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[The following is letter I sent to a Yahoo group, a regional jackoff club that is very active and provides a connection and organizing resource for men to meet in groups and couples for JO. They exchange a dozen or so messages every day and reflect an enthusiastic community of masturbators. This letter was a response to a number of comments posted by guys complaining about the cost of organized gatherings]

“… Am I the only guy that sees $40 as expensive just to JO? …”

“… Joe, you sound like me….I can JO at home for free, and I can invite some other guys over to join me… ”

There is a major difference between jacking off alone and jacking off with others. A huge difference. That difference is worth something to lots of guys, worth enough to support with money to make it possible and keep it happening again and again. That value is why there exists something called a JO club.

No matter how vivid your imagination or how awesome your online porn access, solosex doesn’t provide the sensation of another living, horned-up man’s hand on your stiff prick, another nibbling your left nip, another nibbling your right nip, another ticking your balls and a hard cock in each hand, neither your own… Solosex doesn’t shoot a load of warm sperm on your nutsack just before you blow a massive load. Solosex doesn’t provide a furry butt or a smooth scrotum to caress in your fingers while you feel your your cum rising… You can imagine it and replay it during solosex, but the real thing is, literally, real. Those of us who have been to lots of group JO know the difference.

There seems to be some confusion here between solosex and social masturbation. They are not the same.

And yes, you can “invite some other guys over” to join you, and that means they have to already know and trust you, or be willing to go to a stranger’s home to JO, and the host has to have the space, time and living situation amenable to having strangers over in their home to (hopefully) JO. Many men are able to do this and have done so for decades, even before the Internet made it so much easier to find people, and for people to find us. It’s great when it happens and most JO clubs start with private JO parties.

But there are monumental advantages of having a predetermined time and a safe place, a club that builds camaraderie and community, an atmosphere of friendliness and positive feedback, the sounds and smells and sights of men masturbating and cumming, laughing and cheering after a buddy’s particularly awesome orgasm… And in 21 years and hundreds of events, I have never been to a JO party or club where there were not enough guys to have a great time, but I have had many, many experiences of trying to connect with one buddy in my or their home or hotel room and being left to bate on my own when they flake out or someone’s roommate or boyfriend or girlfriend shows up or they end up looking nothing like the pic they sent… 

These and other factors are exactly why jackoff clubs exist, why we have the word “Jacks” to describe them, and why it is worth supporting them with our presence and monetary assistance to make them possible. I assume Atlanta Jacks still exists for group JO and buddy JO and not just for solo JO. If a guy is perfectly satisfied to jack off alone, virtually any sex site, hardcore and soft, will do the trick.

There are thousands of counties in the USA, and entire countries all over the world, where JO clubs do not and/or can not exist. If you live where there is one and you have an opportunity to support it, it is worth recognizing that these organizations are unique and rare and should not be taken for granted. 

If you really want to go to a JO club and the cost is too high, I encourage you to contact the organizers and ask if there is some way to participate at a lower rate, buddy up with generous friends, offer to help run the event or some other way of supporting the club. Sometimes that works. If, however, you’re just as content to stroke your own meat solo, or if you have the ability to host others for free, it should not be an issue that you can’t afford it since you can be satisfied without the social difference.

Rain City Jacks in Seattle (my club) charges $40 for the first event when a member joins for a full year, and then $15 or $10 per event. We charge $20 for a trial membership. We offer discounts to students, military and card-carrying members of other JO clubs, and members can attend free when they volunteer or sponsor new members.

We also understand that that $40 or $20 barrier means that we are filtering out guys for whom the experience isn’t valuable. Frankly, if a guy thinks it’s not worth paying for, we don’t really want that guy there. We all want everybody in the room to WANT the experience and not just be a sexual tourist who’d rather be bating, fucking or sucking. We want everyone there to be an enthusiastic buddy bater… so we’re not worried about turning away guys who don’t consider it worth it. I want every man there to think it’s worth it…

We pay to rent an awesome playspace with lockers and room for up to 150 masturbating men. We also pay for all the Albolene, paper towels, baby wipes, snacks and beverages, loaner locks, mouthwash, soap for the showers, laundry for the towels, linens and furniture coverings, and we pay for insurance so that if one of our members should be injured on the premises, both they and the club will not go broke taking care of him… We have no fear of the law (because we’re 100% legal) and our members have no fear of attack, theft or personal exposure. They have no fear of HIV or STDs, no need to negotiate terms of play or any need to even disclose HIV status, no need for condoms… What they get for their money is a reliable, safe place to gather in significant numbers to be safely and freely naked, hard and fully male together.

I have absolutely nothing agains a guy who loves masturbating alone. That describes me too. I love my penis and I love the freedom to spend time making myself feel good and exploring it deeply. What I think must never be lost, and is worth reminding each other, is the difference between solosex and social masturbation, and the need to never take the latter for granted.

I want more jack-off clubs to form and thrive all over the world. I make no secret of this desire. I love this community, the familiarity of energy at every JO club, the warmth, friendliness, the cock… Oh there is a lot of cock out there, and even a tiny fraction of them constitutes millions that would share the pleasure if they had the opportunity…

There are two things I recommend for every man considering what he needs to start a jack-off club. The first is tricky, but the second is not.

First: Experience a jack-off club yourself! I am floored by the number of men who read about the Jacks and say they are ready to start a club of their own, even without ever having placed a finger upon any penis other than their own. Seriously.

This makes real experience absolutely essential, and this is the tricky part because there are not a lot of JO clubs to choose from out there. You have to go there, get naked and experience the reality of group masturbation yourself—actually touch and be touched, actually see and smell and breathe in the fact of it—before you attempt anything like what you have in mind.

Because while it should be a simple matter for guys to masturbate together, it just isn’t. There are countless obstacles—personal, social, political, philosophical, environmental, legal obstacles—preventing it. It is absolutely vital to the venture that the incipient Jack Daddy has a successful model to follow before he attempt anything like this.

So you want to start a jack-off club? You need to do a little field research. Whatever it takes, you need to start with a trip to one of the places where men are hosting JO events regularly. It means travel. It may mean lying to someone about needing to take a business trip or a family trip. You have to go to New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia… You need to go to a JO club in one of those cities or elsewhere and play there, preferably several times.

You will come back with scenes replaying vividly in your mind, details you never would have considered, and dozens of ideas for how you would do things better, or smaller or bigger or just differently. You may also find that it is way more than you ever thought you’d want to do. You could even find out that you don’t even like it, that what you really prefer is solosex and fantasy.

Whatever the outcome, if you’re going to start a JO club, you need to experience someone else’s first.

Okay… The second thing, the less tricky recommendation is just this: Start small and keep it simple.

What you need is a safe place, a predetermined day and time, and participants. Yes, you can add more to that, but essentially, this is it: A place, a time and dicks to jack. Without all three of those things, you can’t make it happen, and really, you need little more than these things…

The place needs to be legal and private, and often a good-sized hotel room will do. It also needs to be warm enough when the weather is cold and cool enough when the weather is hot. You need to effectively communicate that it is a JO-only party and you need to be ready to enforce that rule.

My first event was a party in a hotel room suite. I paid for one night with my own credit card and invited guys through a Yahoo group I set up. If you get money from your guests to help offset the expenses, you may be in violation of some local Victorian sex laws, but if you just pop for it yourself, it’s a private party of consensual adults, legal almost everywhere in the country, even where old sodomy laws still exist.

I based much of what I did on my experience at the (sadly short-lived) Chicago Jacks of the early 1990s. Much of what I learned from that club was transferred to my club in Seattle, now in its 7th year.

So, you want to start a club? Go to one first. Do your research, plan a trip or three (they will be very, very fun trips, I promise you) and then come home and you might be ready to try it yourself. And when you do, start small.

Like someone said, if you build it, they will come.

(NOTE: I’m not The JO Club Authority, and there are always exceptions. PDX Jacks is a fantastic club run by a guy who has never been to one. He just happens to have all the skills necessary to run a kick-ass Jacks right out of the box. What he does do is keep it at a manageable level. Visit his club if you want to see one great way to do it… but I still highly recommend attending before you host.)

One of the most fascinating pieces of Jacks culture regards the many assumptions surrounding why we jack off together. The most common assumption is that it’s all about “safe sex” and HIV. In other words, fear. There’s an idea that we’re afraid of getting HIV or transmitting HIV so we are essentially settling for this “fake sex.”

In my experience, and this is just my perception so you get to disagree all you like, those of us who are sexually active are often unsuccessful at suppressing what we really want. Our strongest sexual instinct is to push further, not to retreat. We want genuine pleasure, satisfaction and authenticity in our sexual experiences, and we rarely are willing to “settle” for more than a short period of time, although for a tragic number of people, it’s easier to just give up on sex altogether than to settle for what they don’t want…

It’s like dieting (and there are loads of parallels between our desire for sex and our desire for food). A few people will be able to curb their desire to eat, chew and enjoy the foods they crave, but this almost always results in cycles of control and release. We can control the cravings and limit ourselves to a point, and then we release that control. For serial dieters (those familiar with riding the “diet rollercoaster”) it is painfully clear that diets are often a “two steps forward, three steps back” proposition where they lose weight and then gain it all back plus a little more. For many successful at weight loss, a deliberate release (a “free day”) built into a diet means they can keep their progress on track.

Accepting and embracing what we really want works better than trying to suppress it altogether.

In sex, like in dieting, we are trying to suppress strong, primal forces that are active in us all the time. Those forces only go away when we can no longer sustain them biologically and when we are successful at suppression, it almost never leads to happiness. Eventually, we go for what we want, binge and deal with the regret later… often by consoling ourselves with more binging.

I know I’ve been tapping the well of this factoid a lot lately, but its significance is important: Jacks clubs formed in earnest before HIV. A number of men (and their numbers were in the process of expansion well-before AIDS appeared) organized to jack off together out of desire. There was no such thing as “safe sex

There is a primal hit we get from every specific sex act, and there doesn’t seem to be any end to the specifics. We want and we explore and when we find what gets us off, we want to go back and get off again and again. We’ll keep going back and digging deeper until we don’t get off anymore, and then we look elsewhere. At some level, men will always desire novelty as a way to get off, but some things click for extended periods of time for us, and when those things are missing, we feel unsatisfied.

Barebacking is part of that dynamic. So is fucking in general, or sucking, or water sports or glory holes or public sex or BDSM… Any "Kink” or conventional sex practice can easily be seen as just another way of expressing the general category of sex that satisfies to an individual.

Jacks like jacking off together. Jacks get off on the specific energy of group and/or buddy masturbation. It is a desire that drives them (us) repeatedly back to that activity, not fear. Fear motivates a lot of behavior, but when it comes to sex, desire is the onus that makes things happen and keeps them rolling.

It may be obvious to you but it is not to others. Many will always see mutual masturbation as a poor substitute for real sex but for Jacks, it is real sex. Period.

I’ve been digging through the old newsletters of the SF Jacks (San Francisco’s venerable JO club, most faithfully inspired by the NY Jacks) and I am so delighted by what I find there, though I have read it many times before. It is a fantastic window into the ‘80s and into one of the main taproots of Jacks culture.

One piece of history I find particularly of interest—both in the SF Jacks and the NY Jacks who originated this philosophy—is the focus on JO as proud fetish. There was a very clear directive to prospective members that this trip was not for tourists, but for the repatriated prodigal sons of that rich land. It is spelled out with absolute clarity in the original rules of SF Jacks, based almost verbatim on the original rules of the NY Jacks:

RULES OF THE JACKS

Jerking off is the reason for our club’s being. The San Francisco Jacks is a meeting of men who wish their primary sexual outlet to be J.O. in the company of other likeminded men. For a very significant number of members, jerking off alone and in groups large and small is not their central, but their exclusive sexual activity.

• We’re looking for recreation, not romance.
• Checking of street clothes upon arrival is mandatory.
• One of the hottest aspects of our club is the mutuality of interest that prevails. Proud as we are of our club, it is incumbent on us all to discourage visitors whose interest arises merely out of curiosity.
• Because of the communal nature of the S. F. Jacks, the use of poppers is discouraged.
• If a member or guest cannot be fully satisfied by J.O. alone, then the San Francisco Jacks is not the club for him.

“…men who wish their primary sexual outlet to be J.O. in the company of other likeminded men…” is a very strong, very specific statement. It leaves out millions of men who merely “like to jack with a bud” or just “get into ‘bating.” The proscription of “…visitors whose interest (arise) merely out of curiosity…” crystalizes the original core of the Jacks’ reason for being: intense fetishization of mutual masturbation.

That should tell you a few things: The original Jacks felt the need to make a strong statement that was specific and erotically-centered. “You must really want this” was, and still is, the core message. 

And consider the history of that time and place: These rules were written in the San Francisco of 1983. AIDS was a present spectre in the gay community and that period of time was already one of terror and fear-motivated choices. A wave of death was already washing over the greater community. Yes, the original NY Jacks version of the rules was written in 1980, a year before the epidemic had even been heard of, but look at the rules. There is no revision for the times, no mention of “safe sex.”

The spirit of the Jacks was the power of specific lust, a particular sexual taste and a sense of having discovered something extraordinary that had to be shared and evangelized… And protected from dilution. They saw all the relationships, cruising, tricking and hierarchy of sexual acts as a morass of needless complication and confusion. They didn’t judge sex or relationships, many simply felt that for them, it all missed the mark…

They sought and found, through simply jerking off together, a connection of equals (“likeminded men”) and a reconnection to a genuine, personal and primal nature once buried under social ritual and sexual politics.

(Your comments are always welcome. Please leave a personal note or question and please do share my blog with friends.)

I just finished watching Gay Sex in the 70s, the 2005 documentary about the period between Stonewall and AIDS, roughly 1969 through 1981. It was a rich experience of nostalgia, humor, sadness and history. It left me feeling grateful to be alive, to have survived, and to have benefitted from the experience of those who were much deeper into the scene than I ever was…

I watched the film for source material, to find photos and clips to use in my kickstarter video, but also to get a better sense of the culture out of which the New York Jacks and the entire JO club movement sprang. I’m amazed that an enduring fetish culture centered on safer sex came out of the same cauldron where the most reckless sex was being celebrated 24/7, and yet it makes a lot of sense to me too.

A big part of my experience of the 70s and 80s was drugs, and I began my recovery in Aspen, Colorado in the summer of 1989. That was a community and a time that was saturated with cocaine. Almost everyone I knew snorted coke. It was a deeply addicted community but within it, there also existed an intensely effective recovery community. I think whenever you have an extreme cultural phenomenon in place, some will reject it and forge their own path, and a sort of complementary phenomenon will flourish.

In the 70s, fucking and sucking were, as they have been in straight culture as well, considered “real sex” and masturbation considered either practice sex or foreplay, but certainly not deserving of main course status. It was assumed to be an appetizer only.

The men who would become the NY Jacks were simply men who really preferred manual over oral or anal sex. They preferred a more equal footing than the designations of top and bottom gave them. Their taste for egalitarian and non-penetrative intimacy and sexual sharing is, to a great extent, why so many of them lived through the first great outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. They didn’t originally seek out JO clubs because they sought refuge in safe sex, but many survived the devastation of the 80s because of that preference and the opportunity to experience and enjoy it.

I had my share of anonymous and definitely risky sex in the 70s and 80s… and drugs. I was high on something every day for 14 years and had already fucked, sucked and stroked with well over 1000 men by the time I met Eric. I explored the dangerous places and met my own dark side and it got very different when I A) stopped using drugs and B) started exploring JO clubs. Partnering with Eric was nothing short of transformative, but I still look back and am amazed at my survival… 

I have come to understand that shyness is a common quality among men who go to jack-off clubs. I’ve heard it so often from prospective members, I never thought to ask men who never mentioned it, but sure enough, it turns out that a venue where a large number of men are uniformly naked and masturbating cuts right through many of the specific obstacles that shy guys normally find intimidating. 

It makes a lot of sense to me. Shy men are often terrified of having to impress strangers with witty banter or displays of fashion sense, status or wealth. There’s often an idea that one must pretend to be someone else in order to win the attention, if not the affection, of someone appealing—a sense that there is an ordeal of social artifice one must pass through to get to what one desires. 

JO clubs level the playing field in many key ways: Everyone is naked, so there’s no need to spend time dressing to impress. Conversation is completely optional although simple courtesy is standard practice, and being naked makes class distinctions far less obvious. Add to these “social simplifications” the simple fact that everyone is immediately available for open sexual activity with and among all others present and all significant barriers for shy men turn out to be completely down. It is, in many ways, an ideal environment for the shy man… at least, the shy man who wants to share a masturbatory experience with other men. 

My guess, and it’s just my personal sense without any data to back it up, is that Jacks are more likely to identify as shy than not. 

I am not shy. I divested myself long ago of the notion that I generally need to impress anyone to have sex. Even so, I am not “bold” either. I am neither intimidated nor intimidating… at least not intentionally. 

But I was shy once. I remember all too clearly what that feels like, and I don’t mind being a generous ambassador for the club, offering a smile, a friendly touch and direct reassurance that every member is welcome and that we all want them to have a good time and want to come back. When guys tell me they want to come to an event but are shy I like to say, “That’s great! You should really enjoy the club. It’s perfect for shy guys." 

Have you been to a JO club and experienced what I’m talking about here? I’d love to read your comments. 

Digging into the roots of the JO club phenomenon, I should not be surprised to find myself stepping squarely into the Meat Market of New York, years after its disappearance.

I have been to New York City exactly once, spent a handful of days seeing my husband’s play get its off-off-Broadway debut. That was in the very-late 20th Century when our partnership was still sexually exclusive. I was far too excited about his show to be thinking about the lost fantasies of my youth—visions of urban men cruising and tricking publicly in seedy, seething neighborhoods—so I passed through New York with little more impact than making a connecting flight at LGA.

But today, as I research my book, every tiny detail leads me through the tenuous fragments of our collective history and the intense cultural phenomenon that was the Meat Market. I was a disco twink in the late ‘70s, dropping acid and partying after hours in my Central Illinois enclave of distant homo debauch in college. I read Honcho and Mandate and dreamed of going to where the real action was, where I could dig into the mansex I devoured surreptitiously from the midst of the corn and soybean fields.

At 17 and 18, I was learning not to fall in love from JB, my first crush with the emotionally sadistic side, and at 19, I was making regular trips into Chicago to visit Man’s Country, my first bathhouse. I was, at that point, not interested in “wasting my time” at bars. At 19, I could legally go to a bathhouse but I could not get into a gay bar anyway. I just wanted to start putting my penis everywhere I could and taking every strange cock I could find into my mouth and my ass. In this way, I did experience the echoes of the Meat Market, the actual culture and network of open, anonymous and semi-public sexual adventure exploding among the gay men of that decade.

But I never went to the Gold Coast, Chicago’s venerable leather bar, nor did I ever want to go to the Hellfire Club, the secret society of the City’s leather and SM culture. It didn’t appeal to me, although the artwork of Tom of Finland was incredible and intriguing, I was not into “the rough stuff” so I stuck to Man’s Country and later, The Bistro, Broadway Limited and other discos I could finally play in when I hit 21 in 1981.

But in 1981, the party was in its final act as HIV began to invade our common psyche and AIDS began to kill us. We denied vehemently the pronouncements of “God’s vengeance” laid upon us by the moralizers without and within the disparate gay communities and those who had always condemned us, and we kept partying for a couple of years but it was like the twitching and ejaculating of the hanged man whose body denies its end. The party was over and we simply were not ready to leave.

In New York City, where the revolution really began on the night Judy died and drag queens fought back, the culture was deeper, darker and in many ways, more mature than its emanations across the country and around the world, and from the hardcore world of the Mineshaft, J’s Hideaway and really from the whole belly of the beast, came something different and strangely both wholly new and primordial: groups of masturbating men.

In some ways, it makes perfect sense. This massive buffet of sexual and social experimentation was spread out before us and we had an opportunity to taste everything, or to at least imagine everything, and we naturally began coming back to those experiences that appealed most to each of us, that best fit our taste.

The Jacks were the guys who had a taste for the very casual, very self-possessed and very fraternal experience of mutual masturbation, of sharing the very personal with trusted, if not all that familiar, friends. In many ways, they were the most authentic Jacks that would ever be because they had had ample opportunity to try everything they pleased, but returned by choice to this one section of the buffet to taste over and over that which satisfied them most: sharing masturbation…

More to come. Please feel free to share your own memories, personal experience, comments and photos in the comments section.