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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.

I log in to tumblr and go to my blog. In the top right corner, I click “Customize” and on the customize page, I look under the “Appearance” menu and scroll down to select “Show Twitter Headline” and “Show Twitter Sidebar.” It may not be an available option in all themes.

I’m having a hell of a time getting the real story of how the New York Jacks formed—their origin story; their Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider moment—and I will need that piece of modern mythology for my book.

I will get that story, or whatever version exists in the folk memory of the NY Jacks. In the meantime, in case anybody ever wants to know, here is a very truncated version of Rain City Jacks’ origin story…

I’ve fantasized about beating off with other males ever since I can remember learning that masturbation existed. In the 1970s, I read articles in Honcho and Mandate magazines about “JO clubs” where large numbers of men would convene to masturbate themselves and each other. Learning about their existence galvanized my imagination from that point on. I wanted this badly.

From college through my twenties, I continued only to fantasize about mutual JO and instead pursued the more mainstream gay sex repertoire of sucking, fucking and anonymous encounters in dangerous places. These behaviors were the cultural norm for many sexually active gay men like me.

Within days of moving to Chicago in 1990, I had found my first Jack Off club, Chicago Jacks, via a personal ad in the Weekly Reader. After jumping through a few convoluted hoops I found myself walking through a dark street in the just blooming Wicker Park neighborhood toward the home of Chicago Jacks. 

My experience there is documented elsewhere but the crucial elements are that I realized my fantasy for the first time and loved it, and the details of that club were etched sharply in my memory. The paper towels, lockers, little cups of lube, the flow of people from playmate to playmate, the newcomer on his knees being chastised by other members for violating the rules… All these aspects etched in my mind. On subsequent visits I began to recognize familiar faces and make friends. I loved that club.

And less than a year later, I met the man who would become my partner. We agreed with mutual enthusiasm to be sexually exclusive, mimicking the “monogamous” model and that was how it went for over nine years.

Shortly before our tenth anniversary, we decided to open our relationship (yes there was a lot more to it than simply making a decision, but I’ll save that for another time). So here I was, now in my early 40s and suddenly free to explore, but not interested in any new romantic relationships. I did not and do not need a replacement for my husband, so dating is out.

Likewise, I had no interest in risking my life or my husbands and part of our agreement was to always play safe and specifically save fucking for each other (all open relationships have their own rules).

So naturally, I found myself looking for a jack off club, precisely the kind of intense sexual play I was looking for, without romantic entanglements and virtually free of risk for STD. It also helped that it was my long-time personal kink, one that I had eschewed a decade before.

But here I was in Seattle, Washington, far from any JO club. 

Then one night, while cruising for JO buddies on the net, I encountered a Yahoo group, seattlejackers. I signed up in seconds and began contacting their leader to find out all I could about the group, if they actually did meet or just cammed and chatted and wished they could get up the nerve to do what they fantasized about…

Seattle Jackers was real. Their leader, “Max” (pseudonym) would get a hotel room and invite guys from the Yahoo up to masturbate together. It seemed perfect to me, although I didn’t much like the sneaking around required to convene in a hotel room, and something more disturbing showed up during my second gathering of the Jackers: oral sex…

Second time for this question (because the first time was so surprising)…

Without looking it up, in your own words, define and/or describe the meaning of the word “masturbation” to you. Please put your comment in the comments section below. Check back frequently for your fellow men’s thoughts.

• HINT: Write your response in a simple text editor or in Word, not on this web page, then copy it, come back here and paste in your comment.

Thanks in advance for your contribution! I can’t wait to see your feedback.

I’ve been chatting with masturbators. Yes, I’ve also been masturbating with masturbators but that’s nothing new. I’ve been having good, focused conversations with men who go to jack-off clubs about jacking off with other men. There are important differences.

Talking and having sex with someone are very different experiences. I can hear a collective “Duh!” arising from across the blogosphere… I have been sharing masturbation with other men for many years but this sharing about masturbation is so different. For one, I’ve begun to see patterns in aspects of our lives, and I also experience the return of unrequited sexual tension, since our penises remain securely in our pants while we speak very frankly about what we do with them.

And I have never experienced a jacker interview become a JO session. If I were falsely modest I might assume this is because they got to know me too well to be turned on, but I think familiarity is only a moderate anaphrodesiac in short time spans. There is a level at which we just want to talk and not release tension. I have long suspected that we share a deep drive to feel desire, not the cessation of that desire. Orgasms are great but it’s the build-up that is the real goal… A significant conversation is like that, but without any disappointment for not having consummated the experience. 

What I come away with is a sense that these conversations are important and rare. The mere act of talking frankly about something we almost never talk about at all just integrates the experience in multiple levels of consciousness. I want to do a lot more of these interviews. I also want to do follow-up interviews to learn what the effect of the interview itself may have been.

I’m getting to know jackers in a new way, and I think this is expanding my understanding of myself, not only as a jacker myself but as an individual. The patterns I notice in my interviews are similarities I see in myself. Even so, I think I’ll do quite a few more before I start publishing any specific observations. It would be dumb to poison the waters.

So. Anybody reading this want to sit down with me and talk about what it’s like to masturbate with other men? I think I have an opening in my calendar…

Thanks for the suggestions! We do not actively encourage members to connect socially outside of events. For many, anonymity is a major issue but that’s not true for everyone. 

I know that some of the members do connect socially after having met at the club, either after events or on their own time. I don’t see any reason to not help social connections happen. Everyone has the option individually to choose anonymity.

Another thing we tried in the past was sponsoring “afterglow” events where we would designate a local pub as a gathering place to relax and socialize after events. That had limited success, but I don’t think we need it to be hugely attended. It’s perfectly good whether only two guys show up or twenty do.

I think it’s often a surprise for the members just how social an experience a JO club is, since they go into it thinking only of the sex. In my experience, it’s the social element itself that makes JO clubs unique.

I guess I’m thinking of two specific extra-masturbatory kinds of interaction… The first would be informal, convivial activities, like the afterglow or maybe a Summer barbecue or other social gathering. The second would be less informal and light—I’m thinking discussion groups at Gay City or the “pre-meat” coffeeshop gatherings before events. Those would be more to actually converse honestly about the club itself.

Both kinds of activities would add to the experience of the club and, I think, strengthen the group as a community.