hide behind a wedding and adopted children.

I’m not sure it’s all to do with fear of rejection by the public, either. I’m sure some canny publicists realise a bit of ambiguity and intrigue never heart any big star - always good to appeal to the widest demographic. Plus, us gays love the whole ‘are they/aren’t they’ cat and mouse game and tend to lose interest in a celeb when they finally confirm what we always suspected. And what you’re basically saying, by coming out, is, “I like gay sex,” which translates to “I like nothing better than a big, hard dick in my arse,” which then gets etched into some people’s brains and that’s all they associate you with.

Us mere mortals aren’t in a position to have a blanket coming out, informing everybody all at once with a singe newspaper headline. For most gays it’s a process that has no end - you’re straight until proven otherwise. A group of people in my life who still don’t know I’m gay because I never came out to them are my old school friends. One of them is getting married in September and I’ve been invited to both the wedding and the stag night (which I believe you call a bachelor party in the US). I used to hang out with these guys all the time and would love to go, but if I do, I’d have to level with them, and that means coming out to bunch of very straight lads.

I genuinely don’t think they’d have a problem with it, but they might treat me differently. I suppose it was a bit cowardly never confiding in any of them, but by the time I was confident in telling people I’m gay, I’d moved away and hardly ever saw them and it was all too easy to avoid the words when I did. In fact, it’s several years since we last all met up and that’s a shame, because we were a tight, little group at school.

Actually, for a bunch of straight guys, there was rather a lot of mutual masturbating and hand jobs, but that’s just normal for an all-boys school, right?

I found myself having defensive gay sex last night. Rich is away all week on a residential training course for his job. I know what these things can be like: a remote hotel with nothing to do in the evening apart from drink and loosen up with your training buddies. What if there’s some hot, friendly guy - maybe straight, maybe not - who is strangely drawn to young, gay Rich from Brighton? He doesn’t know why this is, but the more he drinks he, the more he flirts and after enough pints he’s anybody’s and it’s a night of bedroom hockey.

I might have a vivid imagination, but it doesn’t hurt to take out some insurance. So I fucked for England last night, ensuring Rich fired off a couple of rounds and I could happily pack him off today with an empty cartridge. This was all going on in my subconscious, by the way, and it’s only in the cold light of day that I realise I was fucking defensively because of silly paranoia.

This led to thinking about other times I’ve had gay sex for the wrong reasons - more often than I would like to admit, probably - and I came up with the following list:

1. That first time, with totally the wrong guy to trust your virginity with, just to get the bum sex out of the way and jump through that first, painful hurdle so it can start getting better.

2. To get over an ex. Everyone says the best way to get over someone is to get under someone, but what if that ‘get over it’ gay sex is bad? Then you’re left thinking how much better your ex was in the sack and you still have to fuck another guy to get over the last, disappointing one. Slippery slope, I tell you; slippery slope.

3. ‘Last turkey in the shop’ syndrome: you’re out clubbing, it’s nearly closing time, your mates have pulled and you don’t want to go home alone. That guy you’re not really into, who has been dancing close to you all night, is now a lone figure on the dancefloor, but also an available figure on the dancefloor.

4. You’ve turned up and the guy is nothing like his profile described and those pictures must have been taken at least 10 years ago, but you don’t want to waste the cab fare.

5. Because the guy is so good looking you ignore the fact that you find him vein, self-obsessed and aloof - if we have amazing gay sex, maybe we can build a relationship from that. Im sorry, but if you don’t like a guy, the sex is never going to be amazing.

6. A younger guy is new to the scene and doesn’t yet appreciate how hot he is, so you get in early, before everyone else.

7. To get a bit knocked off your bill.

8. To have something to write about on my blog!

P.S. That last one isn’t true.

I got a late night, S.O.S. call from a friend yesterday. Andy was on the phone to me, in a bit of a state, terrified of the bleeps emitting from the corner of his room and convinced that his computer had become a malicious force out to get him. How had my usually sane friend been reduced to a paranoid wreck?

Actually, I might have played a part. You see, Andy, until very recently, was one of those gay guys who just couldn’t see the point of online socialising and found the idea of putting up a personal profile a bit strange, preferring to meet guys for sex/dating/a pint of lager the old fashioned way. And that’s fair enough.

One of the things about Andy is that he’s very argumentative, not in a harsh way, he just likes to debate - yes, he’s a master debater. So, if I’m with Andy and I have a different opinion about something I better be prepared to defend it. The whole topic of using gay dating sites came up again a few months back. I’ve not used one for a while, for obvious reasons, but found myself staunchly defending them against Andy’s negative picking. Then we got a bit drunk and thought it would be funny to create a fake profile of a hot 18 year old. Well, we’d barely uploaded it and the messages were coming in thick and fast: “got any pics?”, “hey sexy!”, “wanna chat?”; that sort of thing. I think Andy found the whole experiment quite an eye opener.

Andy promised he would delete the profile after I went home, but he later admitted, sheepishly, that he was actually using this fake profile to chat to other men under the guise of a sexy 18 year old! He did delete it after this and created a genuine profile. After that, I saw Andy less and less - staying in and going online became his new going out. I knew it was becoming a problem when he owned up to calling in sick to work one day because all he wanted to do was browse guys online. Then I found out he had more than one profile, different ones for different moods. Andy was becoming an addict.

In fact, Andy came to me for help, realising his internet cruising was crossing into obsessive behaviour. He wasn’t even meeting up with most of the guys he chatted to, let alone having gay sex, it all seemed to be about the thrill of the chase. I suggested that he restrict himself to something like an hour a day. This didn’t work because he’d get chatting, then lose track of time or walk away, but stay logged in, so that the messages would ping into his inbox and he’d be straight back on.

He agreed to go cold turkey last week. I knew he’d find it difficult and I’ve had to text encouraging words every so often, but then last night’s desperate phone call. The relationship between Andy and his computer was getting to surreal levels, like the treacherous computer, HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He couldn’t answer me why the computer was on at all, as if it now had independent control of itself. He had gone to bed, but the sound of messages pinging into his inbox was calling him. I managed to convince him to pull the plug and go to sleep.

I can appreciate how easy it is to get sucked into gay personals sites and waste hours surfing without noticing it, but my experience is more about getting into a habit rather than a genuine addiction; I was always able to walk away at the end of the day. I do remember the buzz of someone new and hot and the exciting sound announcing the arrival of a new personal message. The faces of those permanent, online fixtures become kind of reassuringly familiar, even though you’d never chat to them as they’re clearly desperate, always logged in… and, of course, with the good comes the bad: “Why hasn’t he replied to my last message? We seemed to be getting on so well. Maybe he didn’t take my ‘best ever film’ appraisal of Kermit: The Swamp Years as ironic”.

So, the paranoia creeps in, as does the disappointment, the rejection, and the disillusionment, to the point were you wonder why you would put yourself through it all in the privacy of your own home. But then again I’ve met some really nice people online - and had the odd decent shag along the way - so it’s all swings and roundabouts. Not for my friend Andy, though. Don’t know what to do about that one. I wish he could take some words of advice from HAL: “Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

I’ve had a fair amount of gay sex as an adult (I challenge anyone to define ‘fair’), but have never been involved in a fight. This might seem a strange statement to make, but after an experience I had at the weekend, I believe these two forms of physical expression aren’t so far removed.

To say I was involved in a fight would be exaggerating, but the threat of violence was real and so was the adrenaline pumping through my body. It all happened while I was food shopping at my local supermarket. I was a little distracted, ticking items off a mental list and thinking up recipe ideas when a guy, taller and bigger built than myself, came marching at me on my side of the aisle, his basket flailing as he bore down on me. He clearly expected me to somersault backwards into the shelves of vegetables and clear his path. I didn’t move and, in fact, as he knocked past me at speed, clearly unhappy at having to swerve slightly, I might have held my shopping basket out a bit further than necessary, but I’m not admitting to anything.

Just after the point when our baskets clashed and kind of locked, causing this big guy to stumble slightly, that’s when it all kicked off. I quickly realised this was a man who wasn’t going to let it go. He squared right up to me, inches from my face and started to make silly threats and insults in a gruff, slightly raised voiced. His face was bright red and, while he seemed to be putting a lot of effort into keeping his words controlled and even-pitched, his trembling body and clenched fists suggested that he really wanted to pummel me.

In one of those almost out-of-body moments when you seem to be watching yourself react, I responded calmly, but defended myself verbally. My adrenaline was fired to the max. I can’t even remember much of what was said. I do remember him jabbing me hard in the shoulder, however, and my unthinking response, which was to shove him backwards by pushing his chest - it was a very firm chest; big, hard pecs. Everything seemed to go slow motion after that and I could see that meaty fist of his positioning itself, getting ready to strike, at the same time as a security guard’s voice broke the air and the blur of his uniform appeared in my line of sight. My supermarket nemesis dropped his fist and backed off. For the first time I noticed the impressive bulge in his tracksuit bottoms.

The security guy gave us both a warning and sent us off in separate directions. He stuck to me, limpet like, for the rest of my shop. The adrenaline was still there, but easing off slightly, and I started to appreciate what a close call it had been. I also felt pretty macho - it might have been ugly, but this is how real men settle disputes, isn’t it? Well, truthfully, real men would probably fight with shopping trolleys filled with beer and steaks, not small baskets containing mange tout and porcini mushrooms, and they wouldn’t be squaring up in the organic veg section.

I managed to avoid running into the guy again, but while I was queuing for the checkout, he was waiting at another and I got in a few glances under the still watchful eye of the security guard. In a different light and no longer with a red, angry face, my opponent wasn’t bad looking. In fact, I would say he was kind of hot: tall, muscular and cheek-boned. His sportswear hugged his gym-toned body very nicely. In other circumstances I can easily imagine buying this guy drinks and taking him home to fuck. And afterwards, when all the adrenaline had stopped surging and I was back home, I found the whole experience a bit of a turn on! I mean, I did get to feel the fella up a bit and what other way is there, without having gay sex, to stir up such strong feelings between two men and use up excess hormones?

This experience highlights what a powerful thing testosterone is; all those guys walking around, pumped up and looking for a release. It now makes sense to me that some straight guys fight so they don’t fuck; I just wish it were the other way around.

It’s scary how much information it’s possible to glean about someone just by putting their name into Google. I had an interview last Friday and I knew the name, beforehand, of the main guy who would be interviewing me. He has a fairly uncommon name, so I decided to dig for some dirt on the Internet and struck gold! The guy was obviously gay, lives not far from me and is involved in various organisations. I knew his age, the faces of some of his friends, and that he suffers from piles (be very careful about emailing those medical advice pages on websites, or at least use a false name!).

I only searched on this guy to build up some sort of picture of him in my mind prior to the interview, to put a human face to a very formal situation and, also, to find out what sort of person I might be working under. But, when I started to find out very personal information, it didn’t sit well with me and I felt I was crossing the line into Stalkersville. Just because the information is out there in the public domain for anyone to see, doesn’t, necessarily, make it alright to go looking for it - you wouldn’t go searching through someone’s rubbish, even if it was left on a public street.

There’s a lot of debate right now about the authorities watching people, but there’s also the separate issue of information we willingly upload to the Net for all to see (he says, writing a very personal blog!), or things written about us that we have no control over. Consider, hypothetically, a long-ago, minor conviction or an incident you might have been involved with that got reported by an online news service and published to permanent webpages - I’m sure some potential employers Google names, too.

For those of us used to sites like Gaydar, this form of pre-emptive selection has been around for a while. Suddenly, you could make an informed decision based on a guy’s dick size, role, fetishes and level of hairiness without the messy business of actually having sex. If you’ve arranged a date with a virtual stranger, it’s only an extra click to find out all manner of information about them - he volunteers for a cat protection charity? Well, I’m a dog person.

So, did this guy come close to the image I had pre-formed about him? Yes, I suppose he did, but based only on an hour or so of responding to his questions and some brief, informal chat before and after. As for the job, I haven’t heard yet and, as long as he doesn’t Google my name, I think I stand a good chance. Oh, and my name isn’t really Joe ; )