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By far, the one question I get more than any other is some variation of, “Is there a JO club in ____?” Clearly, there are a hell of a lot of guys who just want what JO clubs have to offer and when they find out about us their one response is, “Hell yes! Where do I sign up?”

There is no current list of all active JO clubs being maintained. The one listing I go to when asked that question is the NY Jacks web site, specifically their page of Links. I just checked it and sure enough, there is a listing for “PS Jacks.” Unfortunately, as of this writing, that link goes to an “account suspended.” page, so it looks like the PS Jacks have faded. If anyone reading this has information about JO clubs in Palm Springs, please post that here in the comments section.

What I do know is that Billy Jack, the man behind the classic porn persona of Chad James, has been presenting Healthy Friction, a series of serious JO-centric weekend retreats since 1989 and many of them take place in Palm Springs. The events are intense, deep-bate experiences with men who are very, very into “the bate” as a personal, social and even spiritual practice. This is, in some ways, a step beyond JO clubs.

I see that they are currently planning Wank Fest 2013 at the Triangle Inn for the weekend of April 25 through 28, 2013. I suggest you contact them by visiting and joining their Yahoo group. Tell them JackDaddy Paul from Rain City Jacks sent you. Billy Jack is a luminary of bater culture.

Again, please add your comments to this question if you have any info about and buddy JO and/or group JO being organized in Palm Springs.

Yep! Class of 1979, U of I in Champaign-Urbana. I guess that makes me an “Illini” or Illinus or Illinum… My degree was pretty much worthless, so I don’t bestow much credence on that fact, but yes. I’m from there. I have an applied fine arts degree in music (vocal performance).

I also attended two years at NIU in DeKalb.

I got my most relevant experience those years (at least, as far as this blog is concerned) as bartender at “The Bar” on Chester Street.

I feel as if I’ve just woken up from a long hibernation. I’m not sure what sparked it, but I’m hornier now than I’ve felt in a very long time. I’ve been healthy, I’ve been masturbating regularly, I’ve been playing with others as much as ever, I’ve been sleeping well… so maybe it’s just the slightly longer days starting to roll in with winter rolling on, but I welcome it, whatever the reason. It feels great to not only have sex, but to feel driven by it and toward it.

I’m 54 now. I know I don’t have the chemistry I had in my twenties and thirties. I also know that I’ve got a hell of a lot of sex going on for the “average” man my age, and I have no intention of slowing down, but sometimes, we don’t get a choice, whatever our intentions. Life isn’t forever.

But… I came three times yesterday. Very unusual for me these days. The first orgasm came while cruising a phone line and looking at amateur porn. During that session I found a guy who I would meet later in the day and spent my second load with him, just after he spent his on my chest. The third erupted around midnight, when I decided to try on a new silicone “nuttsling” I’d just bought which very much worked some hard-cumming magic on my cock and balls.

And today, I’m horny all over again. I was seasoning a warm cast iron skillet with some bacon grease this morning and almost without thinking, found my hand rubbing the warm grease into my cock, thinking about how I would personally love to suck a dick slick with bacon grease (I am no vegetarian, folks). After a few minutes and full erection, I wiped down and decided to spend my energy on this note.

I have no shame about sex. I absolutely love it and can see clearly that it belongs in our lives in all kinds of ways. I have my opinions about some kinds of sex, but I mainly just love it and feel gratitude for it’s active presence in my life in myriad ways. Often, I want to think about it, look at it, write about it, talk about it… but mostly, I want to be in it. I look forward to sharing my experience with you more as the days grow longer. I hope you will share yours with me along the way.

To all my followers and anyone curious about where the hell I’ve been, I just want to check in to let you know I am just over here, in the weeds. I’m taking a deliberate hiatus while the whirlwind of projects blows through. Look for me to emerge at the end of May.

In the meantime, I will respond to any serious question or comment posted in the blig, so if you want to hear from me before the end of the month, try nudging me with some query. All you have to do is click the “Ask me anything” link at the top of the page, or post some salient commentary in any of my existing entries.

Otherwise, sit tight, my friends, and I will be back before you know it.

Cheers,
Paul

It’s not really a secret, but there’s a certain tactic I employ at Jacks events that I learned while waiting tables for 20 years. It’s the “safe touch” tactic.

It works like this. When a good waiter is experiencing a warm exchange with a table, when he likes the people and can tell they like him (or her), they will—very briefly, very sparingly—touch the customer.

It’s a somewhat risky move, since there are many establishments with explicit codes of formality, but it does something magical to the customer. It is like a hot injection of human warmth through a simple application of a friendly hand on the shoulder in passing. You may have experienced this yourself and not noticed its effect, Indeed, it is intended to have a profound effect while not drawing attention to itself.

What is happening is this: whether the server’s motivations are sincere or ulterior (and it’s often a mix of both), he is giving a sip of cool water to a person who has just crawled in from the desert. He is satisfying a thirst so primal, but so long endured as to have been forgotten.

Here’s what I do: When I enter the playspace for Jacks events, I make a point of connecting above the waist, making eye contact, smiling warmly, and touching men on the shoulder in greeting. I give them the touch they crave; simple, human touch. What I am doing is helping them to be present, welcoming them as complete people, not just penises and desires for penis. I am making an overtly friendly gesture, establishing friendly touch as a cultural norm in the club.

I have the power to do this effectively, because everyone knows I am the leader of the club. Regardless of my objective value as a leader, I understand that we are animals that form tribal groups, and that all groups reflect the leaders in a multitude of ways. This is true of all human groups. Every business, club, sports team, political party… all reflect the leader. I know that, and I try to constructively build an honorable community by treating every individual with honor.

I consciously affirm each person I encounter with my attention, my generosity, my willingness to assert reasonable boundaries with kindness and compassion, my willingness to open myself up and share freely in a safe space. I do this especially with new members and, I hope, that expression of human values is reflected among the rest of the club membership to the point that it becomes a self-sustaining culture. A community.

I think that’s a better context for friendly sexual play than one that focuses on power, domination, submission, intoxication, desperation, fantasy, delusion and illusion. I see those destructive aspects of gay sexual culture as products of our persistent, internalized shame about our sexual natures, not only as men attracted to men but as the long-suppressed, horny primates we all are in our overly-civilized world.

We all need to be touched, especially when we are infants, but we never completely lose the need for simple physical contact. We’ve been communicating through touch far longer than we have through speech. Before we enter the circle of men and our focus turns powerfully to our central organs of pleasure, I see it useful to conjure the complete man through friendly touch, to bring forth the whole person by simply smiling, looking in the eyes and reassuring that they are viewed as okay, worthy of connection with their fellows, through the most fundamental connection: a friendly touch.

[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.)