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Sunday, September 19, 2010

I haven’t been able to quickly find the survey I read a few years ago, but I’m going to cite it now and come back and amend this entry with a link later…

A large, popular sex survey was done by some Canadian magazine a few years ago, and it had a lot of interesting results (because hello… it was a sex survey…) but there was one statistic that leapt from the screen and branded itself in my mind.

In response to the question, “Would you like more intensity in your sexual experiences?” Thousands of respondents seized their pens and gave one common response in thundering unison: Yes!!!

100% of respondents to this survey said “Yes, I would like more intensity in my sexual experiences, thank you very much.” My thoughts spun around that universal agreement and has continued to do so ever since… It was a very straightforward question. It didn’t ask, “Are you dissatisfied?” It just asked if you would like more intensity.

Twenty years ago, I sat in a 12-step meeting listening to a bunch of drunks and drug addicts sharing about their recovery and one guy said something that similarly made a lasting impression: “I’m not addicted to ’drugs,’ What I’m really addicted to is ’more!’”

The two ideas seem related to me. Okay, the two ideas are obviously related, although one references sexual experience in general and one references a behavioral disorder. What I know is, these statements are true for me in both contexts. I would also like more intensity in my sex and I am addicted, for want of a better word, to “more” in all areas of my life. I want more food, more money, more love, more clothes, more muscles, more sex, more semen when I cum, more men shooting their loads all over my body…

Forgive my related tangent… There’s a lot to chew on in the assertion that all people want more intensity from sex, so I will just chew on this one little morsel over here: Safe sex is, reputedly, less intense than unsafe sex, and is therefore counter to our natures (unless it includes some measure of increasing excitement, in spite of the apparent nature of safer sex, and safety in general, being the quality of “boring”).

“Safe” is sometimes used interchangeably with “boring.” What we experience as excitement is actually our reaction to a symphony of chemical reactions in our bodies that include adrenaline and insulin and cortisol and testosterone and a mad soup of hormones and enzymes and… stuff… that makes us react to life. It seems the top cause of excitement is threat, a sudden perception of danger that puts us into response mode.

So there is something inherently more exciting in the moment a bare cock slides into your ass than in the experience of a becondomed cock making its benign entry…

Dog bites man: Danger is thrilling. Lack of danger doesn’t make those same chemicals pump into our veins and so “safe” sex has less appeal because… we all want MORE INTENSITY.

Oh sure, we can settle for safer sex, for a primary focus on the elimination of threat and taboo, but if we’re going to continue to experience the fleeting satisfaction of sexual excitement, we have to find ways of not being TOO safe… of taking responsible sexuality to a more exciting level without genuinely endangering ourselves…

I think this is actually part of why jack off clubs can work well for some people, the key element of newness, the natural “not 100% safe” feeling we get with a stranger’s cock in our hands allows us a modicum of thrill… There’s also the disorientation—for the newbie, anyway—of group sex, but even community sex, social sex practice when one is accustomed to seeing sex as an exclusively very private act…

We are, thankfully, not wired to be excited only by danger. Evolution has provided us with a long menu of options for feeling excitement… Like shaking up a routine, changing roles, changing scenes, changing partners… As the manager of a JO club, I consider these drives in the context of running a successful non-profit business, sustaining a community…

I think there’s a lot I understand about men and the way they relate to each other as friends, lovers and casual sexmates, and so I do not take it personally when relatively few men are consistent members of the club, but come and go, sometimes disappearing for weeks, months or years only to reappear later, fatter or thinner or stronger or weaker or very much the same… but just ready to experience some excitement from the experience again. Many can do that with a JO club.

This is why the Jacks has, by design, a loose architecture of rules, that allow some latitude and encourage exploration within some boundaries. This is why most clubs deemphasize the “safe” aspect of the sex and instead focus on the kink part, the thing that’s fun for us rather than the no-fun things we are being safe from…

I’d be interested in comments related to bringing more intensity to shared masturbation. God knows, a lot of men continue to find ways of adding intensity to solosex… What do you think?

Thursday, September 16, 2010

You may disagree with me, but I feel strongly that masturbation is sex.

It seems ludicrous to me that anyone would think otherwise, but I know we like to parse words and find ways of telling our stories so that we can continue to do what we want to do.

When a man fucks a woman without a condom, it is sex. There’s little argument there, but there are some who think it is not sex as soon as you put on a condom. You can see where this kind of thinking leads…

Well, if you can’t, it leads to disease pregnancy and Catholics. Three things the world could definitely benefit from less of. 

The problem is, it’s massively dishonest. I suspect we make such distinctions because of our primordial drive to procreate, and the natural inclination to not let anything get in the way, but a lot of it is to justify any kind of sex that’s not conventional. You know, the fun stuff.

Guys on the DL justify gay sex by telling themselves that it’s not “sex.” As I’ve said before, this is like the Christian sorority girls who swallow cum and take it up the ass but justify it because they’re still “virgins” when it comes to “real sex.”

The denial is what makes us sick, and makes our sex sick. When we’re open to sexual possibility and honest with ourselves and our loved ones, we actually get the sex we desire and those cravings don’t come out in malignant ways (like abusing thousands of children all over the world…)

A.C. Grayling said, “Imprisoning sexual feelings is an invariable recipe for potentiating them.” In other words, suppressing our sexual needs doesn’t make them go away… it makes them stronger.

Now, I saw a Canadian sex survey a few years ago that had one question that received a 100% affirmative response. The question was, essentially, “Would you like more intensity in your sex life?” I think this is part of why we find taboo so erotic, the idea that being bad or naughty is more fun than sanctioned, vanilla sex. I would as,“Do we have any idea what sex feels like really free from any trace of taboo?”

I think that the individual sex acts we participate in, from bareback fucking to conceive to cocksucking, pussy licking, every conceivable kink and every individual alone, making love with their own cock or clit, is all sex, all equally valid, all part of being sexual animals.

The intimacy I experience jacking off with a man while surrounded by dozens of other men, is just as intimate as any sex I have, as long as my mind and heart are there in the act, and I’m not distracted by the pointless babble of the inner critic, the inner moralist. It’s all about what I bring to the moment that makes it intimate, but it’s all sex. Sex is a general term and I don’t like to over-parse it.

I don’t have to argue about a muffin being food in comparison to a hamburger or an apple or a dish of peas… They are all food.

The sooner we accept that the sex we have is sex, the sooner we can take ownership of our pleasure and start experiencing genuine sexual health. Even if it’s a very basic step in that direction. So let’s start there: That quick wank you had in the shower this morning? That was sex. That blow job you accepted from a gay guy? That was sex. You had sex with him, even if you did not reciprocate. Wake up and stop parsing the word. You’re having sex. Enjoy it!

The last course of this blog binge is below. I hope you’re as relieved as I am… You can read part 1 here and part 2 is here.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

In 1990, I moved to Chicago at age 32. I was still a total slut but I had shortened my playlist by then and stepped away from bottoming completely. On the rare times that I did fuck, I was always a top, which I definitely felt more at home doing, but in general, I didn’t focus at all on anal sex.

And then, within days of arriving, I was scanning the personal ads in the Windy City Times, a typical crappy gay newspaper, and I saw the ad for Chicago Jacks. My response was instantaneous: All I wanted to do was find them and sign up. There was no doubt that I wanted this, I only wanted to get in there and experience it myself…

The sign-up process was ridiculously convoluted. I had to make a photocopy of my driver’s license and mail it with a check for $25 to a PO box, all of which could have been a scam but I was a man obsessed. I don’t think I knew how much I’d been craving this scene until the possibility was in front of me. I though of little else. I even think I remember the moment I dropped my envelope in the blue mailbox and began counting the days until I heard something back from them. I knew there was a risk that they were just going to take my money and blow me off. That would be easy enough to do… But I was hopeful and waited.

The envelope had a mimeographed calendar of upcoming events, an address and an information sheet about the club. I mainly remember the calendar, how they had a few events every month in a re-purposed VA hall in Wicker Park owned by the Hellfire Club, a long-lived leather community in Chicago. I saw the schedule had an event for wearing Speedos, and another for underwear… My mind spun.

I will recount the tale of my first Experience at Chicago Jacks another time, but almost instantly, Chicago Jacks became my primary sexual outlet. Yes, I still cruised phone sex lines (this was before computers took over my social life) and the beach and the streets and I very certainly masturbated enthusiastcally on my own, but I was replaying my electric moments at the Jacks, remembering the feeling of multiple loads dripping down both of my legs, the feeling of a man’s impossibly firm butt as he straddled my thigh as he stroked, remembering standing and stroking cock-to-cock with a very relaxed man with a very alert penis, and moment after moment…. I loved that club.

And less than a year after finding and embracing the Jacks, I met a man while working on a play I was understudying for. He was wickedly smart, strange, very funny, talented and sober… We had a lot in common. Three months after meeting him, I told him I loved him and that same night said that I thought I might actually want to be monogamous. I meant it.

I wasn’t trying to drive anything away, and I didn’t feel guilty for anything I had been doing. I just had fallen in love. I don’t think I’d really done that before as an adult, but then again, I’d only been drug-free for two years so adult-hood was actually kind of new to me…

And so ended my time with the Jacks and so began a relationship that is about to enter its 19th year. Much later, I would find out that Chicago Jacks folded a year after I stopped going there. I felt sad.

I don’t know when I started to understand that there was a special fascination for me about the jack-off club experience, but it was definitely there long before I experienced it in the physical world. It has held a fond place in my heart ever since I saw that ad in the Reader and I think that I will always want to support it, even after I’ve lost the ability to participate myself. I know this is my kink, something most men don’t focus on, and I’m completely at peace with this. Many kinds of sex turn me on and satisfy me, and there is only one person in the world I really need to make love with, but I’m grateful that I can do this too.

As Pee-Wee Herman says, I’m the luckiest boy in the world!

Wow. You go right for the meat, don’t you?

I had to think about this. “Importance” isn’t an easy thing to measure since it’s relative to so many factors…

I think the most important thing I’ve gotten out of my involvement and participation in JO clubs is a strong sense of sexual self-possession.

What I don’t mean by that is narcissistic self-absorption, and I don’t mean that I’m more objectively centered on my penis. I mean that I have developed a strong sense that my body, my cock, my sexual response, my whole life is completely my own. I am fully responsible for my cock and fully in charge of what happens to it and who interacts with it. I am also fully freed of responsibility for the pleasure of others. In other words, if I’m attempting to give pleasure to a sex partner, and they’re not having it, it’s not my fault or responsibility. There’s no need to take it personally. Either our energy just doesn’t match up at that moment or we have no natural, mutual chemistry. It’s nobody’s fault.

Mutual pleasure is then a mutual gift, a generosity of intimate being and something that should always be viewed as a generous gift, not a duty or routine. This is why, in new member orientation, we put a strong emphasis on the ownership of each cock being solely vested in the man it is attached to. A man owns his own penis and is in charge of it. Fully accepting and embracing that concept is, I believe, an essential part of true manhood.

It does not mean being selfish, but it means not surrendering responsibility for your actions to anyone else. It is true maturity, and it is a kind of true honor.

All my opinion, of course… my personal philosophy and ethical code.

But I do suspect that it is not just me, but part of a common experience available to all healthy men. When we discover masturbation as boys, and partly as an outcome of keeping it to ourselves for a time, keeping it private, I believe there is common potential for an experience of original self-possession with respect to our penises and by exploring them, our real sexuality. There’s a sense that “This is mine” and, “This is magical.” At least until it becomes more or less routine as we get older.

Our culture teaches codependency in myriad ways in almost every corner of our lives. Codependency and addiction in general embody a breakdown in the appropriate placement of responsibility—in placing our own responsibilities in others and taking on those that do not belong to us—and the recovery of a sense of real responsibility is an essential element of recovering a healthy life.

This is something I got deeply in the course of participating in JO clubs. From my communications with other long-time Jacks and organizers of clubs, including original New York Jacks lore, this sense of all of us being in charge of our bodies is common in the culture. I think it’s something that not all, but many men who are drawn to JO clubs can and do experience, and reflecting on this question, I believe it is not only something I personally have experienced, but the single most important thing I’ve gotten out of it.

Read part 1 here.

Monday, September 13, 2010

When I was 14, I toured with a swing choir to some central Illinois town to perform with some other youth chorale, and we were farmed out for housing. I shared a bed with some kid who kept going on and on about Mel Grant, one of the girls in our group. He was a little obsessed. After a while he pulled out his meager porn collection, pointing to one image and talking about how much she reminded him of that girl. “Oh, that Mel Grant. I just can’t stop thinkin’ about that Mel Grant. I bet her titties look that good…” After a little while smiling and enduring his single-track mind, and pretending to be interested in the pretty titties, he announced that he was “taking a sleeping pill” to help him sleep, and that he’d be hard to wake up… 

Uh huh…

I lay in bed wide awake until I heard what sounded like sleep sounds. I hesitated about 15 minutes, just contemplating what I wanted to do… and then I reached over and oh-so-gingerly felt his penis inside his white underwear. Sleeping pill or no, he had a definite boner. 

As gently as I could, I just felt it in my hand and within seconds, was pulsing warm semen into my own underwear. I got up, cleaned up as well as I could and came back with the front of my briefs quite damp. He was still “asleep” and soon so was I.

I replayed that moment too during my quality alone time, and I think I may have thought about us masturbating together, but I just don’t recall. 

Over the next three years I started having sex, first with my girlfriend, who I fucked and tongued, and then with Ray, my first man-crush. He was 19 and I was 15 so yeah… he was breaking the law, but I knew nothing about that. I only knew that I wanted to touch him and suck him and I did… a few times, anyway. I was a crappy cocksucker back in those days. He was also quite well-endowed, I understood later. 

And as my last year of high school wound on, I had a couple of “three-ways” with me and another guy basically tag-fucking my girlfriend while not actually playing with each other, and I think I had one blow job in a department store men’s room before I graduated, but it wasn’t until I left home and went to college that I came out and started just exploring everything.

I also explored a lot of drugs—a lot of drugs—during the next few years (ergo, the dodgy memory) but I think it was sometime during that mid-seventies era that I read about New York Jacks. I don’t remember where I saw it… Something about that thought, and the parade of images it invoked in my cock-obsessed mind, riveted my attention like that lean guy with the tan lines at the Aqua Center. Something about the concept of a jack-off club was immensely compelling to me, but as a young man now exploring all that being gay had to offer, from bath houses and bars to disco, acid and orgies, I was supposed to want to fuck butt and suck cock and trick out, not merely jack off with other guys…

I have a lot of patience for young people. It takes time to work out what you really want and what you really don’t. 

It is a minor miracle that I emerged from the seventies without having caught a single STI (we called them venereal diseases back then) and I most definitely did not use a condom once in all that time. Why would I? I topped and bottomed and gave and took and fisted… although I never took more than three fingers in my ass… and abused my body enough to get some pretty nasty hemorrhoids…

But the Jacks seemed very far away. They may as well have been in Atlantis. I was probably never going to get there but the idea was planted firmly in my mind and it was not going away anytime soon…

(to be concluded…)

At the club, we provide the iconic lube of the jacker, Albolene. It’s an oil-based, long-lasting lube for masturbation, or for barebacking your fluid-bonded, monogamous partner.

When I bate at home, I use Stroke 29 or Gun Oil, or no lube at all depending on my mood. Stroke 29 is probably my favorite. You can just wipe it off without washing with soap and water and it leaves your skin feeling clean and great. And it feels amazing.

Once at a Jacks event, three other guys and I were chatting about lube near the refreshments counter. I mentioned Stroke 29 and said I had a jar in my backpack. I invited them to try it and ran to retrieve it. When I returned, the four of us all slathered it on and stood in a tight circle, all counting our strokes to see how the consistency changed from the first, stiff-Crisco like moments. As we got into the late 20s, I heard one guy say, oh… yeah! I see what you mean! and we kept going and in about 10 minutes, every one of us came. Then we all burst out laughing… 

This entry got a little out of control and ended up being way too long for one installment, so I’m going to break it up and give it to you piecemeal. Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode!

Sunday, September 12, 2010

I don’t remember when I started fantasizing about jacking off with other guys. My memory in general is kind of tenuous. I wish it weren’t so but I’m not going to fret over it. I have only impressions and vague images come up when I try to trace the roots of my co-masturbatory predilections. Let’s see what’s there…

I have a strong recollection of being at the Aqua Center in Park Forest, Illinois, a community swim center with a big, open, men’s dressing area. I think that was my first multi-generational locker room and I must have been 10 or 11 at that point. It was essentially a big concrete room with rows of benches secured to the floor, and tiny foot lockers we’d lock wire baskets into. Just rows and rows of men and boys getting into and out of swim suits. On one side was an open shower area. It was all very… open. 

I’d already been masturbating for a couple of years by then (I hit puberty abruptly when I was 9. My mom took me to the pediatrician because she was afraid I was going to be a giant. “No,” the doctor told her, “He’s just an early bloomer.” I prefer the term, “precocious.”)

I remember being overly awed by one lean, hairy guy with a dark tan and a pale butt, which was fascinating to me since I’d never seen tan lines like that, or a naked butt on an older male. I had that riveted experience of total focus. That may have been my first strong attraction to a fully naked male…

I remember seeing my big brother walking around in his underwear when we shared bunk beds. I don’t think he was doing anything other than walking in my direction, but that fleeting image replayed in my mind many times later. 

And I remember very clearly watching another kid playing with himself in social studies class in 7th or 8th grade. His fly was open and the outline of his hard cock was visible inside his underwear as I saw him just running the side of his thumb up and down the frenulum as he sat back in his desk. It was an amazingly hot, searing moment I may never forget.

So… all hot, interesting images for a pubescent gay boy, all fuel for many repeated sessions of fantasy, but none were really about co-masturbation.

When I was 13, I indulged a foray into a Pentacostal-style Christian cult (I was a Jesus Freak for a little less than a year) and I recall one particular sleep-over at a fellow fundie-boy’s house when we somehow got to talking about beating off, and trying not to. He was far more freaked out than I was, and I was “sort of” trying not to masturbate, but I specifically remember him talking about how he couldn’t lie on his stomach in bed because it made him want to beat off, which made me really want to see him do it. As we talked about it, he got more agitated and started to “see demons” in the room. I wanted so badly to see him masturbate right there. I don’t remember if I eluded, however obliquely, to such a possibility, but sadly, it did not happen. He was too busy freaking out about the demons, praying wildly and invoking the blood of Jesus to drive away the demons… Fun times…

Ah, good old demon of masturbation… He’s what ultimately saved me from Christianity and another reason to be a high school pariah. Essentially, if I could not be a Christian and also keep masturbating… well… fuck being a Christian! Bye-bye, Jesus. Hello, penis!

(to be continued…)

Saturday, September 11, 2010

NOTE: This is a repost of yesterday’s entry. I learned that entering text in the tumblr iPhone app results in the wrong format… I also wanted to fix, edit, add links, etc…

I just wrapped up my third annual teaching session at Gay City University. “JACKS: Exploring the JO Club Phenomenon” is my class on JO clubs and what they are, kind of the thought behind the wankery. I just love these sessions and today was my favorite to date.

I changed things up a bit. For the previous two years’ classes, I basically went through the new member process and held forth about the history of JO clubs and our club in particular.

This year I jettisoned the holding forth (mostly) and went with a questions-based program. A friend shot me a long list of questions he essentially streamed from his consciousness and they were almost uniformly perfect… I added a pile of common questions I get all the time from prospectives and printed them all out with room to write in their own questions. 

I then started the session with only the briefest of introductions and launched into going from one person to the next and commanding them to “ask me anything.” All of the questions were great and led to new questions and answers, and every person in the small class was engaged. It was so much fucking fun…

I had a few members of the club there who were forthright about their membership and shared from personal experience, and there were new faces too. I particularly appreciated one man who shared about being in Catholic seminary, around men who had abstained from all masturbation and what their character was like, how mean they became, at least the ones he believed to actually be abstinent… 

There was good discussion of whether masturbation is “sex” even when solo. I got the usual fudging of that issue, and I talked abbot what happens in the body during sex, how the same chemicals fire off in the brain and body during masturbation as do during intercourse, so the body is having sex even if the head is calling it “just jacking off." 

I went to do more of this. Lots more. I’d like to really develop as a teacher. I’m going to try teaching a software course next month, and I want to keep developing Jacks classes, and finding places to present. 

I feel turned on from the top down about this. I love anything that turns on lights in my head and teaching definitely does the trick. 

Now I really want to develop this… I think I should go chat with Allena, director of CSPC, and see how I might present classes through them, which would be awesome because I would be presenting to a much more savvy audience, with a lot more awareness than the average JO-curious guy. It would certainly up my game, and spread awareness of the club… Hmmm…

Friday, September 10, 2010

I’m not the only person who inhabits multiple realms. The design of our institutions encourages us to divide ourselves into different personas that are appropriate to the moment and the place and company. I have a hard time discussing my jack-off club with anyone at my corporate workplace, and I resist the desire to do so because, well, duh… I want to keep my job and not offend the wrong persons.

One of the most heinous labels one can get in formal environments is the dreaded, “inappropriate.”

Okay… massive time-shift…

Stepping back a few decades… I remember being attracted to males from a very early age and, like many gay kids, perceived that this was inappropriate. I therefore took the common tack of suppressing this innate desire and deny it to myself. I started to put on a fake self to protect myself from the displeasure of others who might find my inner reality wrong.

And so was reinforced another lesson in being fake, which so many of us learn from the beginning. It’s not unique to American culture either, since all communities have standards and boundaries for behavior. The only truly uninhibited are the insane, so it is considered a balanced, sane quality to fit in with a crowd, to find a “normal” for ourselves.

When the pressure of a teenage sex drive bottled up broke through, I was 17 and admitted to myself I was gay. I immediately wanted the world to know but because my mother told me in solemn tones, “Don’t tell your father,” there would remain a stash of artifice in my life, at least until he passed away six years later. So at 23, I officially had no one else to hide from. I was out from that moment on and would never hide again. 

In high school, I belonged to several cliques. Choir, newspaper, radio, theater, all were different groups that defined themselves by their groups, but there was very little crossover, except for me. On the groups pages of my Senior yearbook, I’m all over the place… though not in sports. I was also a druggie since I got high and dropped acid back then. I’d been pegged as a fag well before coming out, since I studied ballet starting when I was 14.

Without a tedious recounting of my decade of drug abuse, my decade of recovery, my years of finding what I wanted and gaining my life back, but there are almost no places where I am not expected to play a role, and to spare my associates in that arena the discomfort of who I am and what I value elsewhere.

Today, I have these specific realms in which I exist, and there is little crossover between them. Listed in no particular order…

• Home
• Husband
• Work
• My choir
• The gym
• The jack-off club
• This blog
• Online cruising sites

I could also list Twitter and Facebook, since I tailor the content there to those I know follow me in one but not another.

At home, with the husband, I talk about everything, though generally just in the moments when he’s fully available… we both have our work obsessions that tend to force out other interests for a while… but I hide nothing from him.

The goal, for me, is to be who I am in all realms, although I may not be practicing the same activities in one as in the other. It means I have to be aware of the “me” driving all of these activities, and not be the activities themselves.

So when I’m talking to new members about the club, I’m the same me who talks to account managers in the office, and the same me who talks to my mom about my step-dad’s health, and the same me who holds my husband in bed… I can honor different sets of rules but not confuse the rules with the ruled.

The things that define my self are the things in which I invest my self. If I’m really attached to things and processes and outcomes, the division between those things and my self becomes hard to distinguish. It follows that to be more authentic in more places, I need to be less invested or at least less attached. Being more authentic means being more available to what and who is there at any given moment, so the more I can let go of work, and worry, and busy-ness and social issues and politics and whatever story of the day is clamoring for my mind, the more I’m just me.