Category: Uncategorized

Saturday, August 28, 2010

I had an interesting day this fine, cool, late-August Saturday in Seattle. I got up at 6:30 to caffeinate, wash and shave in time to arrive at Seattle University by 9:00, fresh as a daisy and ready for my makeup call. The following three hours, I was the recipient of the gentle ministrations of Harmony and Annie, makeup and costume sorceresses weaving their dark magic upon me and three hours later, I emerged reborn… as The Devil.

I was privileged to be asked to play the Prince of Darkness by the miraculous Waxie Moon and by Wes Hurley, the director of Waxie’s new film, Fallen Jewel which, I think, is scheduled to premiere next Spring.

This past June, I got to play Sweeney Todd for five minutes when Captain Smartypants and Sensible Shoes presented… Sweeney Todd in Five Minutes as part of Seattle Men’s Chorus’ 30th Anniversary production, Glitter and Be Gay.

While both parts had a rather high tongue-in-cheek factor, there’s no escaping that I may be emerging as a “type,” namely, “evil.”

I’m actually kind of honored to be considered theatrically evil, particularly since I’m reportedly a rather pleasant person, albeit occasionally peevish—curmudgeonly perhaps—but essentially a good guy… I hope.

I don’t care if a lot of people like me or not—I don’t need that kind of attention—but I don’t feel uncomfortable in the spotlight. I generally feel more at home on stage than off, and I want to do a good job and I want the audience to enjoy what I do, but I really don’t like notoriety, recognition on the street, people looking at me through the lens of a character they saw me play…

Also, I don’t believe in a supernatural force of evil. People all have the potential to do bad, even horrible things, and you could say that some people get into a rut of doing bad things, and you could call them “evildoers” (a word I like which also, regrettably, reminds me of George W. Bush) but there is no such thing as an evil force like a devil or monster.

People do evil things, but evil doesn’t exist beyond them… brutality in nature is plentiful, but evil, IMHO, is a human construct… and hella fun to play on stage…

For instance, here’s the Devil’s enormous penis…

Friday, August 27, 2010

There used to be a cable access TV show on Seattle called Sex Life Live, hosted by Dane Ballard. It was actually a pretty cool, DIY production, pretty decent and watchable as public access goes (which is not saying a lot) and they had lots of the local kink community there to talk about… kink. And sex in general. I’d give detail but I didn’t really watch the show. I’m one of those homos who’s not terribly interested in sexually empowered women, at least not as an entertainment, and Dane’s show was full of them, being a very balanced show.

I appeared on SLL a few years ago in my “official” capacity as the JackDaddy of Rain City Jacks, to talk about JO clubs, our club, and the general phenomenon of safe sex as a preferred choice of play. I ran into a few people I knew, both from the club and outside the club. Seattle does indeed have a community around its kink.

A few minutes into the conversation, Dane said, “It’s a… kink, isn’t it?”

That actually took me a little by surprise. I’d never thought of group JO as a kink. I’d always thought of it as really hot vanilla group sex. I think I answered. “Yes, I guess it is, but it has to be the most vanilla kink in the world.”

I’ve thought about his question many times since then. I now think that JO clubs are indeed a kink, though definitely less prop-heavy than leather or uniforms or a lot of fetish-based kink. I don’t think of group JO as a fetish, but it is definitely not the norm in the carnal world. Indeed, it seems to stand somewhere between whatever “normal” is and explicit “kink.”

Some of the things that make it a little kinky are the exhibitionism and voyeurism elements, the group sex element, and the all-orientations, all-men makeup of the group. JO clubs seem to invite a lot of straight and bi-curious guys because of the romance-free promise of a masturbation-only orgy. They can step into a realm of utter familiarity (masturbation) mixed with some very unfamiliar factors (company) to make progress on a suppressed desire to have sex with other men.

For the gay guys, they get to deal with actual straight guys beating hard dicks alongside them, and all the men get to interact intimately with different generations. RCJ has members ranging from 23 to 83 years of age. We all tend to get into a familiar groove so it shakes things up a bit…

In my core, I don’t feel “kinky.” That doesn’t really fit for me. I do feel sexually alive and participating in life with my whole body, dick included, but it just feels normal for me.

I know that there are lots of people who won’t feel comfortable explicitly talking about the reality of groups of men masturbating together on a regular basis. I have to watch that, since to me it’s not a novelty anymore, although I do enjoy it every single time My inclination to mention it is checked in most professional situations, even though it has been a problem for almost nobody I’ve discussed it with. Mostly, people congratulate me and say it sounds really cool.

I definitely live in a progressive place and my friends seem pretty unshakable if this is no big deal… and it supports my own feeling that it’s no big deal. I hope it never becomes an issue for someone, the mere fact that a club like the Jacks exists, because it feels like this is something some people value and in some instances, actually need.

I guess I’m still conflicted on the kink question. Is a JO club a kink? Is kink in the mind of the beholder?

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 – RCJ Event #146

As I write this, I’m that odd guy on the bus, gazing at his iPhone with a Bluetooth keyboard in front of it, clacking away… Being able to carry a compact keyboard that works with my phone has been life-changing. I can now write virtually anywhere (I know, I know… “pen and paper” blah blah blah…. I just have terrible handwriting).

I’m spent. I just boarded the bus a few minutes ago for the hour-long ride from the playspace to home. It’s wonderfully convenient that I get this door to door service but the guys sitting in front of me smells like the dumpster behind a Vietnamese seafood restaurant during a garbage collection strike. Not an exaggeration… that is exactly what he smells like…

No, I won’t explain how I know what that smells like. I moved to another seat, farther from the remarkable stench. I want to write about tonight’s event…

It was a little lightly attended tonight. 51 fine gentlemen braved the heat to come and be naked and generate even more heat together. As always, I played with a number of men, spending ample time with each until each break time hit, and made a point of playing with some of the new members. I would have been happy to have shared an orgasm with any or all of them but alas, I pretty much come once a day and that’s it for me.

I wasn’t even particularly horny tonight, so I concentrated on giving pleasure. This is pretty much what works best for me anyway in any sexual circumstance. Even when I am receiving pleasure, it is my buddy’s enjoyment of my pleasure that gets me off, not the action of fingers on genitals, although that’s definitely an essential element of the deal…

I saw this hot marine again, a tall, hung, very hunky, very masculine… He’s also a generous and egalitarian member, playing with all kinds of guys although he obviously has his preferences. He’s no elitist. I played near him, watching him and another beautiful, tattooed man make out and mash their greased up cocks together. I really enjoy watching men up close during these moments, and I’m very sensitive to not being a distraction. It can be an erotic plus or minus to have witnesses literally inches away while you’re having sex.

Yes, “sex.” Sex is what we have at the jack-off club. I just hate the game of calling sex something other than what it is—the idea that this act or that isn’t “real sex.” I remember President Clinton’s famous, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” and how it was spun with an explanation that where he comes from, “sexual relations” means intercourse. A blow job doesn’t count as sex, so he wasn’t lying!

Which is why we now have lots of “good Christian girls” with their virginity pledges somehow intact, getting all kinds of STDs from cocksucking and butt sex, because if it’s not one penis in one vagina, it’s not sex. For some, not making a baby means it’s not sex.

I am of the view that this is the purest horseshit. “Sex” is a grossly general term, like “food.” There is a wide, wide world of experiences that all qualify as sex, each with its different gradations of intimacy and health risk. Jacking off is sex as much as oral, anal or vaginal sex. It is sex regardless of how many people are in the room with you, if any!

My body knows what sex feels like. It’s like art or obscenity. “I know it when I see it” or, more likely, when my body chemistry does its magic sex thing. Ultimately, that’s what sex is for everyone: Chemistry, not methodology…

So I had sex with multiple guys tonight, as I do a few times every month. All of it was on the far end of the safety spectrum, and I strove as I always do to be as as authentic and as present as I could be in every case.

I spent a long time sitting opposite a young, lean fellow with long hair and a gorgeous and very erect penis, gawking at each other showing off our “technique” and just getting off on the sight.

I did more side-by-side bating, this time standing beside a man wearing the red wrist band that signals “don’t touch my dick.” I noticed he also had a gold band on his left ring finger. It was not stylish and decidedly straight-married looking. He had another gorgeous cock, very swollen. We did not touch each other, but stroked and chatted a little as we did, just getting into the sight of mirroring each other. This was his first time doing anything like this and he was clearly ready for the experience…

I licked some nipples, spent about 20 minutes just giving another longhair bater some very specific attention as he stood in front of where I sat. I made him keep his hands behind his back and allow me to do the work. So much fun…

About an hour and a half into the event, I watched as a guy I’d been appreciating from afar started cleaning up after consummating a session with a man he’d been sitting beside on one of the couches. He smiled and laughed, as I’ve found many guys in an early refractory period do. His partner stood up, wiped himself down and immediately made clear that he was not done yet, and was interested in me.

We stroked ourselves for a while and he paused to put a lot of lube on himself. I asked if I could have some of it and made no move to use my own hands, indicating that I wanted him to lube me up, which he did. I returned the favor and very soon we discovered that we liked each other’s touch quite a lot.

We played like that for a while, alternately stroking ourselves and each other, pretty much unaware of anyone else, although when I looked to my side at one point, the red-banded newcomer from earlier was orgasming as he watched us… which we found inspirational…

After about 20 minutes of edging I spouted semen onto his stomach, as he requested, and we both stood there for a minute with my liquid running down both our bodies in slow motion. I decided to stay with him and fight the animal reflex to rest and stop after orgasm.

I caressed his scrotum as he stroked himself and I played back and forth between his nipples with my mouth, occasionally licking down his stomach to tease his cock (both of us knowing full well I was never going to taste it, but it’s a delicious tease). I stayed with it, looking into his face and feeling his body tense as he arrived at his destination with a gasp, returning the favor of anointing me with his warm fluid on my stomach.

Again, we lingered for a couple of minutes, just savoring the abatement of the moment, still feeling warm and friendly, and without a trace of a desire to fly. No shame and no regret, just a powerful afterglow for a fleeting few minutes.

I showered, dressed and ran to catch my bus, where I wrote most of this and finished just now at home.

I enjoy virtually every event. I love the connection sex allows. I love the spent feeling afterward. I even love how it makes me hunger for my husband, as it always does. I’ll write about him sometime… For now, it’s time for bed and sleep. Next event is in eleven days.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 – The day before the Jacks event

Tomorrow night is an event night. Somewhere between 40 and 80 men will gather expectantly at the playspace at 7:00, to strip down and masturbate together for three hours. For me, that means I just finished a couple of hours of updating the club database with all the new and renewing members from the last event, the memberships that will be expired by tomorrow, sending out expiration notices, reminding the volunteers to show up on time, making sure we have adequate stocks of membership cards and enrollment forms, make a list of supplies that need replenishing, and as I do every day, replying to emails and phone calls asking about the impending event…

For myself, I observe a ritual of no sex the day before an event (as I also do before sex with my husband) and all the rest of my schedule, the gym, work, errands, meals, all are planned around the event tomorrow night. It’s showtime, folks!

As I finish up the paperwork, I get a call on the toll-free line. It’s a man I’ve spoken to before. He has an Asian accent, and speak falteringly, not because of the language, but because he is nervous, and a little desperate…

He’s not asking anything unreasonable. The schedule of our events conflicts directly with his work schedule and “other commitments.” I recall that he said he “wasn’t sure” if he might be gay or bi, and he is very, very clearly hurting to experience something he is very nervous to admit he wants so much it has become a need. He then says, “And… I’m married…”

His voice goes a little quiet and I can tell he is trying to conceal how much this means to him. He wants to know if we ever hold smaller events on different days. I mention that some members, on very rare occasions, hold private gatherings, but I was not aware of any. He very graciously and nervously asks if I myself ever host “private events” and I wonder if he has seen pictures of me in my online profiles, pictures which I do not conceal myself, and which I reference directly to the club… I am very out, after all.

At this point, I am feeling a lot of compassion for this guy. He’s either closeted gay or bi and on the brink of desperation to explore this, to experience intimacy with a man. I have heard this many times before, and I’m just not a cold guy. I really wish I could do something for these guys. It is so incredibly universal among the closeted, this intense hunger for what they deny themselves. It is something our heterosexual brothers just can’t get, how visceral and emotional and painful the denial of sexual expression can be.

For bi-curious men, who are primarily oriented toward sex with women, their interest in same-sex play is rarely a need. It’s an interesting option just a few shades above the indifference of the baseline heterosexual. They can’t appreciate how much the denial of this essential human need feels like deep torture of the soul.

And this is not about masturbation. Whether the guy in question is genuinely into the JO scene is doubtful and really irrelevant. In this instance, it is just an opportunity, a place for anonymous exploration with very minimal health risk. It is probably not going to be their scene, their kink, but it will serve to crack open the door to their next baby step toward becoming more true. I do not require my members to be hard-core, compulsive group baters. I like to leave the opening there for these other men, these same-sex tourists looking for much less and much more than the Jacks can provide.

I really like making friends with these men, specifically because I know that I model a pretty calm, centered and sexually self-possessed way of being gay. I don’t intend them to become like me, but I want them to see that it is possible to be good to others in the process of exploring what feeling good means to your body when it experiences the long-denied sensation of male contact. I have no investment in how any member identifies sexually, but I love seeing these men of all stripes adjust to the JO club culture.

And holy crap, this entry is incredibly non-erotic. I’m glad I’m getting it out of the way before assuming the mantle of JackDaddy another night. I really am looking forward to it, as I always do, my steamy, spermy, honorable brothers appreciate much about me and the feeling is mutual… just like the masturbation.

Monday, August 23, 2010

in 1989, I took a weekend trip to Boulder Colorado from my then home, Aspen, to take Level One of Shambhala training. I had read Chogyam Trungpa’s book, Shambhala, The Way of The Warrior during the first year of recovery after 14 years of remarkably consistant drug use. It was part of my “prayer and meditation” step (I think that’s the 11th step… it’s been a while since I went to any meetings).

Shambhala is a sort of secular Buddhism of the Tibetan variety, reworked for the Western Mind, so that we could integrate the practice into our incredibly backward ideas about spirituality (i.e., to infiltrate and undermine America’s religious puritanism—Actually, “spirituality” in the late Eighties was looking kind of exciting back in the late 20th Century). 

I had an interest in enlightenment, which in retrospect seems an amazingly horseshitty kind of pursuit…

Essentially, I wanted to learn to meditate some way other than the Zen practice I’d already learned. I don’t think I particularly liked the Zen teacher I learned it from… The secular component really appealed to me since I was having a hell of a time wrapping my freshly-recovering mind around the whole “Higher Power” idea without buying into anyone’s religion.

(Nowadays, I consider virtually everything to be “higher” in power than me or any other human… We just have higher egos, I’m thinking…)

Level One of the teaching involved a weekend of long sitting and walking meditation, group talks and brief, cryptic interviews. Although I may feign skepticism, the truth is, I learned a whole hell of a lot of things that really stuck, such as… 

Meditation wasn’t going to make my mind any quieter, but I was able to detach from all the internal noise a bit, and I definitely developed a sense of humor about my own thinking, which runs on and on relentlessly, as constant as Niagara Falls, and out of which comes a huge amount of good ideas and bad.

The ideas they offered to us in the evening talks included a few morsels of what I immediately recognized as just plain truth. They were all moments that I basically though, well, of course that’s true!

In other words, I pretty much bought it, hook, line and sinker. I still do…

I actually remember and retained virtually all of the teaching of Level One, partially helped by the fact that I took it again a decade later.

Two of the Big Truths I got, were that the authentic quality of the living, human heart, is “sadjoy,” both happy and heartbroken, and indescribably sweet. That singular recognition was like a massive flash of light that leaves an optical echo in your vision, but one that never fades. I imagine that very person I meet has that same quality underneath all their own chatter. I got that we all have this immediate potential of joy and sadness at the same time, and that in the absence of everything else, that’s what’s there: sadjoy. Heartbroken, sweet, happysadness. It gave me a sense of connection to everyone I still have….

…even if I am still occasionally full of shit…

The other piece was the concept of “basic goodness,” the authentic quality of all life, mine included. It is just basically, ambiently good to be alive. Life is delicious in itself. Good in the most basic sense. This was an awesome idea to accept into my personal philosophy. It really changed everything…

So. Sadjoy and basic goodness. After a few months of sitting practice, reading and taking more levels of the training, I don’t think was an iota more perfectly enlightened, and it’s not at all what I want anymore. I am too hooked on life to want to rise above it. It doesn’t feel like suffering to me… It feels like a fucking banquet. Well… not always. But more often than I think I ever hoped for.

What I want now is to be genuine. I want to be who and how I really am, and I know that involves tasting what life has offered me, and following my heart, although not recklessly… most of the time. I just want to be “true.” Coming out as gay when I was 17 was just one in a series of endless steps in that direction…

Here are a few things about me that I believe are true: First, everything I think is true about myself is subject to change without notice… Also, I’m mostly gay, and that feels right, even if my idea of what “gay” means has changed over time. I know that I have almost no shame about sex, that the early messages I received that my sexual impulse was okay stuck deeply with me. I know that I am in love with one person, and while I can’t exactly define what that means, I know it is true.

And I know that I still want to experience sexual intimacy, pleasure, connection, with many, many men. I’m willing to have faith in my own sense of trust in an individual and share a moment of raw physical pleasure, and it doesn’t subtract one iota from my love for my husband or anyone else. If anything, it increases…

My feeling about sex is bound up in my sense of life: Basically good. Sex is one way of experiencing the sweet pleasure of fleeting life, and the sadness of knowing I will ultimately have to say goodbye to it.

That is one of the foundations of my personal code of ethics, and I live it. I’m sort of an evangelist for basic goodness, except I’m not an evangelist, really. Am I?

Saturday, August 21, 2010

I started masturbating when I was nine years old. I also smoked my first marijuana when I was nine. It was something of a pivotal year for me…

The Winter before my ninth birthday, when I was eight, Olympia Fields, Illinois shared the Great Chicago Blizzard of 1967. I think of that as the last season of my childhood, since so many things changed for me after that brilliant season of digging tunnels and playing in the snow with my brother and sister. There was no traumatic event that cut my childhood off early, just a curious and precocious boy digging around his house, finding his sister’s weed and his mother’s sex manuals… It was just time for me to make some discoveries.

The pot was no big deal. I knew what it was and knew I wanted to try it. I took one of my mom’s Kent cigarettes, emptied half the tobacco out and packed in some of the green weed I’d uncovered in the baggie in the back of the closet of my big sister’s bathroom… I snuck out to the garage and smoked it, just like any clever child of two smoker parents… and I felt nothing. No high… No biggie… I figured it was overrated. I wouldn’t start getting high in earnest until I was 11.

The masturbating however, was a huge deal from the first moment I laid hands on myself. I’d found a copy of a book called “Love and Marriage” in the night stand on my mother’s side of my parents’ King bed. It was a black, hardbound volume without a dust jacket, and was stored next to “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Lenny Bruce. I pulled it out in those days I was home alone and lay there on my parent’s bed, reading. I only remember two chapters, “Sexual Intercourse” and “Autoeroticism.”

The Autoeroticism chapter actually didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time. I was far more fascinated with Sexual Intercourse, and the simple descriptions of what it was, how it was done, what goes where and how it’s supposed to feel, all written for newlyweds, I think, since it seems weird now to think that a married couple wouldn’t know all that stuff before they were committed to doing it, but at the time, I was too swept up in the reality of the mechanics, which were an utter mystery up until then.

Sometime later, it occurred to me that I wanted to know what that felt like. I wanted to know what “ecstatic pleasure” meant. It sounded really good, although it was little more than an interesting word to me then (and I’ve always loved words). It didn’t occur to me right away, but after a week or two, I reasoned that my penis might be really stupid, and that I might be able to fool it into thinking it was experiencing a vagina during intercourse. I thought, well, a vagina is supposed to be warm and wet and slippery, so I went to the bathroom and closed the door, locking it for the first of many, many such occasions, and made my hands warm, wet and slippery with hot water and soap. I then put both my hot, soapy hands together into a tunnel and inserted my stiffening penis.

I started to move my penis in and out of the warm, wet slippery tunnel, and became very, very focused on the strange new feelings emanating from my penis, absolutely fascinated at the sensation of tightening through my stiff shaft, like a thick knot of tension drawing slowly but steadily tighter and tighter, and then it seemed like a light flared inside my chest, as my penis suddenly swelled up and began spasming and oozing a few tiny drops of pearly fluid. This was definitely not pee, and definitely something new.

And it was a secret. And it was mine.

And I was back in that bathroom three more times that day and several times every day for weeks, just exploring this “simulated intercourse” I had so cleverly devised. I tried other lubricants like lotions and oils and powders. I tried creating friction through my underpants and virtually everything worked. There didn’t seem to be a wrong way to do it, and over that year and the next the volume of pearly fluid increased and the strength of its ejection from me became greater and greater.

I think I abandoned the idea of simulating intercourse pretty soon, and when a couple of years later, I bought a small copy of The Little Red School Book, something clicked in my head that fit perfectly with the development in my body. Inside that small volume I found very short, very simple descriptions of masturbation and orgasm, and very plainly stated that “it’s quite normal.” This very simple and, to me, obviously true statement, became bedrock for my own developing sense of self, my feelings about my body and my desire for sex. I read it over and over and over like a mantra…

From the beginning, I knew I needed to keep my masturbation private, to hide it from everyone else, but in my secret world of early post-childhood, I was also developing a fundamentally positive sense of masturbation and sex that would ultimately bring it out of the shadows. I think it’s that fundamental self-acceptance that set the stage for what I later described as my awakening to the “basic goodness” of the sexual impulse, and the abandonment of sexual shame…

(Which I’ll pick up on another time.)

Friday, August 20, 2010

I want to talk about bators. “Bators” are the self-described, proud masturbators in a currently thriving area of the kinkiverse. They are men who seek other men to masturbate “with” (either physically or virtually). Some of them can be found at jack-off clubs but you will find a lot more online, at places like bateworld.com (which became bator central some time after its predecessor, batenation.com, dissolved in a flurry of social web host incompetence). In bateworld you will find a lot of men, thousands of them, with handles like “Stroker” and “Tugger” and “B8Addict” and “Edger” and on and on… Guys who, like me and like most men, love to masturbate, but unlike most men, glorify the bate and elevate this most common of human sex acts to a genuine kink, a cultural phenomenon. Something to share with like-minded fellows and revel in like any kink.

Bators don’t just love to masturbate, many are somewhat obsessed with it. Many proudly proclaim themselves to be masturbation “addicts” or “compulsive” masturbators. They share stories, pics and videos of getting lost in “the bate,” or lost in “the goon” (gooning refers to the monkey-like, drooling, demented look a bator will have when he is completely absorbed by his penis and the sensations he is giving himself, a state which evokes the reptile brain, freedom from higher mental functions and a complete surrender to sexual sensation.)

There are phone lines where bators listen to each other while they jack off, some just listening on a speakerphone while their bolder brethren wank and moan and talk dirty, about penis, cock, stroking hairy boners, sometimes just repeating the word “penis” over and over again.

There is more than one kind of bator, just as there are many shades of vegetarian or protestant or European. As a man who leads a community of masturbators, I have encountered several discreet varieties within the world of bators, jackers and wankers.

I would say the most general divisions are between what I would call solosexuals, Jacks and dabblers. The first two are the only actual bators, but there are a lot of dabblers, so they merit mention here…

“Solosexuals” are interested in masturbation to the exclusion of physical contact with others. They may fantasize about others sexually, but in reality, they just want to masturbate. Period. Most solosexuals are not really interested in or well suited for sexual relationships with other people. They may not be introverted. They may, in fact, be really friendly and outgoing. They just don’t want to have sex with anyone but themselves. These guys can be found by the hundreds and thousands in online communities like bateworld. Solosexuals may be gay, bi or straight, but when it comes down to engaging in actual sex, it’s practically a moot point, since they are almost exclusively into their own penis, and less likely to pursue a lasting sexual relationship with others.

The big drawback to solosexuality is loneliness. While many solosexuals are perfectly happy to be single, many still want intimate contact with a partner or a family. They still love, they still need intimacy. They just are wired to find their most complete sexual satisfaction by their own hands. Many find compatible partners and many more just live in the closet, and hide their masturbation just as they did when they were kids. For many, the hiding itself becomes sexualized and part of what turns on the solosexual. Not surprisingly, solosexuality may work best for single men who don’t mind being that way, but they exist in all kinds of relationships. Nobody knows how many men are genuinely solosexual.

“Jacks” want to masturbate with others, primarily other men. Although there are plenty of straight guys who like jacking off with women, they seem to be a small minority in the greater Jacks phenomenon. Jacks are more often gay or bi, but may also be straight. Jacks are characterized by a desire for “social” sex with a fraternal, convivial energy. They want to jack off with other guys, and prefer mutual, group or social masturbation to solitary masturbation.

The big difference between solosexuals and Jacks is the primary connection being sought by each. Every masturbator is seeking a connection with himself. Solosexuals will generally prefer and return to solitary masturbation by preference. Jacks want to connect with others as well as themselves. Because of the intensity and primal quality of shared masturbation, it also serves as a mirror to our selves, as well as an opportunity to be sexually connected without an assumption of romantic possibility down the road… Jacks sometimes refer to their preferred activities as “recreation, not romance.”

And then there are the dabblers, the tourists, the curious… These may be bi-curious guys who are just dipping their toes into the realm of same-sex experience, or gay men surreptitiously seeking a way into a more “penetrative” contact than just masturbation, or coupled men seeking a safe way to play outside their primary relationships… There are the men who perceive the “kink” of Jacks clubs and are just checking out if it is for them, since they like to masturbate already… The dabblers are a lot less likely to show up in the solosexual realms, because they’re not likely to be solosexual, and solosexuality by design excludes contact with others. Among the Jacks, however, you find a wider range of interest in JO as a primary kink, and a lot more experimentation. Guys are more likely to show up at JO clubs once or twice, and then lose interest and move on, or show up once every few months.

Real “Jacks” will return to a JO club again and again, and will feel comfortable around the diverse men sharing masturbation in pairs and groups. They may have exclusive relationships, but they often return to JO clubs when circumstances allow, because it just fits for them. Solosexuals just need the time and place to masturbate, and whether they are using a phone line, web chatting, watching videos, using a web cam or just fantasizing, they are the only human being touching their penis (they’re also the only people having genuinely safe sex). 

All of these guys experience varying degrees of self-acceptance, just like anyone. We all negotiate our brief lives with varying levels of joy, fear, contentment and boredom… Whatever a person is most naturally drawn to for sexual pleasure and satisfaction, so long as it is consensual and does no harm, embracing it and accepting it is part of being a whole person.