Sounds Kinky-er

I can think of a caption or two…

2012-02-23T12:44:00.000-08:00

This pic showed up on I Has A Hotdog (aka LOLDogs), asking for readers to caption it:

Wow. How about…

“Doing it doggie style… you’re doin’ it right."
“Not just uncut, untrimmed!”
“They’ll make anything into a stuffed animal these days.”

Return of “Craigslist bots”

2012-02-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

Posting on the Craigslist personals sections is kind of like sticking your hand into your refrigerator vegetable drawer, blindfolded. You might pull out something wonderful, or you might grab the cucumber you left in there two months ago and forgot about. Eewww. (And I’m just talking posting and the replies you get, not what actually shows up at your door!)

The most notorious are the Craigslist bots, automated replies that get past the CAPTCHA mechanism to send you curiously phrased replies which are just tantalizing enough to maybe be real. I’ve posted about this before once, and again.

Here is the latest variation I’ve received, within 15 minutes of each other (I’ve zapped the address domain names so spiders hopefully won’t pick them up):

From: Vance Hale

Well let's get this show going! I reckon I should give you my stats, I'm 6'1in, 180; brown/green. I'm looking for normal to small dicks. Later, man

And then this one:

From: Cory Ford

God, some of the posts are hilarious. Yours was great, tho. So I suppose I should give my stats, like 6'1", 177 brown/blue. Any age difference is no object for me. Meshing well is about all that does. Chk U L8r.

How to spot a bot? Well, a couple of the old methods aren’t present here: a woman’s name attached to a post going to a guy, or directing you to a site to verify that you are real.

The telltale here, of course, was the similar structure: greeting, I should give my stats, stats for someone desirably tall and desirably slender, note about what I want, closing. In particular, though, no reference to what my post was about, no racial information, and nothing that my post requested is present (like a pic).

You’ll note that the “Cory Ford” email address carries a woman’s name, though, and the “Vance Hale” one may as well (“willa”), but the email address is going to be hidden in favor of just the reply name in most modern programs. I can’t for the life of my figure out who would program bots to be smart enough to attach a male name on an m4m post but still use a female email address. (But that’s how spammers and virus writers get caught: they do something stupid, leave some clue.)

What is the difference between a “whore”, a “tramp”, and a “slut”?

2012-02-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

A slut sleeps with everyone.

A tramp sleeps with everyone but you.

A whore charges.

(I consider “slut” to be a compliment. But don’t call me a ”whore”, I give it away.)

Online Ass d’Jour: Never Put Off Until Tomorrow When You Can Be An Ass Today

2012-01-25T15:27:00.000-08:00

Date: December 25, 2011 / Place: Palm Springs, CA / Service: Scruff

I was at the Sunday beer bust at the Barracks when this exchange occurred. I’ve [corrected] a couple typos below, but left other wording and capitalization as-written from both of us.

Him: Want to stop by my place for a good breeding?

Me: No, thanks

(3 hours pass)

Him: How long in town for?
Him: Want your cock sucked off?

Me: Later, maybe

Him: Wow such attitude as if you had so many options out there man
Him: One would think if mr right was [out there] for you you would already have found him
Him: Good luck

Me: Sorry, fuckhead. I'm out somewhere that a BJ isn't what I'm after. Obviously should have blocked you at "breed".

Him: Sad
Him: All those hankies and all the colors in the rainbow how is anyone suppose to guess what you don't get into! Sad soul of Xmas
Him: So I can shit on your face but no bj? Lmao!!!

Me: No, you just can't have/give a blowjob *NOW*. What part of "later, maybe" was so hard for you?

Online Ass d’Jour: Get Real

2012-01-23T22:00:00.000-08:00

Date: January 14, 2012 / Place: Washington DC / Service: Bear411

Him: might want to upgrade the scooter to a real cycle. the whole image is a little funny when you read your profile and then see you on a scooter. Hardcore profile and then a pussy scooter. lol

Me: How about you be less of an asshole?

Him: I wasn't being an asshole. Your description just doesn't match a scooter. pose with a real cycle and it will boost the cred in your profile description.

Me: If you're judging by what I ride rather than who I am, you're being an asshole. Using the phrase "real cycle" reinforces that.

For purposes of illustration, here is the pic in question; I did upgrade to a larger bike (but still a scooter) last April:

You can read more about my multi-thousands of miles ridden on that scooter in this post. And a long trip to Vancuover. And one to Portland.

My “pussy” scooter has done more than most “real” cycles.

(Leather) Vacation in Palm Springs

2012-01-17T22:06:00.000-08:00

(This post covers my end-of-2011 vacation in Palm Springs. A tiny bit of the trip report — covering the leather title pieces — is located on my Northwest LeatherSIR 2012 blog.)

Homo for the Holidays

For several years now, I have made a point of not being in Seattle for New Year’s Eve. The biggest piece of this is that if I’m in the same city I live in, the holiday doesn’t feel “special” — it’s just another night at the bar, and the bulk of the people around me are the same ones I see every Saturday night. Not that I don’t like being around them, but I’d rather spend the holiday somewhere else.

It isn’t just New Year’s Eve. Holidays = Travel, for me. I haven’t been home for Memorial Day since, um, 1995, either being at International Mr. Leather or an IAGLCWDC hoedown. I’m typically gone for Labor Day, frequently for President’s Day and July 4th, coming up is my 13th trip to DC for Mid-Atlantic Leather on MLK Weekend, Thanksgiving and Christmas are usually at my mother’s house, etc.

So in the past decade, I’ve spent New Year’s Eve in New York, Palm Springs, Portland, and often in Vancouver, BC. Vancouver and Portland are just a few hours away, easy trips, but that’s enough to satisfy my “be somewhere else” urge. This year, it was back to Palm Springs, but double strength: Christmas as well as New Year’s.

If I had to tag a favorite vacation spot, Palm Springs would be it. I’ve been there for New Year’s a couple times, for Wet n’Hot five times, and West Coast Rubber twice. There’s relatively little to do as a tourist, compared to the likes of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or New York, so it’s okay to just lay around the pool. Even better, of course, with the gay resorts there, it's okay to lay around the pool wearing nothing at all.

For Christmas a few years ago, my mother gave me a week’s time share stay for a present, which I could have anywhere in the world. That’s great in theory — and she’s taken me on trips where we stayed at time share condos in Killarney in Ireland and Rotorua in New Zealand — but if I’m going to go for a week’s vacation by myself, it’s going to be to a good place for being a leatherman. Unfortunately, the time share places often aren’t all that convenient for that. Amsterdam? 15 miles outside the city. Similar for Berlin.

But Palm Springs? The condos are a quarter mile from the downtown shopping core, and of course a 2.5 hour trip with airfare in the $300 range makes it way easier than Europe or Australia would. And while Seattle would be in the low 40s around New Year’s, Palm Springs would be in the low 70s. Yum. So taking a week’s vacation at the end of the year sounded like a great idea.

With Christmas and New Year’s on Sundays this year, I decided to lengthen the stay a bit and include the weekends. Of course, the time share stay being only for a week, I added two nights at the start and one at the end at Chaps Inn, the leather-themed gay resort. I also invited my buddy Cliff along. He’s my ex, but we get along great as travel buddies. (And frankly, there’s no one better to have along to ensure that there are a good number of hot guys coming to visit. Cliff can talk just about anyone out of their pants and into the sling!)

The Inns and Outs

Chaps Inn is located just off north Indian Canyon, a block or two from Camp Palm Springs. It’s a small resort with about 10 rooms. Each room has sling hooks in the ceiling and they will rent you a sling and chains. Our room also had tie-down points and chain in one of the doorways. Outside, they have a decent sized pool and a jacuzzi, plus an outdoor sling and cross. (Unfortunately at this time of year, those don’t get much use. Due to the proximity of Mt. San Jacinto, the sun went away by about 3:30, so it got too cold to play outside by the time you were ready to.) Chaps Inn also features some nearly pornographic cacti among the landscaping.

The owners, Stuart and Ian, are great, friendly guys. This was about the 5th or 6th time I’ve stayed there over the years. It isn’t posh (but “posh” doesn’t interest me much), but the beds are comfortable and the setup is very nice, just the way I like it. Very recommended.

Spending Christmas on vacation was new for me. Spending it butt naked around the pool in warm weather, and then hitting the Barracks Beer Bust later in the day, that was great. (The line I used in my Facebook status: “That's the downside of spending Christmas at a clothing-optional resort: no packages to unwrap!”

The time share condo was at the Palm Springs Tennis Club, at the end of Baristo Road within walking distance of downtown and the Arenas Road gay district. The Tennis Club is right up against the mountain — like 10 feet outside the window — which was a very different sort of view. The room itself was a suite, so we could again deal with what meals we wanted to eat in (especially breakfasts), with plenty of room for the sling and other entertaining. Neither of us play tennis, and we didn’t spend any time around their pool, but Stuart let us come back to Chaps Inn a couple days to hang out there.

These are a Few of My Favorite Slings

Knowing that Cliff and I would want a sling available beyond the days we were at Chaps Inn, bringing a portable along seemed to be in order. And while I have one, I’ve been borrowing one or two frames from friends for the play parties I host, so I figured it was time to get a new sling frame to supplement what I’ve got.

Given the cost to ship the frame and airline baggage costs, I had it shipped directly to Chaps Inn, so that I would only have a baggage cost coming back. I arranged the delivery with Stuart ahead of time, although I didn’t tell him how big of a box to expect. He pretty much knew what it was when it arrived.

My first sling was purchased in 2001 from JIMsupport.com (which is now owned by SIlver & Black Distributing, Inc.). They are highly recommended, of course, but wanting branch out and sample what else was out there, I ordered the new one from Ft. Troff. In addition to just the frame, the Ft. Troff sling frames (note: naughty pics at that link) have leveling feet on the base (although I’ve never needed such before), tie-down points at the corners (so you can use it for more than just hanging a sling), and they are the new taller design, adding a few extra inches (ahem). Oh, and they come in blue, black, or fist-friendly red (that’s the one I got).

Ft. Troff is also selling a number of add-ons for the slings: fish-eye mirrors, supply stands, camera holders, bars to attach toys to for solo sling play, and so on. Frankly, this is a great idea, enhancing the ways to set up your play space with stuff that all works together. I didn’t order any of that this time — and of course, brought my own sling and chains.

(By the way, Ft. Troff does an excellent job of turning around orders, and following up afterward to ensure that the order arrived satisfactorily. I recommend them several notches above many other leather/gear shops on the net.)

On Christmas Eve afternoon when we got there, we went to local leather store Gear for some shopping. (And Cliff shopped the staff as well.) I bought a pair of red and black suspenders and got a look at the sling mirror (note: again with the naughty pics), since they had one on display. I was able to get a better feel for it than I could from the Ft. Troff pics. The mirror is a slightly convex mirror (about 16 inches across) with a ball-joint pivot, so that the bottom can get a wide-angle view in the sling, but it can also be adjusted so that the top can make use of it as well. The frame attachment slides on when assembling the frame, and it can be used with slings other than the Ft. Troff models.

On Monday, I tried to do some due diligence and price similar mirrors at Lowe’s, Home Depot, and AutoZone, but no one had anything close to the size. So I ended up going back to Gear and buying the floor model. Made a great addition to my self-Christmas present, and I was even able to pack it into my suitcase coming home (I had expected to have to ship it)!

Take a Hike, Ike

While I said earlier that there’s not a lot to do in Palm Springs, that’s not quite true. If you want to be touristy, you can take the tram to the top of the mountain, you can go to Joshua Tree National Park, you can hike the canyons, you can do museums, there’s the Palm Springs Follies show, and of course lots of shopping. I’ve usually been to Palm Springs in July or August, with daytime temps above 100 degrees, so the outdoor stuff hasn’t had a lot of attraction, as you can imagine. (And I’ve usually gone for events, which often preclude much sight seeing — you nap during the day and play hard until the wee hours.)

(“Wee hours”. Heh. I’ve been to Wet n’Hot five times.)

We went shopping at the Cabazon and Desert Hills outlet malls at Morongo the day after Christmas. I bought a pair of jeans and four deep-dish mini pie plates (which should be great for the likes of chicken pot pie; two for me, two for my mother), and looked at tennis shoes at several places but found nothing that appealed to me. Of course, 90% of such malls are clothing stores which hold no interest for me. When at such places, I sometimes wonder if I’m missing out on some great pleasure in life by not being a straight woman or a fashion-interested gay man. For me, it ultimately comes down to two things: I already have plenty of clothes (so why look to buy something I don’t really need), and I put little value in expensive clothes (are those $200 shirts 4 times as good as the $50 ones, 10 times as good as a $20 one?). Which isn’t to say I disdain luxury and pleasure, but I seem to enjoy them a lot more when they are occasional rather than regular.

We tried one day to go take the aerial tram up the mountain. We really did. But after driving and parking and walking to the tram station, it was a 2.5 hour wait for the tram (and then the sun would be going down). We hadn’t brought anything to read and there was no cell signal up there (they should have free WiFi in the terminal!), so we drove back to town rather than hang around doing literally nothing. Sigh. We sort of intended to buy tickets online, but you have to do it more than a day in advance, and we never got around to setting a new goal date. (Oh well, not like I’ll never be back!)

We also didn’t get to Joshua Tree. Oh well.

Thursday night, they shut down a few blocks of Palm Canyon Drive for a street fair. We walked the fair, and I bought a hummingbird photo print for my grandmother. We also met up with Frank and Jeaux, who are from Seattle but have a condo in Palm Springs. We invited them to hike one of the canyons on Friday with us, a recommendation from one of my co-workers. We were before the season when the creeks run — there’s a seasonal waterfall in one of the canyons — but the weather would sure be right for it. Big rock boulders, palm trees in the oasis, a good hit of pot, and blow jobs back along one of the paths a mile or so out. Yeah, I’d hike that again.

Fisting the Night Away

One guy I know in Palm Springs is Bear Films star Cameron Stuart, whom I met there the previous summer. He invited me and Cliff to the play party he was hosting on New Year’s Eve. I had to twist Cliff’s arm a bit — he originally planned to go to the play party at Helios — but I knew he’d have a great time.

The party was in a three-car garage space, broken up with hung tarps and some plywood walls. I think there were five slings, plus a covered mattress and a fuck bench, plus maybe some other equipment. It was a good layout of the space, and Stuart and a play buddy of his had made sure to invite a number of fisters to ensure that there would be a good set of guys there beyond those mostly interested in just fuck-n-suck. Among other people I knew there were Bill, who I had played with the night before, and John, a buddy from San Francisco whom I have played with a could times before.

Definitely a good time. We and a couple other guys shut the place down a while after 1:00 am.

In addition to the play itself, I always like to get a look at how other guys lay things out for their parties — where the snacks and drinks are, where the lube and supplies are, the make-up of the attendees, the layout of play spaces. That stuff always helps inform and enhance my own parties.

All the Other Kids with Their Pumped Up Dicks

After a play session on Wednesday, my PA piercing got too heavily abused — bruised on the inside — so on Friday, I went to Palm Springs Piercing Company (who did my lorum piercing a few years ago) and had the PA taken out. It was almost getting too painful to walk. Of course, that meant that the piercing proceeded to shrink as it healed, so when I got home, I had to go back to my old 4 gauge curved barbell, and worked myself back up to the 2 gauge over the next week, just in time to head to Mid-Atlantic Leather.

While I was at PS Piercing, I also had them upgauge the 12 gauge nipple bars to 10 gauge rings. I had one nipple pierced with a ring at MAL 2000, but it never healed well (got regular small reinfections) and I took it out a couple years later — I primarily blame the temptation of the ring as a pull toy during the healing process. In mid-2010, I got them both done with bars and they have behaved themselves vastly better and I was comfortable getting rings in now.

Cliff and I went dancing at DiGS on Christmas Eve, and I did again on Tuesday. (Tue/Sat are the CW dance nights there.) We ran into Jake, who had moved down from Seattle a few months ago.

Other names to drop in addition to those mentioned above: hunky Matthew from Gear, the guys from Off Ramp Leathers (who had just moved to Palm Springs from San Francisco, opening the store on the day we left, so we dropped in), Jim T. (who used to be in the San Francisco Saddletramps with me), and assorted guys at the Barracks and Chaps Inn whose names elude me now.

Typo of the Day

2011-11-23T00:59:00.000-08:00

This profile showed up near me on Scruff recently:

“stalky” — Best. Typo. Ever. (Technically a malapropism; he presumably meant “stocky”.)

If you’re looking for guys to stalk you, online cruise sites would be the place.

Online Ass d'Jour: Why Thank You

2011-10-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to my recent item on unsolicited photo spamming on cruise sites, this LOLCat pic showed up this week. Sums things up pretty well, I’d say:

What is up with misspelled words? TrouBBle, SSkin, ParTy, FFun,…?

2011-09-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

If you hit gay cruise sites enough, you will end up tripping over seemingly misspelled words a lot. And not just simple typos, nor the shorthand txtspeak/lolspeak terms which infect so much online communication these days (U, ur, lol, ROTFL, etc.), but stuff unique to the gay cruise world, stuff with extra letters and internal capitals “errors” which show up often enough that there must be meaning behind them.

Indeed there is: like with so much else in the gay world, these are code words, spellings intended to alert those in the know to the proclivities and preferences of the person they are reading about, without them having to come out ans say it. Sometimes, as with hanky codes, this is to advertise for sex; sometimes, as with the term “420” referring to marijuana, it advertises drug use or other illegal activities; and sometimes it serves to hide controversial philosophies or political leanings.

Didn’t you learn to capitalize the pronoun “I” in school?

This one is a common affectation for men who are playing the “slave” (extreme submissive) role in a relationship (or who want to). To express subservience or to take away the importance of the self from the slave, the slave becomes “i” or “this one”, always lowercase (even at the start of a sentence). This mirrors the capitalization of “He” when referring to God, and since the master in the relationship is sometimes deemed to take the role of a “god”, he may become “He” or “Sir” or whatever.

Girls just wanna have fun, why do guys want FFun?

“FF” is shorthand for Fist Fucking, usually referred to just as fisting these days. Any time you see the double-F capitalized, either by itself or embedded in another word — unless you are reading about Marvel Comics — that is what is being referred to. (Exception: if the entire word is in caps — “RUFF & TUFF”, for example — it probably isn’t about fisting, even when the word is misspelled like this.)

You’ll also see references to “handball”, but that isn’t a sports alternative to tennis. “Handball” is a euphemism for fisting — “hand in a ball”, get it? (And in case you didn’t know, “watersports” doesn’t usually involve an Olympic-sized swimming pool.)

Hiding things behind euphemisms can backfire, though. Several years ago, our local leather club reserved a church-owned camp location for a weekend event, and we listed “handball” as one of the activities that would be available in the playspace (aka “dungeon”, but we didn’t use that word). One of the directors of the camp read our website and said “We don’t have a handball court, I wonder what they mean?”, so he looked it up online. We quickly had our contract cancelled. But karma comes around: they went into bankruptcy and had to sell the camp within the next year. Don’t fuck with leathermen, because we use our fists!

Won’t you get in trouBBle for spelling it that way?

When I first came out, “BB” would show up in newspaper personal ads meaning “Butch Bottom”, more or less what we now call “leatherboy”.

By the mid-90s, “BB” had come to mean “Body Builder”, back when “working out” wasn’t the primary hobby of every non-bear gay man in the world, when having a six-pack was rare — as opposed to today when it is almost required if you go out thump-thump dancing and dare to remove your shirt.

For the last decade, though, “BB” has meant “Bare Back”, as in fucking without a condom, usually including cumming inside the guy. See also seeding, breeding, and bug chasing.

Confusion over the term was the focus of a subplot in Queer As Folk, too, although that was very odd since the characters assumed it meant “butch bottom” (they went to a “BB” party, guess what the activity was), but I hadn’t seen it in use that way for maybe 15 years before that episode aired. (And then just this morning I saw it used in the abbreviation guide in an issue of Bound & Gagged from 2003.)

Do you hiSS much when you SSpeak?

Every now and then, you’ll hit a profile where every “s” is capitalized and doubled into “SS”. Completely orthogonal to “FF” = fisting, “SS” references skinheads with white power/white supremacy/neo-Nazi leanings. (Or SSometimeSS juSSt guySS into Nazi uniform play, I gueSS. Not going there, thankSS.)

(I’m not trying to be judgmental here. There are skins who aren’t neo-Nazis and there are skins who are not white supremacist or “white power”. I only know enough that when I tripped across such an “SS”-filled profile, I just turned around, didn’t ask any questions.)

Just for completeness, if these profiles reference “88”, that doesn’t mean they play the piano. “H” is the 8th letter of the alphabet, so 88 = HH = Heil Hitler.

It’s my parTy, I’ll do drugs if I want to!

And finally we come to drug use. The standard euphemism for drug use during sex is “partying” or “party and play”. So when asked if you want to “party”, or when someone says they are looking to or for a “party”, they don’t want streamers and noisemakers. A number of different drugs can be involved in this, typically meth (methamphetamine, crystal), but also cocaine, MDMA, and GHB. In particular, though, while alcohol and pot and poppers are technically drugs which can be played with in connection with sex, few if any people ever mean them when referring to “partying”; those drugs are too “soft” for the intent.

A common nickname for meth is “Tina”. Abbreviated to “T”, the letter gets inserted in the middle of any number of words, but especially in the word “parTy” to qualify the intent.

How do I tell codewords from typos?

While I usually recommend “Assume ignorance before malice” when evaluating things when someone does a stupid or offensive action, the reverse is my recommendation when it comes to cruise site profile text and ads: “Assume what they wrote is intentional.”

People have ample opportunity to craft, review, and edit their text. While many men do write poorly and typos do creep in — and many write quickly and never review what they wrote or correct errors — these codeword typos are common enough that they can be identified easily and most don’t fall into common causes of typos. Incorrect capitalization will usually only occur at the start of the word — “COmpany” is a common one for me, caps on the letter after the initial one as well — but not in the middle of the word. And while an occasional accidental doubled letter can creep in, consistently doing it with the same letters throughout an ad or profile transcends accident and becomes intent.

Which then leads to the other rule of thumb: “If you suspect there is an extra layer of meaning, trust your instincts.” That doesn’t have to mean “run like hell” (although I’ve done that); like any coded communication, these things are both an invitation to conversation and are prone to misinterpretation, so if you are curious, ask. And then read between the lines of their response: fisters and slaves will likely be very upfront with you, but druggies probably won’t.

Updated on September 19

Naturally, as soon as I posted this, a new example cropped up. I got hit up by a guy looking for “pig pplay”. I asked and he promptly confirmed it the double-p a reference to ”party”.

Online Ass d'Jour: 5000 Words and Counting

2011-08-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

Date: August 14, 2011 / Place: Las Vegas / Service: Grindr

I noticed that there was a message badge on the pic of a guy I had not been conversing with yet.. So I tapped the pic to view the message.

Him: (sends picture)
Him: (sends picture)
Him: (sends picture)
Me: (start to look at the first one)
Him: (sends another picture)

(Jesus Christ, at least say “Hello” first. Or maybe “Hello, want to see naughty pics of me?” And wait for me to say yes.)

Him: (sends another picture)
Me: (block)

Online Ass d'Jour: Rubbers? What rubbers?

2011-08-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

Date: August 13, 2011 / Place: Las Vegas / Service: Scruff

Me: What kind of of hot man sex?
Him: Hot pig sex. More top but love to fuck raw
Me: Got to use a rubber for fucking
Him: Y a rubber for fucking? Don’t u like to feel a raw cock in ur ass
Me: I’m done here
Him: Done with what?

(Come on, guy. When someone says they don’t bareback, you don’t push them to. Period.)

(I refrained from blocking him so I could get a reply. Got one that was semi-apologetic — “OK I will respect that” — but I’m still not going to have sex with him. No least because I wouldn’t expect him to “respect that”.)

Online Ass d'Jour: Smile When You Say That!

2011-08-19T14:47:00.000-07:00

Date: July 10, 2011 / Place: Palm Springs / Service: Adam4Adam

Him: (sent a smile)
Me: (looked at his profile, nothing I was interested in)
Him (a few minutes later): When someone sends a smile, you're supposed to reply.

(Thank you Emily Post. Here’s my take on smiles, winks, tugs, and pokes. Short answer: no, you’re supposed to check out the person and then reply only if you have anything to reply about.)

Online Ass d'Jour: Clothe Thy Naked Self!

2011-08-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

Date: July 9, 2011 / Place: Palm Springs / Service: Adam4Adam

Him: Wow
Me: Thanks
Him: Wasn’t a compliment. You should put a shirt on.

(That’s the pic he saw on my profile. If he has issues with that pic, how much time does he spend telling guys online to cover up? Wow indeed.)

Save me from “discreet” encounters

2011-06-27T13:44:00.001-07:00

Twice in the past couple weeks, I’ve had people approach me via online connections for “discreet” encounters. (I covered what the term means in a previous post. Basically, it means the guy is either closeted, cheating, or uncomfortable with his kinks.) After this, I’m done with agreeing to such encounters.

With the first one, who approached me via a Craigslist ad, he asked during our negotiation exchanges if I was “discreet”, and I made him tell me what he meant by it. To me, it means the simple stuff — don’t go telling details of what we did, and look/act like a normal person when you come to my place or we see each other out. To this guy, though, it was “Never connected; never met if asked or not asked” (that is: “You don’t know me, you never saw me, you’ll never contact me.”) Sorry, I don’t work that way: if I see you in a social setting (be it the gay bar, the supermarket, or a business lunch), I’m not going to ignore you or feign ignorance. I’m going to say “Hi, how are you doing?” as I would to any casual acquaintance. If someone asks how we know each other, then I will properly feign ignorance/memory loss: “Heck, I don’t remember, I meet so many people. It was a few months ago, maybe?”

At the end of our negotiations, he pulled back from meeting (when I was actually on the way there, in fact; lesson: never head their way without a full address and room number), saying he was “too uncomfortable to have any fun”. My hope is that he realized that he can’t really have his kink cake and eat it too for very long; that the more people he plays with, the less “discreet” he can actually manage to be, and that he’ll eventually overcome his fears (or have a good talk with his partner). I accepted his apology (at least he didn’t totally flake out), and gave him a mild reprimand/encouragement to realize that his “discreet” requirements really don’t mean anything to most guys: we just want a hot scene and aren’t going to care to give him anything other than a vague acknowledgment in other social settings.

The second guy hit me up on a formal cruise site. Looking at his profile, I saw that he was from Chicago, but because he keeps his sex life “private”, he only wants to play with guys in Minneapolis. And further, he only wants to play with guys who are visiting Minneapolis. In other words, he wants to keep the chance of meeting you in any other context vanishingly small, and also wants to minimize the chance for a repeat encounter. That’s not keeping your sex life private, that is being embarrassed about the sex you choose to pursue.

I’ve dealt with another guy here in Seattle who expressed a similar but different version of this: he wants to go to play parties, but only in other cities. He bartends at a local bar and he doesn’t want there to be a chance that someone at the party might be one of his customers. I can’t say what the concern is beyond that, though — they might expect free/stronger drinks, they might puncture a “tough top” image he tries to project as a bartender, something else? I find it hard to picture a scenario where the fact that actual sex was involved in how they knew him would make things any different. (Maybe if they felt he gave bad service, they would have additional dirt to bad mouth him with? Please, girl, this is the gay community: they can make up plenty of dirt without having seen you in action.)

Going forward, if a guy ask if I am “discreet”, I’m going to say “No, I’m not. If you have to ask, then I’m not discreet enough for you.”

Bear, Legs Akimbo

2011-04-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

This picture was one of the available pieces of wallpaper photography from National Geographic Magazine for May 2011. I know that pose. I've seen many a bear in it.

You can get the photo here. Photograph by Meta Penca. (A pity: the photo caption identifies the particular bear as female.)

Most useless CraigsList photo ever?

2011-03-31T11:53:00.000-07:00

This ad showed up on CraigsList the other day:

Masc casual fun - 35 (Seattle)

Nice & normal, good-looking white masucline and horny looking for some no-strings, safe, casual fun with like-minded fit bro around my age or younger.

I'me five-ten, one sixty, packing a thick 8 inches. Nice bod, hairy chest and legs.

I cannot host but can travel to you in and around Seattle. Real here ... in Seattle ... wet day

All perfectly fine, nothing out of the ordinary there.

And then it had this pic attached:

Now, I know you’ve probably seen pics in CraigsList ads which are bait-and-switch pics: knowing that some people won’t click through to read an ad if there’s no pic, some guys will add a sunset or a drawing or some other image. Those offend a little (since you’re either looking for porn shots or some hint of what the guy on the end looks like other than his dick/ass), but they are part of “doing business”.

This one, though, what is the point of this pic? You aren’t showing your “thick 8 inches” (heck, you aren’t even showing a bulge from it!). You aren’t showing your “nice bod, hairy chest and legs”. Hell, you aren’t even showing that you’re male! But at the same time, neither does this seem to be in the same class as a bait-and-switch pic; there is a different level of intentionality attached to using this.

So, yeah, “Most useless CraigsList photo ever.”

What does “Woof!” mean?

2011-03-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

“Woof!” is a greeting, especially in the bear community, generally meaning “Hi, I think you’re hot!” It is the verbal (or in online chat, textual) version of a wink/smile/tug.

(Why do bears say “woof”? The most likely answer is that the snurfling sound a real bear makes can be written as “whurf” — half growl and half snort — which easily transcribe into “woof”. Alternately, start from the greeting “Yo, dawg!” and follow that path to get to the same destination.)

Of course, one person’s “Hi, I think you’re hot” can be another person’s “Hi, I think you’re hot, let’s have sex now.” Take this exchange from Adam4Adam this past weekend for example. (Of not: the guy’s only profile picture is a side shot of his dick, and his profile text is equally sparse: “Not looking for love or anything other than getting my cock off. Blowing a load”. Occasionally you can check out the profile and respond to a tersely worded potential sex request. But not with this one, and especially not when I tend to be looking for kinky fetishy sex partners and the profile indicates nothing of the sort.)

him: Woof!

me: Thanks

him: which translates as "no thanks?"

me: "Woof" doesn't usually translate as a specific offer. I'm not available until later tonight anyway.

him: yeah, good luck with that

And he blocked me. Whatever.

If you want “Woof!” to mean more than “Hi!”, that’s great. But you’d better be ready to follow it up with an offer and specifics.

Stuff I Read: “Imaginary Encounters” by Mysh

2011-02-24T23:38:00.000-08:00

I despise most poetry.

Spending much of my time as a kid and a teen with books, I embraced novels and comic books, works which spread a broad tableau of clear imagery and abundant words, not just telling a story but building a world. Poetry, on the other hand, comes off as tight, small, and absorbed, twisting on individual words and phrases to depict a single idea or evoke an emotion. When you’re used to lots of words building a story, consumed at a fast pace, having to mull over each word and syllable, backtracking over and over to get at the true “meaning” of the poem… it’s slooooooooow.

(Those who “get” poetry are hopefully saying to themselves “Yeah, that’s the point.” Those who don’t get poetry are probably saying “Yeah, I know what you mean.”)

That said, some specific forms of structured poetry, I have great respect and even love for. Taking an idea or emotion and capturing it in a limited number of lines, or forcing it into a rhyming couplet (or a limerick!), that awes me. (So I guess it’s really unstructured, longer form poetry that I can’t stand. How does that phrase go, “I don’t know what it is, I guess it’s poetry”?) I’m especially fond of haiku (when done right, at least in the modern Western sense; some people think just three short lines of whatever is all it takes, sigh).

I recently got an e-mail from Israeli artist and filmmaker Mysh, pointing me to his site of queer haiku comics, “Imaginary Encounters”. Wow! Could stuff get any better than that? Combining the elegance of haiku with shortform cartooning, usually illuminating rather than illustrating.

Highly recommended. Not safe for work, though; some of the cartoons contain sexual imagery.

Grindr Censors User Text, Blames Apple

2011-02-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

A week ago, I signed into Grindr and got an alert saying that my photo or profile text had been forcibly deleted because it didn’t conform to their Terms of Service. According to the page they linked to, my crime was apparently in having (sexually) suggestive text.

This e-mail was sent to help@grindr.com:

I recently had my Grindr profile’s text zapped. So far as I can tell, this was because something in the text was deemed “suggestive”. Not explicit or offensive or in violation of copyright. (Of course, since I don’t have a copy of the text that was there before, I can only go by my memory of how “suggestive” it may have been.)

We’ve become used to restrictions on imagery with social networking sites (gay and otherwise) — many won’t allow any naughty images in the publicly available pics (and especially not pics which depict actual sex), and some even require an identifiable face — so the similar restrictions you have had in place there do not bother me.

But now you’re limiting text? Really? And not even explicit text, but “suggestive” text? Double really?

I never like to tie things to malice or stupidity where there may be a rational reason. Is this something that was dictated by Apple or RIM in order to get in/stay in their app stores? Did you get purchased by Disney? Are you trying to back away from the market that made you popular for some reason? (Because let’s be honest: Grindr’s #1 use is chatting up prior to hooking up. Please don’t try to deny it.)

Limiting what people can say (or write) edges into the realm of censorship. And even though it may technically be your right to limit what we can do through your system, if this over-the-top limitation of content is your own choice and not something forced on you (er, “insisted upon”) by external partners, I can’t help but think it’s going to bite you. (Actually, it’s apt to bite you even if this is capitulation to external requirements.)

Here’s hoping you’ll be willing to reply to this in some understandable form, whether that’s a personal reply or a press release or a web page which addresses the issue in a generalized manner (and hopefully has guidelines for what is and is not “suggestive”).

(A URL to your existing Terms of Service isn’t going to do it, especially since it doesn’t have the same text as the app put out notifying me of the zapped text.)

Looking forward to hearing from you.

— Jim
Seattle, WA

I was finally able to dig around in their website Terms and Forums to find this:

Apple places limits on what can be displayed in a public profile. This includes not only your picture, but also text. Even masked text is not allowed. This means all public profiles have to be G rated. (link)

“Masked text” would refer to things like “f*ck” and “po**ers”.

So they are trying to pass the buck to Apple. But when Apple did their booting of boobie apps a year ago, here what they said:

We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store (link)

Here are the full Grindr profile guidelines, which specify:

• No sexually explicit or overly suggestive text.

In others words, no, Apple doesn’t say it has to be G rated, just that it cannot be “overtly sexual”. Notice what has happened in part: they dropped the “T”, turning “overtly” (openly) into “overly” (excessively); by definition, suggestive text cannot be “overtly” sexual.

More to the point, though, they don’t (presumably won’t) define how much becomes “excessive”. But by use of the term “G rated” (which Apple apparently does not require), potentially anything (sexually) suggestive becomes “overly” suggestive.

We shall see, though. I’ve entered new profile text, referencing hanky colors instead of any spelled-out activity (previously, I said something about “put me on my knees”), so the suggestiveness should be more vague; you need specialized external knowledge to decipher things.

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants, if gay social networking apps running scared caused a resurgence of the hanky code, only in textual form rather than actual cloth-in-a-pocket?

(Hmm, “kick in the pants”. That would be dark blue with white boot print pattern, right? Teal blue with boot print for “kick in the balls”?)

(And yes, I know there are Apple haters out there who are going to try to lay the blame right back at Apple’s feet. Your belief is already noted; only comments with some substance beyond that tired tirade will be retained.)

More fun with “Craiglist bots”

2010-11-02T00:17:00.000-07:00

See this post for more on these sex-post phishers.

For some reason, I got several apparent Craigslist bot responses on Friday to a post I made on Wednesday.

The “I’m so excited I can’t type” Reply

This one came from “Nga Abdullai”:

in nice shape and average good looking would like to give u massage dwviwsncq

And this from “Syble Rendina”:

hella excited to do this never done this before, kinda nervous as well kilgjl

I guess the intent is “You are so hot that I’m jerking off here just thinking about— oh fuck, I just came all over the keyboard.”

In addition to the note in the previous post about replies mentioning things I never talked about in my ad, these studiously avoid referencing anything I did mention.

The “Don’t Scam Me, Bro” Reply

From “Cory Raden”:

What's happening? Im a real fella seeking something hot...my stat is 22 years old, 5'10, versatile and fresh. I just got conned by a doode on here so I am trying to determine if you're real or not. But yeah this is my buddy's email so I got to get trucking but if you wanna, I am currently on my profile site so let's swap phone #s and photos on there to be reliable. This way we can verify to each other that we are both genuine. Don't even respond back if can't even put any time, I ain't trynna to get scammed again. P-e-a-c-e!

It was followed by a URL, a pic of a guy playing field hockey (me.jpg), and a pic of a guy’s crotch in tighty whiteys with a hard-on (mine.jpg).

And an hour and a half later, from “Mariela Barocio”:

What's going good? Im a real guy wanting something incredible...my stat is 22 years old, 6'1, versatile and fresh. I just got conned by a doode on-line so I am trying to see if you're real or not. Anyhows this is my pal's email so I gotta get bouncing but if you are serious, I am presently on my profile site so let's exchange phone #s and pix on there to be trustworthy. This way we can show to each other that we are both legit. Don't even respond back if can't even put any effort, I ain't trying to get scammed again. Cya!

And it was followed by a (different) URL, a pic of a guy playing field hockey (me.jpg), and a pic of a guy’s crotch in tighty whiteys with a hard-on (mine.jpg).

I swear, it’s Attack of the Mad Libs or something.

The “Married and Down Low” Reply

This one came from “Catrice Strickland”:

hey, straight guy here curious of this, wife just went out of town and i am wanting to try... n

Gee, guy, if you want to stay married, maybe you shouldn’t use your wife’s e-mail address for cruising. She might find out.

(You’ll note that other bot posts came from Syble and Mariela, also women’s names, and the only Nga I’ve ever met was also female. Suggestion to the bot programmers: use only male names on replies to Men Seeking Men ads.)

All five of these had Hotmail return addresses, and all with the full name that was listed as the owner plus one or two random trailing characters. So there’s another bot spot technique.

What is “Gear”?

2010-10-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, Leatherpost.com started sponsoring a monthly Gear Night at the Cuff Complex. This is by no means the first use of the term “gear,” but what does it really mean? What constitutes or qualifies and “gear” and what does not?

The first uses of the term “gear” that I encountered were in the rubber community, as an expansion of that fetish to include sports gear — jock straps, football shoulder pads, cleated shoes, and so. (Why expand rubber — which already included two major subgroups of tight latex and thick industrial rubber — with the seemingly unrelated genre of sports gear? Heck if I know. Maybe there's a connection via spandex?)

By extension, “gear” would also cover the tools and the accessories attached with other fetishized professions, especially firemen but also medical, police, construction, and so forth. We certainly have seen an increase in fire fighter pants and boots (and gas masks) in recent years.

And thus, we can come around to an actual definition:

“Gear” is all the fetish clothing and equipment which we accept into the greater “leather community” (and that's a whole 'nother definition) which isn't leather, uniform, or rubber. “Gear” is the “Etc.”, the “E” in “L.U.R.E.”

Under this definition, note that traditional leathers — pants, chaps, shirts, vests, harnesses, etc. — are not “gear”. Tight shiny latex or hip boots and surf suits — not “gear”. Police or military uniforms or cammo — not gear.

Sports
Firefighters
Medical
Cowboys (and Indians)
Construction
Puppy and Pony Play
Lumberjacks
… that's “gear”.

Misadventures: Cancel the Three-Way

2010-10-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

So after chatting back and forth with this hot guy for a few weeks, we finally set things up for a kink-filled three-way with me, him, and his partner. I unlocked my pics for his other half. We discussed time, play activities, what play supplies and toys I would bring, the sling, the hot tub, beer and other beverages, and so on.

I got detailed directions to their place, out in East Bumfuck — seriously, an hour’s drive, and I was going to go there on a Tuesday night. We’re talking I was looking forward to a hot session!

Then late this morning (day of the play session), I got these texts:

Mind giving me a ring? I need to cancel. Not the right time.

Have to say no for best ting for my relationship. Sorry to waste your time. Thought we were there. Best, xxxxx. Please call if u would like to speak versus txt

Fuck. (Or “not fuck”, actually.) You can read between the lines on that one. I imagine a discussion like this:

How come you’re so frisky this morning?

Just thinking about how hot tonight’s going to be.

Mmm?

Really looking forward to getting that guy from Seattle in the sling. We’re going to have a fucking hot time.

Oh you are, are you? And you were going to tell me about this when?

What?!

I really thought we had a good relationship here, but apparently you need to go setting up fuck sessions with tricks from the internet, and then you rub my face in it!

What are you talking about? I told you about him last week. You said “Sounds hot” and told me to set something up!

(and cue escalating screaming match from there)

Or perhaps it was nothing more than morning-of cold feet from the boyfriend, something he thought he was ready to pursue a week ago, but really wasn’t. Not my place to ask. Whatever the case, there was obviously need for a touch more extended communication in that relationship before pursuing something like this.

(Sometimes that’s the reason for living in East Bumfuck: keeping the leash on more easily.)

Updated on October 26, 2010

Last week, I heard from the guy and we tried setting things up again. This time, I played with him and his other half had someone else over as well. There was some interaction between the four of us, but mostly two couples in two different rooms.

I didn't ask for details on what had gone sour the first time, but it seems it was ultimately less drama than I had expected.

MI6 “used bodily fluids as invisible ink”

2010-09-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

Not sure if this qualifies as “ick” or “cool”:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8015180/MI6-used-bodily-fluids-as-invisible-ink.html

Article doesn't say if you hold the stuff over a light bulb to make it readable, though.

Update:

Why does this seem like it should be from a Warren Ellis comic book?
Is this the first new euphemism for masturbation in years? “Making up some invisible ink.”

CraigsList Sex-Post-of-the-Week #1 (in a series)

2010-09-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

Found this one on Sunday, September 19:

DL Power Bottom 4 U! (Just don't tell my mama) - 21 (Seattle)

Really new at this and I’m excited to finally post on CL. I need to be on the DL, though.

I ‘m a really fit power bottom. I am a virgin. I love a good sling session and am open to fisting if we click. I cannot host, I live with my mother and she doesn’t know. I actually live in the basement but I can get a bit noisy, even when I jack to my favorite Colt Videos. I am not gay, but until I meet the right girl, I want to Party!

I am a real man and expect the same, 20-40 is cool and I prefer hairy muscle studs like Tom Selleck. I am all man at a pink 230, 5’9 with boyish charm at 49. I don’t look my age and got carded once. I feel 21 and that is all that matters!

I don’t have a pic as I am on the DL and don’t know you. Please send me a pic, though. You need to host. As a virgin, I have not been tested, but you need to be. I LOVE box wine so have some ready. Cannot wait to hear from you! Toodles!

I’d love to assume that this is a joke (if so, well written!)… but it is CraigsList!

Trip Report: West Coast Rubber 2010

2010-09-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

Before the Trip

West Coast Rubber takes place in Southern California each year on Labor Day weekend. This is year 6; the first one was the same time as Hurricane Katrina’s after effects were being felt in New Orleans. The event was originally held in Palm Springs, but has been in Los Angeles the last couple years. I attended the first 2 or 3 years, but I haven’t been to it since it moved to Los Angeles, in large part because L.A. didn’t hold a lot of attraction to me as a place to go for the weekend.

This year, lots of events that I might want to or need to attend piled up on me for Labor Day weekend: West Coast Rubber in Los Angeles; the Rain Country Dance Association Member’s Retreat (where I’ve been the last couple years) on the Olympic Peninsula; the Northwest LeatherSIR, Leatherboy, and Community Bootblack contest in Seattle; and a possible final VisQueens performance for Anchorage coronation. (I don’t think the last of those came off.) I chose WCR.

Travel: Friday

I ended up flying on Virgin America, as it was the cheapest option with decent flight times (10:30 am going down on Friday, 12:00 noon coming back on Monday). The airline still gives off a lounge/night club vibe, with the white plastic and subdued purple lighting, but it’s ultimately not appreciably different from anything else running down the coast. I did note that their boarding cards are only about 60% as long as most airlines; I wonder what that actually translates into as a cost savings for printing over the course of a year. (Probably a whole lot more than you’d imagine.)

There is no host hotel for the weekend, although they recommend the Silver Lake Comfort Inn as it is fairly central to the event locations (Syren, the bars, etc.) $130 a night for a 2-star hotel, though? *choke* So I priced around and found “America’s fastest growing hotel chain”, America’s Best Value Inn, with a motel about a mile from the Comfort Inn at $70 a night. Much more doable! (Although maybe I should have poked around on Hotwire and such to see if I could find something more upscale for that price, even if not as close in.)

On light rail to the airport, I got checked for ticket compliance. This happened on my last trip (Palm Springs in July), too, but had not before that. After a minute, I realized: light rail has been open for just about a year. They always said there would be spot checks, but they probably didn’t do any for the first year, to encourage ridership to get used to the train. And they may only be checking on airport-bound trips, rather than commute direction (since I didn’t get checked on those in July when I was riding the train to work).

Going to Los Angeles, a car is a must. I found a great deal through Ace Rent A Car, located at the Sheraton near the airport: a Smart Car for about $12.50 a day, $50 total for the weekend, or about half of what it would cost for a cheapest rental from my usual choice, Alamo. Unfortunately, I had forgotten how much easier it can be to deal with the big guys than these third-tier providers. Long story short: I don’t recommend Ace — the price was great, other parts not so much. (Read more here.)

The Events: Friday

After getting to the motel, I drove to a local store to get some groceries — the room had a fridge — and then had a couple tacos at Burrito King. After a nap, I went to another Mexican place for enchiladas to round out my dinner.

Friday night was the Meet & Greet and Rubber Fashion Show, at the showroom net door to Syren/Stockroom in Silver Lake. It was a comfortable cocktails venue with a fruit-and-cookies snack buffet and a hosted bar (at least for those with the weekend pass). A couple photographers were documenting things, so once again I got pics taken with booze in my hand. Sigh.

(Decent liquor selection at the bar, but the only beer option was Bud Light. WTF? And the red wine was okay, but the white wine was described by the bartender as “nun’s piss”; indeed, that intake of breath you do just before a sip said his description wasn't that far off. Urk.)

The fashion show feature various gear from Syren, including rubber aprons (I need one of those!), dog and rabbit hoods, body harnesses, see-through latex, wrestling singlets, straight jackets, and dildos. By being a closed event, they were able to have some nudity involved, and at one point, even some on-stage dildo play.

They also announced the new Mr. West Coast Rubber. Rather than a full contest, they took applications ahead of time and the previous titleholders chose based on those applications, apparently. It’s as valid a way as any, I suppose, but it took most of the drama and interest out of there being a titleholder; turned the title part of things into an apparent afterthought. Doing the decision ahead and behind the scenes is fine, but who else was competing? Can’t you even introduce them?

The winner is Reid from Vancouver, who always sports some great rubber gear when I’m up there. He’ll do a great job, and might bring in a 4th Canadian Mr. International Rubber title.

After the show, I cam back to the motel for a fuck date with a hot Latin guy who drove up from Irvine (45 minutes away) just for a crack at my ass. (Something like that makes you feel special, that you’re intriguing enough to take a good long ride to have a good long ride.) I think I served him well. Afterward, I went out to the Eagle for the Cub Scout event, and then to Slammer.

Slammer is a decent size sex club, with a main space that is mostly stalls and an elevated group blowjob area. Several of the stalls are equipped with slings. There are also two semi-outdoor cruise areas. Slammer was pretty underattended that night, but I did finally get a hand up my ass at about 3:30 am.

The Events: Saturday

I woke up at 11:30 and went to a nearby diner (Alexander’s Brite Spot) for breakfast. Piddled around for the early afternoon, trying to set up a play session, but no luck.

Afternoon event was a “slime pit” at the Eagle, from 4:00-6:00. I got there at 4:15 and was the first rubber guy to show up. The slime pit — actually a vinyl sheet on top of rubber padding, with lube on top, used as a rubber wrestling pit — didn’t get set up until 5:00. Six of us ended up wrestling and sliding all over the place.

Somewhere at the Eagle (I think), we found a chair leg or a post or some such wrapped with kitted or crotched yarn, like a weird cozy. I’ve since found the term “yarnbombing”, which apparently covers this — basically a form of anti-graffiti or a “random act of kindness”. Why you would do this to a chair at a leather bar, and in plain brown yarn, is beyond me.

Took a nap of sorts — didn’t sleep well — and then out to dinner at Pizza Buona. Don’t know if it was the sun, the beer, or the wrestling, but I was plastered all through dinner. Didn’t bode well for the evening. I had clam linguine in red sauce; yummy, but a huge portion, so I got the rest to go, intending to maybe heat it up for lunch on Sunday in the room’s microwave. (Never got around to it, alas.)

The evening “Gear Up” dungeon party was at a playspace in North Hollywood called Threshhold. Typically a het/pan space, it gets rented out for gay sessions as well. Some “gay event in het sex space” events don’t work very well (I’m thinking especially of the Center for Sex Positive Culture in Seattle, originally known as the Wet Spot), because they are set up mostly to make kinky straight and bi women comfortable, which doesn’t tend to be what kinky gay men want — we don’t want comfort, we want edgy and dark and loud and somewhat anonymous, even with the hint of danger. Threshhold was one of the better jobs of converting such a space for gay kinky use, with bondage areas and porn in the main area and low lighting throughout the rest of the space; barring the geisha and boudoir themes of some of the room, the space was reasonably conducive. (One major omission, though: no slings. Doubly odd because one guy I chatted with on Recon goes there for gay bondage parties and says there are usually a couple slings then. I can only guess that the people responsible for setting things up for Gear Up aren’t fisters and/or didn’t have any portable slings available.)

Play at Gear Up, for me, was sparse. Some guys were getting into some bondage and maybe some mummification (not my scene), but beyond that, it seemed to be mostly prowling and dick sucking. Not that such is bad, if there’s enough of it and it’s good. (There was some, and some good, just not enough.) At about midnight, I was prepping to leave — was going to go to Slammer again — but I got convinced to stay, to get into some mutual fisting.

We decided to use the medical room, which had a table with stirrups (although ones that just extended out, not up; silly pregnant women!) and was better (and better lit, although still dim) than other options. I got into his ass without much difficulty, and then passed him on to David (with big hands, a little too big for his comfort at that point), and then to Peter (with tiny hands, who probably could have double-fisted him if we hadn’t been at it a while already). We then got me on the table, and he was able to get into me easily (which is always nice). We played for a bit, but my clean-out eventually gave out (as I thought it was going to; churn churn went the tummy).

I used J-Lube with him because he was in latex, but I was in neoprene and industrial boots, so we used Crisco with me. This was apparently his first time using Crisco for fisting.

The Events: Sunday

My search for a brunch spot for Sunday was fruitless. A web search showed a handful of nearby possibilities. The nearest was a coffee place where “breakfast” was four bagel options. I aimed for one near downtown, but could not get to it; the street I was on turned one way and took me back across the freeway, to where I would have been six blocks away before I could try to find my way back, so I gave up on that one. Another option turned out to be a restaurant supply place, and another was closed. I ended up at Starbucks. Sigh.

Sunday afternoon was a pool party at a house in the Altadena hills, a beautiful private location with a great view of the valley. It was attended about half by WCR attendees and half by other guests or people who had bought just the single ticket for that event.

My left shoulder was hurting. At first I thought it was from holding my own legs up during play the night before, but later I decided I probably strained it a little with the slime pit wrestling.

Unfortunately, after about an hour at the pool party, I made the mistake of accepting a couple hits of pot and I quickly ended up pretty toasted, to the point that I pretty much just quietly sat off to the side the rest of the afternoon. Didn’t engage with anyone, didn’t go swimming, didn’t even walk around much (and thus stayed out of the sun). My senses of time and speed were so fucked up, I didn’t trust myself to even walk around much, and If I sat down somewhere I could recline, I was sure I would fall asleep. (I’m told now that I probably should have walked around more. I’ll remember than next time.) Pretty much wrecked my afternoon as a result. Party was scheduled to run until 5:00 (I think), and I left about 4:45; just picked up my bag and left without saying goodbye to anyone.

That’s the third time I’ve been too blitzed like this to trust myself this summer. First time, I was hitting it off with a guy at the bar, we had a couple hits with his friends, and some time later I found that he wasn’t there any more and I didn’t remember why (but I can guess) or when he left. When I tried to go home, I couldn’t even get the scooter to start (probably a good thing), so I went to the sex club for a few hours (and didn’t do much there) until enough had worn off that I could ride home. Second time, I got toasted with someone else and had some fantastic sex as a result, but then had to ride back to my hotel. I wasn’t too bad, but being in a new neighborhood in a less familiar city, I couldn’t track well where I was on my route and had to stop twice to check the phone map; I was only going about 2 miles, but absolutely could not tell where I was or how far I had gone.

I’ve done this a couple times in the past at other parties, too, taking more than I probably should. This is not a feeling I like, very out of control. Intellectually and after the fact, I apparently am adequately in control, but my brain is racing so much that I feel that I’m not. Obviously, I have to learn balance much better with this and limit myself to only one or two hits unless I’m at my final destination of the evening. (If I’m where I’m going to sleep, fuck it, just keep me from falling down the stairs.)

(I’m such a lightweight. That comes with never smoking anything until in my late 30s, I guess.)

Back at the hotel, I tried to nap, but no good, so I got online for some cruising. Invited a guy over who was a bit of an SM top. Some dick sucking and marking up my ass with the tail of my rubber belt (hurts more than a leather one!), and then zoom zoom, he had his hand up my ass. Ah, very nice. I appreciate going into some good SM subspace now and then.

Last formal event of the weekend was the group dinner at Casita del Campo, a Mexican restaurant in Silver Lake. 11 or 12 of us were there in gear. It was an enjoyable time, but I was still somewhat toasted from the afternoon pot, so I was fairly quiet. At the end, we said our goodbyes.

I had originally wanted to go play some more, maybe go back to Slammer, but with the pot slowly wearing off, my shoulder hurting, and no afternoon nap, I headed back to the hotel. Invited a guy over for some dick sucking, but ended up sending him away after a bit; I just wasn’t into it, and I went to bed shortly after.

Travel: Monday

Breakfast at Starbucks again. Sigh. I really prefer to mix it up. Maybe should have hit the Mexican place I ate at on Friday night instead, in retrospect, since they serve breakfast.

Returned the car. Didn’t have nearly as long of a wait, but see this page for the aftermath on the rental return.

Talked to Cliff at the airport, since he had been house sitting while I was gone. He offered to pick me up at the airport, and suggested we later go to a friend’s Labor Day Party. After we got back to the house, we did some removing of branches off one of my cedars (in light rain), preparatory to taking it down completely the next weekend.

The party was a bit of a bust, with low attendance (due to the rain and too much partying by people over the weekend) and a lot of the people smoked (and frankly, we weren’t all that interested in the conversations), so we left after an hour or so.

Back at the house, we watched Hairspray (the movie version of the musical version of the movie version; that is, the one with John Travolta). I haven’t seen the stage musical, but a couple notable songs were missing from this and John Travolta in a fat suit doesn’t make a pretty woman (or much of a woman at all), so I came away thinking that the original Divine movie is likely the best of the three.

Trip Report: Wet ’n Hot 14

2010-08-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

The weekend after July 4th, I went to Palm Springs for Wet ’n Hot 14.

WARNING: This is going to include discussion about fetish sex activities, activities which some people consider disgusting, some consider unsafe, and which just make some people uncomfortable. Don’t bother reading this if you are one of those people.

It’s also going to be pretty long.

The Fetish

Wet ’n Hot is a watersports (piss) and fist fetish weekend.

Some description of watersports is warranted here, because people who don't engage in it have many different ideas about what it entails (some right and some wrong). At its basest level, watersports in sex play involving piss. This can take several forms and directions, including:

Pissing on someone who is naked. Attractions include hot liquid, odors, and the sexual component.
Pissing on someone who is clothed. Consider the way the clothing changes appearance, weight, and temperature, both as it wets and as it dries.
Pissing in someone, orally. Drinking piss, either as the provider or the consumer. Also includes drinking from a glass or bottle.
Pissing in someone, anally.
Domination or degradation, of someone relieving themselves on someone else.
Domination or degradation, of having a full bladder and being limited in where and when pissing may be done.

You can easily see how, for people who enjoy these activities, this can be a very sexually piggy thing — control and release, temperature, volume, scent and taste, and just the entire socially forbidden nature of things. As a result, other piggy activities tend to get done by the same people who are into watersports, and thus are part of Wet ’n Hot, too: group sex, sucking, fucking, armpits, rimming, and fisting — anything that doesn’t need much more than a naked body and a piggy attitude (and maybe some lube).

Event History and My Experiences

Wet ’n Hot started in 1997. The first time I attended was 2000. At the time, the event already had a notorious reputation, with the primary resort site having been picketed a year or two before by people (presumably religious fundies) who were appalled at the event. (Frankly, it just being a sex event was probably enough to get them up in arms. Piss was just enough of a shock to push them way over the top.)

That first year I attended was fantastic. Probably 300 people, full run of the large gay clothing-optional resort, and so on. It was also my first trip to Palm Springs, which colors the memories some, too. I played with a number of guys, stretched my boundaries, and had a great time. I still have the event t-shirt from that year (and the next two) and the Palm Springs baseball cap I bought that year to shield me from the midday sun.

The second year I attended (2001), attendance was noticeably down, probably by 1/3. To this day, I don’t know of any specific reason for it. Possibly the bloom was off the rose of watersports being the hot fetish activity, or maybe there were internal issues with the host organization that caused problems, less advertising, whatever. In particular, though, where the resort had been WnH-only the previous year, this time general attendance guest passes were available, which caused Wet ’n Hot to be relegated to just a portion of the grounds and require wrist bands for access. This meant that people not involved in the fetish were around, and that changed the energy significantly. Nonetheless, I did get to play with a couple hot guys and had a good time.

I attended again the next year (2002), and attendance was down sharply again, to what I would guess was under 100 people. Also, piss play was being supplanted by “pig play” — what I referred to as “anyone, anything, any hole, any time” — a lot more multiple partner unprotected sex, mostly fucking but also fisting in what I considered (and still do) inappropriate places and times, and a lot less piss play. (This is significant: it’s one thing to have more of other stuff, but when you have less of the ostensible purpose of the weekend, something is definitely wrong.) I played very little that year, and generally had a lousy time. I decided to not go back after that.

I didn’t hear anything about Wet ’n Hot for a few years, then a couple years ago, my buddy BJ attended, apparently giving some sort of workshop or demo, and he said he had a good time.

Preparation

This year, when the final round of messaging e-mails went out about the event, I saw they were touting 350 guys registered, which surprised me. I poked around the website and was impressed again about the information they were putting out there about it, including touting it as a piss and fisting weekend rather than just piss play, which I felt could help to direct some of the random pig play behaviors I had seen on prior trips.

Combined with Seattle’s coldest June on record — we didn’t break 75 degrees until Pride week, a record by almost two weeks — and my not having been to Palm Springs in about four years, I checked around and found decent air fare (through SNA [John Wayne Memorial Airport, aka Orange County], two hours drive away from Palm Springs), car, and hotel prices, so I took the plunge. Worst case, I could abandon the evening events if they were dead and hang at The Barracks and Tool Shed and still have a good weekend getaway in the desert.

(Unfortunately, I swear Delta did a bait-n-switch on me with the airfare, swapping the 4:30 pm departure I wanted for a 9:00 am one that was the same price. So I had to pay a $150 change fee 5 minutes after booking the trip. That hurt. I’ve had this happen once before, perhaps with Delta, so I’m going to watch the site like a hawk the next time I book through them.)

I decided that to streamline my time at the airports — and to save the $25 bag check fee — I would try to do this trip just with a carry-on. I’m notorious (to myself, anyway) for packing heavy (I need enough reading material, and I want a buffer of a little more clothing than I’ll actually need, and then there’s the leather and the laptop and…), but if I couldn’t go light on a trip where I expect to spend much of my time wearing nothing but pool shoes, then I have deeper problems.

One thing to go was the laptop. I could depend just on the iPhone for web and e-mail. Leather would also be reduced to just a pair of boots and a vest; something in case I ended up spending more than a couple Friday afternoon hours at the leather bars, but not very much. Reading material: three comics collections. (This ended up being a little too little; I should have taken a fourth, which I would have got about halfway through. No big deal, the phone had games.)

My only pair of sunglasses broke a week before the trip, so I figured I would have to buy a pair somewhere along the way. (I ended up not doing so. Probably should have, but never tracked some down. Bought some at the Sunglass Hut outlet in Centralia the next weekend, though, on a trip to Portland.)

When I got to the airport, I realized I forgot to pack a baseball cap. That I would definitely need. My first instinct was to buy one when I got to Palm Springs, but I have a cap from there (which I bought for Wet ’n Hot in 2000 and meant to bring this time). So I ended up perusing the Seattle-themed ones at the airport, and ended up with one with red and yellow stripes on it; sounds good, I can tag that as a fetish hat. (I usually dislike wearing location-branded items — shirts, etc. — that are from where I live, but I could rationalize the exception here, since it would help people identify me better at the event.)

The Event This Year

When I attended previously, the event had been at one resort for the evenings and another for the afternoons. Now, the entire thing was at the previous afternoon location, which is probably only half the size of the old evening location. This had a couple good effects, though, because there are several gay resorts within a couple blocks walking distance which they could use (at the old site, overflow locations were not close), and the smaller space made the event seem more crowded, which is valuable for something like this, where proximity makes people more willing to chat and to play.

I can’t say if there were the listed 350 people attending, but the numbers were close enough to that to not quibble over. Suffice to say that the venue was full but not crowded. I met guys from Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, New York, Washington DC, and even Chile and New Zealand (they were making this part of a larger vacation trip). Attendance was predominantly white, but there were a few black, Asian, and Hispanic guys present. Age range was pretty much 30s through 50s, although there were a few younger and a few older. Body type ranged from slender through chunky/bearish; I don’t think I saw many rail-thin guys nor much in the way of outright fat, but it also certainly wasn’t “be built or go home”.

As mentioned earlier, the last time I attended, I played relatively little, and even the time before that, I mostly played with just a couple guys. Attendance was up this year, and so was my breadth of play partners. While I didn’t get all the play I wanted — who does? — I did get plenty. I knew that I needed to start hydrating early and abundantly, but my body wasn’t responding as well as it should, as quickly as I wanted.

Getting back in the groove of watersports play — I haven’t done a lot of it in recent years, alas, and especially not in the desert — meant I had to “remember” how to hydrate well, and I had some pissing troubles on Friday.

The slings were quite crowded on Friday night — only a little fisting that I saw, mostly fucking that I saw — but I eventually got in one for some fist play with a buddy. Unfortunately, my earlier clean out had been inadequate or had worn off, so just about as soon as he got in, we have to stop. A later fuck session showed that my ass was pretty nasty, too, which halted that, and I left a bit later, around 12:30.

Rather than deal with finding a brunch spot (and to save some money), I had gone to the local Ralph’s supermarket and got sweet rolls, bananas, yogurt, and orange juice for breakfast. I lounged in the room, and then cleaned out and headed back to the event site for the afternoon BBQ and play session.

Attendance was much lighter in the heat of the day. I’m sure some were still sleeping, or sight seeing, or just marshalling their strength for the evening. As they did in the previous years I attended, there was BBQ chicken, hamburgers, and hot dogs, plus fixings, potato salad, and so forth.

I was more able to do more piss play Saturday afternoon, engaging in some here and there, plus a fisting session, and I put my name in for (but didn’t ultimately win) the International Mr. Piss contest. I also got a small amount of sunburn; just a little, about what I expected/planned on.

When I had arrived that afternoon, the guy from Chile complimented my piss-yellow tank top, wanting to find one that color, so when I left, I gave it to him. I've got plenty of tank tops at home, and this one was starting to show its age. After a short nap back at the hotel, I went out for dinner at a nearby Moroccan restaurant. I had brought one pair of long pants and a button-down short sleeve shirt for such an event.

That evening, the temperature dropped quite a bit further and a strong breeze came in, making for a cooler, more comfortable evening. That may have contributed, but my inhibitions were down and my hydration was up, so I was able to engage in more play, both piss and fisting. (I had a “clean out” problem early in the evening with my first fisting run, forcing me to hurry back to my hotel for a touch up and then back to the party site before the doors were closed at 10 pm.)

At one point, I was making out with a guy and pissing up his chest, but with my extra piss oomph (I’m able to release a very strong stream and piss a good 6—8 feet horizontally), I was able to hit us in the chin, then in the face, and then hit the guy behind him. I also had a couple fountains during fisting — when the hand comes out, so does my piss — blasting up to hit the cross-bars on the portable sling. Whee!

Aftermath

On Sunday morning, after breakfast in the room and coffee across the street, I did some fruitless online cruising and then drove back to Orange County airport. I did chit-chat connect with a guy who identified my fisting interest based the red on the harness in my Grindr photo. We didn’t get to play this trip, but hope to in the future. We’ve exchanged some e-mails since then, too.

Made it back home at a reasonable hour — after another brief plane switch in Salt Lake — but I was pretty tired from the trip. Too much sun, too much liquid flowing into and then out of the body, too much activity. Just what I expected, but it took me a couple days after to come back to good shape.

In the end, I had a really good time at Wet ’n Hot 14. It felt good to reconnect with an area of fetish play which I've been out of for some time. Attendance levels and the energy were nearly back to where it was in 2000, the first time I went (and the one which will always have that special “glow” to it). I also found that I’ve missed going to Palm Springs at least once or twice a year; even though it’s cheapest to fly into a coastal airport and drive two hours, it’s still a great trip. I’m hoping to go back for New Year’s this year.

I expect I will try to go to Wet ’n Hot 15 next summer, although I will definitely stay in one of the clothing-optional gay resorts. More expensive, but you get the full Palm Springs experience. And who knows, I might win the lottery for a room at the main site. (Of course, I’d also like to go for FistFest, which is there in June. Can I manage both next year? Mmm, we’ll see!)

My First Kiss

2010-08-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

Conor Friedersdorf on The Daily Dish prompted readers to send the story of their first kiss. SO I decided to write this up for the blog (and to send to him).

Frankly, my first kiss story isn’t interesting. It’s the third kiss where you get the goods.

First Kiss: I was a freshman in high school, and there was some sort of Christmas party or dance. An older girl — sophomore, I think, maybe named Dori? — brought over a sprig of mistletoe and kissed me.

Second Kiss: At our high school, Senior Prom was paid for by the Junior class, so all the seniors had to do was attend. Which means you kind of have to, or you look weird. Which means you have to get a date, and dress up nice, and take her out for dinner. (sigh) On the girl’s end, that means there’s an expectation of a kiss of some sort in the mix. My date was my younger sister’s best friend, Amy.

Sense where this is going?

Third Kiss: His name was Lin.

Just short of turning 22, during the summer between first and second years of grad school at the University of Oregon, I finally decided I was gay. (More on that tale someday.) That fall, I found that there was a gay men’s discussion group at a community center just a block or so from my apartment, which I learned about from the campus newspaper, so I attended a couple sessions there. I have no idea what was discussed, how “out” I felt at the time, or any of that. (I do recall that the next spring, I went to some potlucks and to a gay campout with some of the guys from there, though, so I must have kept going regularly.)

I met a guy there named Lin, originally from Wyoming. I don’t know how old he was — late 20s, maybe 30, I think today looking 21 years into the past, but for all I know, maybe just 23 or so, but definitely older than me and more experienced. He was, I think, about 5'9" tall, with a beard and curly hair and a bear-type body.

Memory is weak after all these years — was that the first discussion group I attended, or after several weeks? No idea. I’m pretty sure it was the Wednesday of Thanksgiving weekend, and I was making cinammon rolls from scratch, to take to my parents’ house in Kennewick the next morning (a six-hour drive? Maybe they were for breakfast on Friday?). Lin came back to my apartment with me while I attended to the rolls, punching down the batter the first time, which had risen during the discussion group.

I have no idea today just how we met at the discussion group, or what I had told him about myself and my then lack of experience, but while the rolls rose a second time, I had my first roll on the carpet. Fifteen minutes of rolling around on trashy rust-colored shag carpet later, wildly exploring each other’s faces, we came up for air, and I remember his quote exactly:

“Are you sure you’ve never done this before?”

Guess I was a natural.

All we acquainted ourselves with that first night was tongue. Other gay things came easily (ahem) as well, but not until the next week, after I got back from Thanksgiving. Getting your first tiny taste of sexuality and then having to spend the weekend with your parents a couple hundred miles away is not recommended for frustration minimization, believe me!

What is a “Craigslist bot”?

2010-08-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

There are two types of Craigslist bots:

Posting bots are used to post ads to Craigslist. In theory, this is a legitimate action, allowing people to compose personal or business ads offline — perhaps several similar ads for different items — and post them with a single button click. In practice, though, these bots are usually a form of spam, producing ads (especially personal ads) aimed to get people to reply and be directed to a website or simply have their e-mail address harvested for spam mailings. By some estimates, as many as half the woman-seeking-man personal ads are bot posts.

Here’s a site with recommendations on how to spot these bots.

Reply bots are more clever, replying to your posts to get you to reply back, again either to harvest your e-mail address or direct you to another site which will do God knows what. They have apparently broken the CAPTCHA security measures to access the ability to send you e-mail.

Some of the advice in that post above is helpful for spotting reply bots. Here’s the most recent exchange I had with a reply bot, and how I could have (but didn’t) spot that it was a fake. He replied to my post, and included a pic of a shirtless reasonably cute guy who is even wearing “gay” underwear (2(x)ist brand), saying:

i would love to meet a nice guy for a fwb situation as well. i am free today to meet. how are you? what is your name?

You can’t judge just by fractured grammar and capitalization. I know plenty of real people who write no better than this, especially in online cruising scenarios. It’s like their brain isn’t what’s engaged when they are e-mailing you.
My post said nothing about “FWB” (Friends With Benefits, aka Fuck Buddy). It was a straight-up (ahem) kink sex post.
His post was sent at 1:44 am on Monday. The odds of real guys being up and posting (and not strung out on something) goes down as the hour gets later, and reduces further after midnight on Sunday.
Although his ostensible name is “Darren”, his return address was junk: tamikapateljtvq@yahoo.com
The name of his pic file was also junk: fxKeDPlKwD0pTnkDLiPc9wxx.jpg

After I replied back that I was interested, but that I wanted to know what he was after regarding an FWB situation, given the kink sex nature of my ad, the bot replied (with two more pics, these with reasonable names like me13.jpg):

cool :) lets do this then yea?
let me know when ur free
just do me a favor and sign up on my profile
gaysingles
its a service i use to make sure the guys i meet are safe bc ive kinda had somebad experiences in the past
just make sure you say youre over 25 and it should be free
when ur done feel free to give me a call/txt (cells on my profile)
talk to u soon

“gaysingles” was a linked URL: http://www.safelydating.net/dl77, which redirects through at least three sites to resolve to http://tracking.singlesnet.com/redirect/5974?affiliate=127328. singlesnet.com is owned by Match.com (along with almost 37,000 other domain names).

Needless to say, once you’ve received multiple times the same boilerplate “screening” text directing you to some site you’ve never heard anyone mention before, you know it’s a bot. But you can tell a lot earlier, if you know what to look for.

Curiously, my final reply of “You’re kidding, right?” got no further response. Guess they got the address they wanted, and now I’ll get Viagra ads.

Updated on November 1, 2010

Posted a follow-up with several new bot replies.

What does “clean” mean?

2010-07-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

“Clean”, when used in an online profile, can have two meanings. Neither of them is “freshly showered”.

(Former) Drug Use

“Clean” is often used as part of the phrase “clean and sober”, referencing being in recovery from drug and alcohol abuse. Used by itself, it will typically only be in reference to drug abuse (meth, heroin, cocaine, etc.), not alcohol use. It typically is not used in regard to tobacco and marijuana (although there will be exceptions).

Of course, the only people who use the term in this way are those who are actively in recovery (or those whose lives have been so touched by drug abuse that they are part of that community by proxy, and use the terminology). Which means that someone using “clean” in their profile this way has had a past issue with drug use; those who have no had an issue generally see no need to use the term.

(Drug and alcohol abuse and recovery are a much deeper subject than I’m covering here. Please excuse glossing over of the details in this post. I don’t intend to shortchange the struggles involved, but neither is it appropriate to hijack this post to delve into those details.)

(Lack of) Sexually Transmitted Diseases

The other use of “clean” is with regard to STDs, as in “clean bill of health”. The implication here is that the individual has had a recent health screening and no STDs were found, including not just HIV but also hepatitis, HPV (venereal/anal warts), gonorrhea, and so forth.

Truth and Accuracy

As ever, what people say in their profiles and what is actually true are different things:

Profiles may get out of date, so what was true may be months old
Guys may have had an HIV test but not a screening for other STDs
Some guys will list what they believe to be true, with no actual knowledge
Some guys will lie, especially if they think they will get laid
Recovery is a long (perhaps never ending) process, so “clean” is really “clean since date X”
Some guys relapse, going in and out of recovery

How can you tell which usage is in effect? You’ll have to read between the lines and perhaps engage the person in direct conversation. Look for references to drug and alcohol use, to sexual preferences, and to the person’s involvement in the community. (Or just come out and ask.)

As always, without assuming that anyone is actively lying, always assume the minimum: that what is in someone’s profile is what they believed was correct when they wrote it, but may not be correct now. Use the presence of the codeword to start a conversation, not to avoid one.

What does “undetectable” mean?

2010-07-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

Medically

In technical terms, “undetectable” (with regard to HIV infection) means that the level of HIV in the blood is below the threshhold for detection, typically below 50 parts per milliliter. During early stages of infection and before treatment, these levels can soar into the hundreds of thousands and even millions. With aggressive treatment, levels will settle down to the thousands, the hundreds, and below. There is a direct connection between this level and how infectious a person is apt to be; a major goal of treatment is to keep these levels suppressed, both to reduce risks of infection and simply to keep HIV from progressing into AIDS and further compromising the individual’s immune system.

Here are two web pages for some more info:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071206220353AAVFSoz

http://www.labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/viral_load/test.html

Please note that I’m not a doctor nor an expert on HIV therapy, so I can’t evaluate the details of those pages. I’m just someone who (a) pays attention and (b) wants to help decode some of the codewords people use online.

Conceptually

“Undetectable” often gets used in online profiles to indicate a person who is in a healthy, monitored state regarding his HIV infection, someone who participates in treatment. It is intended to defuse HIV-phobia, where guys are scared to have sex with HIV-positive guys.

Risky Behaviors

As with any of the phrases I’ve been writing about, though, “undetectable” is sometimes used as a codeword, something either used or interpreted to mean something other than the technical meaning.

In this case, there is an obvious connection that gets made between “undetectable” and “not infectious”. This is an incorrect connection, of course, because the person is not cured; he is still infectious, albeit believed to be far less so. This incorrect connection can lead sex partners to assume that unprotected sex with such a person is “safe”.

(Of course, some people are going to read this and be all offended because they think I’ve just accused them of trying to lure HIV-negative guys into having unprotected sex with them, when they are really just trying to put their health status out there. Calm down, boys: I’m saying that some men use “undetectable” as a codeword for that result, and that some men read that as a coded invite for unprotected sex. If you don’t use it or read it that way, super, but don’t lie to yourself: you know some guys do.)

Of note as well is the monitoring schedule. Just as with HIV tests, which are only accurate at the time of testing, “undetectable” was the state at testing time. Viral load testing is done every 2–3 months, so if the person has had an immune system change, including a change of therapy, a “drug holiday”, been sick, or gone on a bender — and heck, just day-to-day shifts can occur — what was “undeteactable” then may not be now. (Add to this that some guys rarely or never update their profile text, especially not portions which would change their chances of getting laid.) And thus coded use or reading of the term has an added risk attached.

What is a “wink”, a “smile”, or a “tug”?

2010-06-20T13:54:00.000-07:00

On most of the cruise sites, there exists a button or link to Send A Smile to another site member (whose profile you are viewing), Send a Tug, a Nudge, a Wink, Poke them, and so on. But you’ll also see profiles where users say “Don’t send tugs” or “I don’t reply to winks.”

You have to wonder why, if some people hate these things so much, they are still even available.

What They Are

What these things are (mostly) intended to be are content-free “Hello” mechanism.

In the real world, motorcycle riders signal each other as they ride by, acquaintances wave to each other across the bar, and people make brief eye-contact at the supermarket. We acknowledge each other’s presence and existence, and signal a mild recognition.

The intent of these online mechanisms is pretty much the same thing. “You’re on my buddy list and I thought I’d say hi.” “I looked at your profile and wanted you to know I thought it was good.” “I see that you sent me a smile, so here’s one back.”

Why People Hate Them

The problem that arises is that many of these interactions which gay guys encounter (other than Facebook “pokes”) are on cruise sites, and thus may carry sexual intent. You wouldn’t be there if you weren’t looking for (or at least thinking about) sex, right? So when you “nudge” someone, what does it mean? (Well, it means exactly what you meant it to mean, right?)

For the person receiving the “tug”, though, it could be interpreted to mean many things:

I’m your buddy, just saying hi
I visited your profile
I visited your profile and liked it
I want you to visit my profile
I think you’re sexy/hot/cute/woofy
I think you’re sexy/hot/cute/woofy but I’m too shy to send you a real note
I think you’re sexy/hot/cute/woofy but saying nothing more than “I think you’re sexy/hot/cute/woofy” in a note sounds dumb (and nothing more than “Hey” would sound real dumb)
I expect you to know exactly what I mean by this and for you to do the correct follow-up, and I’ll be pissy if you don’t

Ambiguity in socio-sexual settings unnerves many guys. They don’t know how to interpret the signals, they don’t know if they should react, they don’t know what the next move is (if any). And so rather than making some response which might be inferior or outright wrong, they throw up their hands and say “Go away! If you can’t be 100% clear in your intentions [which is to say, if I can’t be 100% sure about your intentions], I’d rather not have them directed at me!”

What I Do

When I get a wink/nudge/smile/poke/tug, I treat it for the one thing it unambiguously is: an invitation to (think about) conversation. (That’s the one thing definite: another person was saying “Hey, I’m here!”)

Then I analyze further. Do I recognize the screen name? (And if so, do I need to do anything more?) I most likely go look at the guy’s profile: maybe I’ll recognize his pic, or maybe he has new pics or new profile details. If he’s someone I have any interest in acknowledging back — I know him, or he’s sexy/hot/cute/woof, or I just feel that it would be polite — I’ll send at least a wink/nudge/smile/poke/tug in return (I’ll “wave back”). And maybe I’ll linger on his profile, check out his pics, fantasize a bit, and then send a full message back to him, saying how sexy/hot/cute/woofy I think he is and how I’d like to wink/nudge/smile/poke/tug him in person sometime and is he free tonight or this weekend?

But I find it really hard to be annoyed at someone whom I may not know who is waving at me from across the room.

(Now, if everyone across the room started waving all at once with big sweeping arms and jumping up and down… I’d probably pop one of those Viagra pills smuggled out of Nigeria by the prime minister’s cousin and go fuck them all at once.)

What does “Poz-Friendly” mean?

2010-06-20T12:12:00.000-07:00

Short Answer

“Poz-Friendly” means “HIV-negative, but willing to have sex with positive guys, using rubbers and such.”

Much Longer Answer

In the 1980s, AIDS and HIV had the gay community running scared. Early on, no one knew what it was or how it was contracted. For guys who didn’t have AIDS and who weren’t especially well informed, avoidance became a major method of dealing with it: avoid social contact and especially avoid sexual contact.

Later, when the sexual and body fluids transmission routes became better documented, the social avoidance issues eventually mostly went away. Of course, habits born of emergency and fear are hard to kill, so it took years for the bulk of the gay community to re-establish suitable social engagement, and that cascades outward, such that you still get bizarre transmission avoidance notions in third-world countries, such as eating lots of garlic with ward of HIV.

But if social avoidance largely ceased, sexual avoidance didn’t. How safe are condoms? How safe is oral sex? How safe is open-mouthed kissing? These sorts of questions, coupled with the push to desensitize people to the idea of HIV by encouraging guys to reveal their HIV status prior to a sexual encounter, kept sex with HIV+ as a major avoidance subject. That continues to this day. You can see online profiles loaded with terms like “negative”, “clean”, and “DDF” (drug and disease free), all of which are code for “HIV+ need not apply.”

One of my regrets from the mid-1990s is that when I was dating Eric, and he informed me of his HIV+ status, I broke things off with him. Not directly, consciously because he was positive, but over the following year or two, I realized that was the core of things, and that embarrassed me. That brought me to a few realizations:

Drug advances at the time were making HIV less of a death sentence than it had been in the previous years.
I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, so I was cutting off a large pool of potential boyfriends and sex partners by cutting out HIV+ guys.
Until I was told, I couldn’t tell if someone was HIV+, and due to incubation periods and other issues, a guy might not know his own status, so any reaction I had might be only after we had had sex, at which point the risks had already occurred.

After achieving these realizations, I accepted that my own behaviors were the most important part of the equation. If I insisted on appropriate measures, I could have hot sex and even pursue relationships with guys regardless of their HIV status, and even if they didn’t know their status accurately, I could avoid being a blocker to pleasure.

Obviously, I’m not the only person to have come to these realizations. They are fairly widespread (although not universal) in the leather community, where there is a more strongly stated awareness of both what safer sex practices mean (due to the broader range of sex acts leather guys engage it) and an awareness of the costs when aspects of the community are sidelined and pushed away (since leather has been itself in the past).

Today, many guys who have come to these realizations and want to be sure that other people are aware of it — especially HIV+ guys, since they are those who are primarily targetted with the phrase — use “Poz-Friendly” (often as “Safe Sex/Poz-Friendly”) in their online profiles as such, indicating both that they engage in safe sex (rubbers and gloves) and that they don’t discriminate based on HIV status.

Mr. Friendly

An effort has been made to attach some iconography to this concept, called “Mr. Friendly”, a smiley face with his nose a + and one eye a -. (Myself, I think the icon fails. I identify the icon as the Jack In The Box mascot before attaching sex-related meanings to it.) You can read more about Mr. Friendly here.

If you leave things hanging, a hookup won’t happenOr…Apparently being a top means never having to say “Maybe I was wrong”

2010-06-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

Prepping for a recent trip out of state, I started poking around the locals on various cruise sites a couple weeks beforehand, to see who was out there and if I could set up a playdate. After I looked at one guy’s profile — top, into tickling but also into a bunch of other stuff based on the gear mentioned in his profile — he hit me up. I told him when I was going to be there, and that I was looking to play Friday or Saturday nights.

Four days before I would be there, he left me a note suggesting we play Saturday morning (so I would have the rest of the day free), and he asked if I was ticklish. He said he didn’t check the site every day, and left his phone number.

I replied that same night that I wasn’t available during the day, was looking for the evening, and indicated that I wasn’t really interested in tickling. I didn’t expect a reply back for at least a couple days, based on his last message, and when I didn’t hear back by Saturday (5 days), it appeared evident that since I wasn’t available for when and what he wanted, he had simply dropped the conversation. Miss Manners probably wouldn’t approve, but such behavior is hardly unusual for online cruise site discourse.

Over a week later, he finally sent me a note back and here’s the exchange that ensued. (I’ve removed all indications of his identity, but left both his and my text as written, with the exception of changing straight quotes to prettier curly ones and the like.)

Him:

Guess you weren’t really interested in meeting. Provided my phone number to you twice, and yet you never called to try and manage logistics and meeting times.

Me:

No, you provided it once (check your History). You proposed a time that could not work for me, and frankly, the tickling fetish isn’t what I was after.

While you said you don’t check this daily, the fact that you made no replies after *Monday* implied to me that you weren’t that interested.

So don’t put the entire burden back on me. “Crossed signals&rdquo is best.

Him:

Gonna disagree here. You don’t know how I use tickling in a scene…youre scared of some erotic touch?!?! I gave u my phone number to use… U didn’t use it. Pretty simple. Hope your trip was good but you did drop the ball.

Me:

Look, it’s really simple: your last message on Monday gave me nothing to feed off of. You basically said “Here’s what I like to do most and when&rdquo (which is great), but I replied “I can’t do it then and I’m not sure that’s what I want to do.&rdquo And you didn’t respond back for several days. Why would anyone call someone after four days to set up something in that circumstance? As the Magic 8-Ball would say, “All signs point to no.&rdquo

Would you have been up for fisting at 10 pm on Saturday, rather than tickling at 10 am? Where are my clues for that?

If you still think I dropped the ball, the you’re showing that I was right to. I *could* have called, but I had no incentive to.

Him:

Whatever u need to think to justify your actions. See… Humans converse. Had u done the human thing and called you might have learned what u needed. It’s not my job to “sell” you on an encounter. I clearly said I don’t use that interface often. I’ve no shortage of playmates, but I’d say your approach prevented our meeting. Pure and simple. And I’ve “incentive&rdquo to chase you. Might lookup others with whom I played… That’s why they are listed in my profile. Once again, u made no effort. Last MSG from me, uninspired by you, dude. Your profile led me to believe you were a bit more than you displayed in this encounter.

Me:

Yes, humans converse, and you didn’t.

And it *is* your job to sell me on an enocunter (and mine to sell you). It goes both ways.

(And then I blocked him, since it sure wasn’t going to get any friendlier after that.)

Diss where I live, that’ll help you get laid!

2010-06-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, I got contacted by a guy on Manhunt who was looking to top in BDSM and kinky play. We took the exchange to e-mail (that’s what he wanted). Here’s how it went:

Me:

Hello, sir. Thanks for contacting me on Manhunt.

I am certainly interested in meeting you for possible play. I am very much into fisting, but I also like piss play, many forms of BDSM, and just plain fucking and sucking. I would be happy to strictly bottom for you.

You can reach me at this e-mail address at your leisure. I am available this weekend, after 11 pm on Friday.

Him:

wknds are unlikely to work for me often
monday mornings are often good for me
where do you live?

Me:

Perhaps some weekday evenings would work? I could do a Monday morning on occasion; just have to work late to balance it (but I can do that).

I live in Columbia City/Mt. Baker.

Him:

wow, Columbia City, cool neighborhood but not very convenient.
evenings are not easy for the same reason as wknds, happily married with kids
send ass face body pix

Not too happily married, I would guess, if you’re trolling for gay sex to happen when the wife is at work and the kids are at school.

But really: your job as a BDSM top is to seduce me into doing what you want. My job as a BDSM bottom is to seduce you into doing to me what I want. It’s a two-way street; just because you’re the ostensible top doesn’t mean you have free rein to dictate all aspects of the scene.

He could have been more firm on the time constraints. Since Monday mornings are apparently all he was interested in, he really should have made that clear from the first contact.

But for God’s sake, don’t diss where I live! Just tell me it’s too far to work for you and I’ll understand.

“Fuck off” is a great safeword to stop Internet sessions gone astray.

Updated on October 13, 2010

A few weeks ago, I got hit up by a boy who was looking to recruit another bottom for his daddy/sir to play with. Guess who his top was?

I politely declined, saying just that I had had a past exchange with his top which didn’t go well, and refused to give details.

What does “discreet” mean?

2010-06-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

I often see cruise posts — especially on CraigsList — where the writer describes himself as “discreet”.

Once upon a time, that would have referred to the person himself being discreet, being trustworthy when it comes to dealing with people who may have careers or other situations where it would be bad to have their name and pics broadcast widely in a homosexual context. (For example, an elementary school teacher or someone living with an elderly parent.) By extension, a request for a hookup connection to be “discreet” was a request to respect those sensitive areas: don’t broadcast my name, understand why the only pic I can send you includes a woman, please don’t leave sexy messages on my answering machine.

Today, of course, that meaning has mutated. Today, “discreet” allegedly means closeted. From Urban Dictionary:

A word gay/bi men use to describe themselves in a cool way that they are closet cases and have no intention of coming out soon. This allows them to maintain perceived heterosexual privilege while engaging in their true sexual desires.

Beyond “closeted”, though, these days “discreet” today tends to mean “cheating”. When a guy says he’s “discreet”, you can bet that he’s not in an open relationship and he’s not just in the closet: he’s sneaking around on his boyfriend/husband/girlfriend/wife without permission.

Which means:

He may be giving you a fake name. (I got hit up by someone going by the name “John Master”, a name one porn film short of “Rod Steel”.)
He doesn’t have a facepic to give you. If he’s gay, he might have a dickpic, though.
He may well flake out on actually meeting for sex. (Yeah, just like the out gay boys, you say, but it’s even more likely.)
He will be offended if you suggest that he is cheating on someone.
If you ever see him out socially, he probably won’t even acknowledge knowing you (especially if he gave you a fake name), much less be friendly to you.

In general, there are enough horny gay guys out there who are reasonably out that you don’t need to settle for the dodgy ones who won’t do the online equivalent of looking you in the eye.

Updated on June 8, 2010

This post was inpsired by a guy I was chatting with for a potential hookup who dropped the “pretty discreet guy here” bomb only on the third exchange. I completely blew up at him:
If it means you’re scared to death you might be seen in another neighborhood than you are usually in, stay home.
If it means you’re scared to death that if I see you out and about, I might say “Hello”, stay home.
If it means coming here would be cheating on a boyfriend/husband/girlfriend/wife — if you don’t have an open enough relationship to do this — stay home (and talk to that person about your interests).
On the other hand:
I’m not going to come up to you on the street and say “Hello, want to fist me again” in front of your buddies.
I’m not going to post your pics on my blog to say “I did this guy.”
I’m not going to stalk you after the fact, or get “weird”.
But:
I’m not going to protect your closet (whatever sort of “closet” it might be), but neither will I tear off the door and point at what you have in there.

God Save Me from Muscle Tops!

2010-06-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

In April, when I was in Vancouver, BC for Rubbout, I got hit up online by a guy whose profile described him as a “muscle top” (and the pics confirmed that, or at least the “muscle” part of it). He was hot for me, so I invited him to the hotel room.

I’ve never pursued dating muscle boys. My shorthand quip has been “If they spend that much time at the gym, they won’t be spending it at the Jim.” And the perception has always been that most of them are interested in other hardbodies; it’s not like I’m fat — I’ve got a small tummy and would like to lose maybe 10 lbs. — but I also sure don’t qualify as a muscle boy, not even as a muscle bear. But hey, on the occasions when one wants to play with my, I’ll give it a roll.

When he got to the hotel, he had me put on a pair of black socks he had brought, my black boots, and the black baseball cap he was wearing, while he put on a black toque. He wants to play with someone dressed like him? Okay, I can deal with a little costume fetish.

We got into some boot licking and cocksucking, but about every five minutes, he had to take a break to take a swig of what looked like Gator-ade and then of water. Gotta keep the electrolytes up and stay hydrated. Maybe he just finished a workout. Okay, I can deal with this, although it sure breaks up the rhythm.

Feeling up his ass while sucking dick, I found that his crack was hairy as all get out, and prickly hairy (like stubble a day or two old). Bodybuilders often shave to enhance the show of muscle definition. The amount of maintenance that the hair in his ass crack implied had to be done to keep the rest of his body seem so hairless boggles the mind, though. Okay, I prefer some natural hair growth to shaved or even manscaped, but it’s not required.

Every two or three breaks to hydrate, he went and stood in front of the closet mirrors for a moment and checked himself out. Looked himself up and down, posed. Total narcissist. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be here for? Okay, getting a little weird. Wonder if he’s just like this naturally or if he’s tweaking on something?

His phone beeped, as a text message came in. He reached for the phone — made it hard for me to stay on his dick — but he didn’t need to reply to the message, apparently. Once is forgivable. Twice is annoying. Three times is really annoying. But once you have me in the sling and your hands are gloved and covered with lube…

Let the damn phone alone!

Jesus Christ, if seeing the text message that you aren’t even going to reply to is so important that you’ll risk slopping Crisco all over your BlackBerry rather than wait 20 minutes, maybe you shouldn’t be playing with anyone. Decide what’s most important: a hand in the ass or two on the phone.

Needless to say, as soon as I could after that, I got things finished up and sent him on his way. There’s no graceful way to explode at someone’s behavior once you’re in the sling, so I just had to hurry things along and shut them down quickly.

Now, I don’t know if he had some important business deal or some such pending, or if the texts were from other guys he had hit up, or from his dealer or workout partner or whatever. It really doesn’t matter. It’s a version of the same thing that I said when people defended those whose cell phones would ring during a movie or the symphony: if you have to be reachable at all times, put it on vibrate and check it discreetly when it goes off. And if you being reached means you will have to drop what you are doing and leave, don’t do anything where dropping it suddenly will cause problems for others (like cutting out of dinner or the middle of sex). In those rare cases where such might occur anyway, let the affected other people know up front, and for God’s sake, apologize if it happens.

It doesn’t matter if you are a parent with a baby left with the sitter, or a doctor on call, or bodybuilder fisting top: “Don’t be rude” is the only rule you need in this situation.

What is an “Open Relationship”?

2010-05-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

Seattle has been called the “Land of Open Relationships”, which is to say that in many couples here, the partners are non-monogamous (to some degree), free to create secondary amorous relationships of various lengths and intensities.

(Or to put it crassly, they are free to sleep around.)

I’m referring primarily to gay male relationships here, but it extends to sex-positive straight couples in the area as well. (And maybe well beyond that.)

In part, this may be attributable to Seattle’s (and Washington’s) rankings in terms of percentage of the population that is gay and the like. (See this page.) Some of its is also attributable to the high profile of the Center for Sex-Positive Culture, which embraces a broad swath of forms of sexuality. And to sex-positive columns like “Control Tower” (by Mistress Matisse) and “Savage Love” (by Dan Savage) which run in The Stranger (with the latter column also being syndicated nationally), both of which have abundantly discussed the concept of polyamory and GGG (Good, Giving, and Game).

You could say that the idea of the Open Relationship is in the water around here. (And we’ve got a lot of water around here!)

What is an Open Relationship?

In its simplest form, an “Open Relationship” is recognition within a couple that some form of sex outside the bounds of their relationship is acceptable; in particular, it is not “cheating”, since cheating requires such sex to be unacceptable. This can have a broad range of possibilities, such as:

Just Don’t Tell Me: one partner turns a blind eye to the other’s extra-relationship activities, knowing that stuff occurs but not knowing the details of it (or not wanting to know).
When the Cat’s Away: when one partner is out of town, that partner (or both) is allowed to play with others.
Kink Exploration: a non-kink partner allows the kinky one to explore activities and grow in sexual areas that don’t work for the entire couple.
Three-Ways: a couple invites a third person to join them in sex on occasion.
Triads: a couple adds a third person to the relationship on an ongoing basis.
Secondary Partners: one or both partners develop secondary ongoing sexual relationships, often with the explicit knowledge of the primary partner. “This is my husband, and this is my boyfriend.” (This one is sometimes very hard for people to wrap their heads around due to our society’s inability to separate sex from love.)
And then there are couples who merrily go their own way and fuck in whatever way attracts them at the moment. (“See you in the morning, sweetie!”)

How does an Open Relationship work?

Cribbing some from Wikipedia and adding my own thoughts, there are some things which need to be established in the relationship before an Open Relationship can be viable:

Fidelity vs. Monogamy: realize that there is a difference between the two concepts and embrace the idea that something can be “just sex”.
Trust: both members of the couple have to believe that the other is going to be true to the relationship and not damage or jeaopordize it (which includes that neither one is looking to break out of the relationship nor will do so if the opportunity arises).
Communication and Negotiation: open relationships don’t just happen, they should be created consciously (well, “Just Don’t Tell Me” ones tend to be created sub-consciously). Rules and boundaries need to be set, need to be explicit (ideally), and need to be adhered to.
Non-possessiveness: jealousy about sex had with others cannot be allowed to intrude on the relationship.

Is all this really possible? Hard to say. Do you know anyone in an Open Relationship? More to the point, do you know anyone who you know is in an Open Relationship? (Do you actually know the relationship setup of the people you know?) Odds are very strong that you do know people in one form of an Open Relationship or another, but relatively few broadcast the details. (One study estimated 1/3 to 2/3 of gay couples are non-monogamous, although that includes both Open Relationships and “cheaters”.)

Of course, there’s also the question of whether Open Relationships actually work? Many gay male relationships — and especially ones which don’t have the legal ties of marriage involved — break apart over time. (This is a version of “Half of all marriages end in divorce,” which probably isn’t completely true.) Sometimes Open Relationship issues are involved in the demise of a relationship, sometimes not. (I have had two long-term relationship end which were Open to varying degrees. One ending had nothing to do with the Open nature of things, while in the other, he found someone else and broke things off with me.) Do Open Relationships work? Probably no better or worse than any other relationship type, but they do manage to remove the big stumbling block of “I want to fuck that guy” causing relationship problems. (What would qualify as “success” here, anyway? Does it “work” only if the relationship stays Open and the couple stays together until someone dies?)

Rules for an Open Relationship

Years ago, I got these Rules For An Open Relationship (specifically for an Open Relationship where the couple plays individually with others) from a gay comic book artist I know:

Safer Sex Every Time: rather than just a pronouncement about protected vs. unprotected sex, this really means “Don’t bring anything unexpected back into the primary relationship, and don’t spread anything that is already there to unexpecting third parties.”
No Mutual Friends: this is a version of the straight world’s “Don’t sleep with your boyfriend’s best friend.” No matter how hot he is.
No One More Than Three Times: because that starts to be a relationship, not “just sex”. Unless you are wanting to go fully into the realm of polyamory and have discussed it and agreed to it.

I continue to think that those are good relationship rules, but I would add one more (from my own experience):

Don’t Bring It Home: if your relationship allows play while the partner is out of town, do it at the third party’s place, or a hotel, or a sex club. “Don’t fuck in our bed while I’m not here.”

And a corollary for those who participate in group sex and anonymous sex:

The “Friends” and “Three Times” Rules Don’t Always Apply: if your relationship includes three-ways or going to sex clubs or group sex “play parties”, especially regularly held ones, it can be hard to avoid (or even keep track of!) those rules, so it is probably best to suspend them for such an event. But only consciously suspend them, of course, and only within boundaries. In particular, play party sex buddies need to stay as sex buddies within and only within the play party context.

(It’s worth noting as well that all relationships are fluid, changing over time. What is Open this year should not necessarily be Open next year, as the couple’s needs change. An Open Relationship which stops being Open does not indicate problems, just evolution.)

Will these rules and guidelines and proper communication ensure that your Open Relationship is successful and lasts for year and years? Who can say? Mine did not, but then again, the rules got broken: a play party sex buddy became a friend, and then became a non-play party sex buddy, and then became a “more than three times” sex partner, and then became the new boyfriend, and all this with communication of the situation only coming at the end. (Ain’t that the way it always goes?) On the other side, though, because we had an explicit Open Relationship, emotionally charged issues about “cheating” never arose in the final communication, just more analytic/process issues about “broken rules”, which means that the friendships involved have largely managed to survive the demise of the relationship, and that has to be considered a good thing.

What is the “Hanky Code”?

2010-04-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

So you’re out at the local gay bar and you see a hunky number you’d like to cruise. Then he turns around to talk to someone or order a drink, and you get a view of his yummy ass. But what’s that in his pocket? A colored bandana? Didn’t you hear that those mean something, that different colors mean different things?

Quick, get out your gay phone (iPhone) and Google it. Choose this link. Or this one. Or this one. Maybe check them all out.

What the --? There are dozens of colors listed. How are you supposed to remember all this stuff? And man, if you read the various lists closely, they don’t even all agree!

First, Some History

The Hanky Code is a list of bandana colors and associated (gay) sex activities.

In the 1970s and before, the gay community (and especially the gay leather community) used many non-verbal signals to help indicate sexuality and sexual activity preferences. At the time, engaging in homosexual activity at all could get you arrested; engaging in kink activities would just make that worse, so these non-verbal signals were invaluable. Non-verbal signals includes styles of dress — Levis, leather jackets, etc. — and accessories such as keys attached to belt loops, rings attached to jacket epaulets, and bandanas stuck in back pockets. All completely innocent items, unless you knew to look for them and how to decode them.

(This, of course, is the root of the concept of “gaydar”, detecting other gay men amongst the mass of presumed straight humanity. All the little signals that we read — sometimes subconsciously — which add up to “He’s gay.”)

Even gay bars and bathhouses “signaled”, via their names. Straights might not think anything of a given name, but names with sexual double entendres — Hole, Slot, Ambush, End-Up — were as good as a neon sign if you knew what you were looking for.

Top or Bottom

The first thing you need to know is which side means what. That’s easy: left is top and right is bottom. Anything on the left signifies top, and anything on the bottom signifies bottom. Hanky, keys, wallet chain, arm band, knot on a bandana tied around the neck, etc.

Okay, it’s not quite that easy: when this sort of codification first came into being, the definitions were regional rather than global. The West Coast (California, especially) used Left=Top, but either/both the East Coast and Europe (I’ve never had it confirmed which) used the reverse, Left=Bottom. Needless to say, this could cause confusion for tourists and business travelers. By the time the 1990s rolled around, though, California-style had largely won out, although people still knew that there was or had been a difference.

(In terms of heraldry — coats of arms and such — things on the left are dubbed “sinister” and things on the right are dubbed “dexter”. “Sinister”=Top has always seemed like the right rule to me.)

And for those who are thinking ahead, yes, putting something in the middle can be read to mean “Versatile”. (Which itself means “Bottom” to some guys, of course. Off or On, Top or Bottom, Gay or Straight: they can’t conceive of anything outside of binary existence. Bisexual is right out.) Of course, you have to be careful with that location. It’s a nicely symmetric place for handcuffs, but hanging your keys from the the belt loop in the back of your pants makes them hard to reach.

Color Matching

In the case of hankies (bandanas), there are a whole slew of colors out there, for whatever uses cowboys and construction workers and mechanics (whew, is it getting hot in here?) might use them for. That and knowing that our ability to accessorize is what separates man from animals means that there has to be a use for each color.

It’s easy to reverse engineer the creation of much of the hanky code. Navy blue is probably the most common bandana color, so it goes with the most common activity: fucking. Since sucking dick is so tightly coupled with fucking, make it light blue (“fucking lite”). Red obviously goes to fisting, yellow to piss play, and brown to scat play. (Yes, Virginia, there are people into that.) Black and gray are another heavy/light pairing, and get connected to S&M and bondage, respectively.

(As another possible derivation of Red=Fisting, red flags are supposed to be attached to loads hanging out the back of your truck. I’m sure we can make some connection path to that.)

After the colors that you actually occasionally see in bandanas, and the big ticket leathersex activities that go with them, though, what about all the other bandana colors? And what about all the other colors of the rainbow, whether they ever actually show up as bandana colors? (Well, of course they do, or can, exist: go to the fabric store, get a yard of fabric, and break out the sewing machine, boy!)

Why Are There Multiple Lists? Which One is Right?

It is doubtful that the different lists were both created independently. Way too many secondary items match up the same on each list for true independence. More likely, someone created an initial list, and then either (a) different people fleshed out items they saw as missing, or (b) someone tried to replicate the list from memory and got some things wrong, or [most likely, to me] (c) someone decided to “fix” the list, either to match his own preferences or to just make his own variant.

(Ask country line dancers about how line dances that date from pre-Internet days mutated as they propagated, due to either poor memory or “fixing” the dances, resulting in regional differences that are sometimes minor and sometimes vast. It’s like a giant game of “grapevine”.)

(I was once told that the differences are likely due to geographic separation between East and West Coasts. To be sure, there has historically tended to be a lot more north/south movement and interaction between leathermen than there has been east/west, at least until the expansion of cheap air fare in the 1990s made that more viable, so I can buy this as an explanation. This also ties in with the geographic left/right dichotomy mentioned above.)

Decades down the line, of course, what was once intended as fun (or even as funny) now sometimes gets seen as a Holy Artifact of Old Guard Leather, as though Marlon Brando himself whispered it in the ear of Larry Townsend from behind a curtain and Mr. Marcus then transcribed it onto gold plates. (Oh, I’ll burn for that one!) And thus guys today encounter the Hanky Code and they think they are supposed to obey it, and to do that, they are required to memorize this super long list of color/fetish combinations.

This is bullshit. No one expects you to memorize the entire list, nor do you need to.

(Of course, it is an understandable belief in its way. PINs, passwords, pledges of allegiance, Boy Scout oaths, etc.: our society is heavy on memorization. And for those of us who are founts of useless trivia, something like the Hanky Code is very doable. If I can manage to remember the sci-fi codenames, real names, home planets, super powers, and origin stories of 50-odd members of the Legion of Super-Heroes and the order they joined over the course of 50 years of stories and 5 continuities, then pfft, 40 color/fetish combos is a breeze! Any geek would agree.)

So what we get today is guys new(er) to leather encountering the Hanky Code and freaking out at the long list, convinced that they are being judged as a Real Leatherman on whether they can rattle off the meaning of a coral-colored teddy bear in a silver lamé jumper in the left pocket. And thus they reject the entire concept out of hand.

(That would be a titleholder or pornstar who wants to cuddle and suck on your toes. Just for the record, you understand.)

Is the Hanky Code of Any Use?

That depends on what you think the hanky code is or should be or could be used for.

Does it assure you of getting laid? Fuck no. (Or is that “No fuck”?)

Does it provide a means of non-verbal communication, an invitation to cruise, converse, and pick-up? Fuck yes!

Don’t be distracted by the (fun) junk content of the long Hanky Code lists. No one expects you to be able the tell the difference between Peach and Apricot (bears vs. chubbies) or Dark Yellow and Gold (heavy piss vs. three-ways) in bar light. Hell, no one expects you to ever even see some of those colors for hankies in the real world. (Although I know where you can buy most of them, if you’re really interested.)

(Let me stress here again: all the myriad colors and their fetish pairings are intended to be fun! Peach is for bears because bears are fuzzy! Mosquito netting is for outdoor sex because of the bugs! Mustard is for “more than 8 inches” because mustard goes on foot-long hot dogs! And so on!)

What you do need to remember are the Big 10 colors: Black, Grey, White, Red, Orange, Yellow, (dark) Green, (light) Blue, (dark) Blue, and Brown. (That is: S&M, Bondage, JO, Fisting, Anything, Piss, Daddy/Boy, Sucking, Fucking, and Scat.) Oh, and remember anything you like and want to flag, such as Piercing (purple) or Puppy Play (bone print).

(Orange is one of the major differences between the lists. One list has it as Anything Top/Anything Bottom depending on the side, while the other has it as Anything/Nothing Now (Just Cruising). I prefer the former, since it echoes everything else in the list better; it gives a pig play bottom something to flag without being needing a dozen bandana stuffed in the same pocket. And of course, I’m simply confused about “Just Cruising”. What the fuck is that? Cruising is what we’re all doing when flagging. If you don’t want anything, don’t flag anything!)

Does the Hanky Code Get Used?

The Big 10 are just about the only colors you will likely ever see being flagged, and thus the only ones you really need to be able to identify. Yes, I have seen brown flagged: once at IML and once at MAL. Not my scene. I’ve also seen Purple flagged a couple times. I don’t think I’ve ever seen most of the other lesser colors, or if I did, I didn’t recognize them for what they were. In the local bar, the only colors I see with regularity are Red, Yellow, Dark Green, and Black (but that’s hard to notice in leather pants), and sometimes Gray. Yellow seems to have become far less common in the past decade.

So back to the question: does anybody actually use the hanky code? Well, I do. If I’m going out to the bar — or generally any time on the weekends, anywhere around town — I have a hanky in my pocket. (Usually a red one.) Will it get me a “sudden date”? Probably not, but on the off chance that someone will see it and approach me, it’s a whole lot better than not having it there!

If you go to any leather bar — and definitely if you go to a big leather event like IML or MAL or Folsom Street Fair — you will see people flagging, and you can be sure they are doing it quite intentionally.

If you are just out and about somewhere other than a gay neighborhood and you see someone with a colored hanky in his pocket, well, odds are against it, but he could be flagging (like I do). Does he set off your gaydar? Does he have the bearing of a leatherman? As noted before, a hanky in the pocket isn’t an invitation to fuck so much as an invitation to talk about fucking. So go talk (or at least make eye contact) if he turns your crank! Worst case, he’s a clueless straight contractor.

So, Should You Flag a Hanky?

You know, that’s ultimately up to you.

I know several guys who are completely disdainful of flagging, apparently under the idea that some people — straight people! — flag unknowingly. As best I can tell, rather than get their hopes up that some random person they see might be a fetish match for them but actually isn’t, they prefer to toss out the entire concept. Cutting their losses, it seems.

Others can’t decide what they should flag. Does yellow send too strong a message, will it ruin my reputation? (Might make it, actually.) Does light blue send too weak of a message? (Depends on how much you like cocksucking.) Can you get away with two hankies in the pocket? (I say yes, but three is pushing it.) Three in one and two on the other side. (Mmm, no.) Should I wear red in both pockets since I’m versatile? (Hmm, I’ve never tried it. Give it a shot.) Do I just wear orange to cover all the bases? (To swap around the line Tony DeBlase is famously credited with, only if you’re into kangaroo shit.) Faced with too many choices, some guys freeze and opt for nothing rather than risk going too far or not far enough.

Myself, I know from direct experience that flagging sometimes does work. (I was on my way to a fisting party in Berlin, to a bar I had never been to before. Someone else on his way there noticed my hanky and helped me find the place. We also played later.)

I’m also cognizant of the historical nature and value of flagging, and I consciously choose to propagate this behavior both to show my honoring of our past and to promote those older rituals which actually still work in today’s world.

Updated on April 6, 2010

You can even get a Hanky Code app for your iPhone!

I forgot to include links to various hanky code listings. Fixed that. It was remarkably hard to find one which featured orange in the top/bottom way that I think it should be. And I found that Wikipedia’s entry has some oddities of its own, like attaching Rust to Pony Play rather than to Western Fetish like I think it should be.

There has been something of a renaissance of additions to the hanky code in recent years, such as:
Lightning Bolt Print (Electrical Play)
Bone Print (Puppy Play) — (with the color of the background signifying fist pup, piss pup, etc.)
Mint Green (Leathergirl)

Updated on February 11, 2011

A recent Facebook exchange with my friend Lorelei brought up the discussion of what a plaid hankie she once saw might mean. I suggested three options:
Dyke Top / Dyke Bottom
Scotsman / Looking for a Kilt
Lumberjack / His Tree
(This last echoes off of the Rust hanky definition being “Cowboy / His Horse”, which is presumably Western Fetish/Cowboy Gear. “Lumberjack / His Tree” would mean Outdoorsman Fetish — hiking, camping, etc. Although now that it’s been proposed, someone will twist “Lumberjack” into shorthand for “Axe Play”. Sigh.

Updated on September 8, 2011

Corrected a bunch of typos, added links, and revised/clarified some of the text, including adding the paragraph on gay bar names.

Three more colors which vary between lists:
White: JO (masturbation) or Not Looking, depending on the list you look at. As mentioned above with the variances with Orange, why would you flag anything to signal you aren’t looking?
Rust: Cowboy/His Horse (which I read as Cowboy Fetish) on older lists, Animal Play on others. Presumably meaning Furries/Animal Role Play rather than Zoophilia. This may be a repurposing of an underused color to be something more common today, or it may be a total misconstruing of what “His Horse” would have meant in the 1970s.
Lime: Pays for Dinner/Dines off Tricks on older lists, Foodplay on newer ones. Again, likely an example of repurposing an underused color to be something more common today.
And a mystery one from a recent Facebook thread: what should Steel Blue be used for? One person suggested sailors. I suggested some narrow slice of police (state troopers?), since it is close to Medium Blue.

New Zealand 2010: Wellington to Christchurch (Sunday, February 21)

2010-03-01T17:14:00.000-08:00

This is just the sex parts of my New Zealand trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I connected with a guy named Pete who lived nearby (although I got lost on the way because I turned the wrong way on the street right in front of the hotel). He invited me over to fist my ass and for me to fuck him, which is what we did. While his cat, Rufus, watched from the stairs, and Norbit and Deliver Us from Eva played on the TV. (Pete, you’ve got to get some porn! <grin>)

Updated on March 11, 2010

New Zealand 2010: Wellington (Saturday, February 20)

2010-02-25T16:28:00.000-08:00

This is just the sex parts of my New Zealand trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

Met a guy named Bastian at S & M’s; (not a leather bar, aw!). I ended up at Checkmate without him — I told him I was heading there, but he didn't seem interested in joining me. It looked for a while like I would be playing top all night, but eventually got a good fucking. As I left, Bastian had just arrived. (Sorry, guy! You needed to get there earlier if you wanted a shot at any of my body parts!

I wonder what Mom’s thoughts are about the 45+ minutes I’ve been spending in the bathroom before going out each night, especially with water running periodically. She hasn’t asked, I haven’t told.

Updated on March 9, 2010

Updated on June 8, 2010

New Zealand 2010: Rotorua to Wellington (Friday, February 19)

2010-02-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

This is just the sex parts of my New Zealand trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I ended up at the Checkmate Sauna (gay sex club), where I played with a couple guys and got fisted by one named Will. Aaahh.

Updated on March 1, 2010

Updated on June 7, 2010

New Zealand: Kayaking Lake Taupo, Taupo, and Rotorua (Thursday, February 18)

2010-02-23T18:42:00.000-08:00

This is just the sex parts of my New Zealand trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I finally managed a connection with a Māori guy named Rob, who is into fisting. He secured us a cheap hotel room and got a case of cans of bourbon and coke. (We don’t have that in cans in the States, so far as I know.) We talked about stuff for an hour or so and then got down to brass tacks. He fisted me, then I fisted him, and then he fisted me again. He was surprised that I got into him, since he has had such bad luck getting fisted before that he was halfway convinced he was physically unable to do it. I happily proved him wrong; he was a very happy boy when we parted company.

Rob said he had done three clean outs that evening, he was so excited at the chance to play. I’ve found that at least two cleanouts and when I’m setting up for a party scenario, three helps me both stay clean and be loosened up, so they probably helped him, too.

Updated on March 1, 2010

Updated on March 17, 2010

Updated on June 7, 2010

New Zealand 2010: Hobbiton, Bay of Plenty, and Rotorua (Tuesday, February 16)

2010-02-19T01:28:00.000-08:00

This is just the sex parts of my New Zealand trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I’ve been trying to set things up via online connections, but I had to actually block one chap I was chatting with. He’s 24 years old and apparently so desperate for a connection that he started messaging me multiple times. When I broke things off, telling him he was too clingy, he messaged me 5 times in 30 minutes to say how much he wasn’t. Indeed. (Relating this story to someone a couple nights later, he was able to tell me the guy’s screenname from the description. Guess the kid does this a bit.)

Updated on March 15, 2010

New Zealand 2010: Auckland (Saturday, February 13)

2010-02-17T01:53:00.000-08:00

This is just the sex parts of my New Zealand trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

Met up with a couple at Urge I had chatted with online, but they have a kid and thus couldn’t host. At Lateshift, there were initially more guys than on Friday, but fewer of interest to me. I played with a couple guys and eventually got off (ended up in the barber chair again), but Friday was definitely better.

Updated on March 10, 2010

New Zealand 2010: Sydney to Auckland, and Auckland (Friday, February 12)

2010-02-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

This is just the sex parts of my New Zealand trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I was pleased to find that New Zealand threading on plumbing matches U threading; I had brought my shot nozzle just in case and was able to use it, which makes clean out a lot easier!

After going to the leather/bear bar Urge, I went to a club called Lateshift.

Lateshift is a sex club, with one of the best mazes I’ve ever encountered. I kept finding new alleys and rooms all night! I sucked and got fucked by a guy in rugby gear with a really thick cock. Sucked another guy, then got into an assplay session with Roy, who I had chatted with earlier at Urge. And then, when I was winding down, I sat in a barber chair in one room and started to beat off. Very quickly, a hot guy came in. He sucked my dick, ate my ass, made me suck his dick, and then fucked me in a couple different positions. Very hot time. After that, he wanted to sit with me in the TV lounge and cuddle a while, but I had to tell him no, that I had to go (because it was still 3 hours later for me, internally, and thus after 5 am to me); this hurt his feelings a bit, alas.

Updated on March 8, 2010

Added links.

Updated on June 2, 2010

Mid-Atlantic Leather 2010

2010-01-23T14:09:00.000-08:00

This past weekend was my 11th consecutive trip to Washington DC for Mid-Atlantic Leather weekend, aka MAL.

My first trip was in January 2000. The previous year, Mr. Marcus had asked me if I was going to attend again, thinking that I had (or must have) attended in the past. I had not, although I had attended International Mr. Leather (IML) in Chicago a couple times, LeatherFest in San Diego, and I guess I was becoming enough of a known quantity in the San Francisco area that he thought attending MAL was a logical thing for me to do.

In November 1999, I competed at Mr. International Rubber (MIR) in Chicago. Years down the line now, I can’t say whether I planned to attend MAL ahead of that event (in case I won; I ended up as 2nd runner-up), or if I decided to attend MAL after having been to MIR. I think Mr. Marcus’ comment came before I attended MIR, but I can’t be sure.

Anyway, think I have been every year since then. I’ve attended the WaterBuddies watersports parties three times and the FFA/CAC handball parties twice. I’ve been a vendor twice. I’ve represented Seattle Men in Leather in the Parade of Colors two or three times. I’ve been on stage as a titleholder twice, as Seattle Leather Daddy 2004 and International Mr. Saliva 2006. I’ve been there as the spouse of a titleholder twice when Rusty was Washington State Mr. Leather 2005 and American Leatherman 2006. I’ve sometimes had (paid for) a weekend package and sometimes not.

I guess that what brings me back each year is that the event is pretty much just the right size. Local and most regional leather weekends tend to be centered just around the contest, maybe with a play party and a meal involved. That’s plenty of reason to attend if you are also local or in the region, but it’s not going to pull people in from around the country. In particular, such events typically can’t sustain a vendors market, or a wide span of play parties, or dedicated dances or other events.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have IML, which is just fucking huge. Massive contest, a myriad of play parties and dance parties and such, and a vendors market like no other. But there’s arguably just too much: too many options, too many people, even too many vendors (in terms of truly shopping for what you want/need; you can barely manage to find your way back to a given individual vendor).

Mid-Atlantic Leather hits in the middle of these extremes: big enough to be a draw, but not so big that it overwhelms. Big enough to support a vendors market, but not so big that you can’t find the vendor or item you want. Big enough to have accessory events to choose from, but only a few. Big enough that lots of people deem MAL to be an event worth attending, but not so big that you feel like you can’t manage to run into all your friends.

A few other things worth noting:

While MAL isn’t “too big”, it has been too big for its location at the Washington Plaza for several years. There is a very limited amount of space for the vendors, such that each year we see almost exactly the same ones, in almost exactly the same layout; for people who attend each year, this ends up limiting the amount of time we spend in the vendor market (and thus how much money we spend), and by extension, how much time we spend in the host hotel at all. (This year, I didn’t even enter the room where Mr. S was. Too crowded and I knew I wasn’t likely to buy anything there.)
They have also been too big for the lobby for a while, although less so than with the vendors space. There used to be some couches and such in the front lobby — they were used as a puppy play area a couple times — but the couches have been absent in recent years to accommodate more men.
MAL will be moving to a new hotel next year (the Hyatt Regency on New Jersey; I’ve stayed there for other events twice). Apparently this one is large enough that they won’t (initially) have to require purchasing a weekend pass to have a room at the host hotel.

Will I attend again next year? I expect so. I did find this year that I spent less time at the hotel, and thus felt much more on the “fringe” than in years past. Part of this is that I went to the FFA parties all three nights (like last year), which meant that I had to head there earlier in the evening. While I enjoy going to the FFA parties, I don’t want those to be the reason I go — it becomes expensive to travel across the country for a fisting party. (It’s always a trade-off: do I cruise the packed lobby for hours, perhaps fruitlessly, or do I bug out to an off-site event where I know I’ll get laid but won't see and be seen? And how does the party price with free beverages balance against the overpriced lobby bar beers?)

I also stayed further from the host hotel this time than last year (although I’ve stayed slightly further away than this a couple times before) and was just generally disconnected from the hotel scene as a result. I need to remedy that next year, or I may stop enjoying the weekend as much and will stop attending.

With luck, I’ll get my boyfriend to go next year. I won’t even need the FFA parties, then, because he’s great about seducing guys into three-ways and play parties and such. (evil grin)

Some notes about other DC stuff:

The Lambda Rising gay bookstore chain is closing down this year, and they were having a 60% (and more) off sale on all their stock. I bought a handful of leather flag pins for 25 cents each, and a raft of what they termed “demo” CDs from the 1990s magazine New Country (which included a CD with each issue; I had a subscription for a year) for like a dime apiece.
Twice during the weekend, I saw people reading from a Kindle. Up until now, I have largely dismissed the Kindle as a gadget fad, as a device that doesn’t do enough well enough to warrant purchasing one. (And having worked on the first generation of eBook readers a decade ago, I know whereof I speak.) I may have to reconsider that stance now that I’ve seen them in the wild; if people are actually using them, maybe they will last. (I still think that the current designs are bland, though.)
DCA (Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport) remains one of my favorite airport designs. Ticketing occurs on an upstairs level, then you descend to a lower level where there are shops and restaurants and the security gates. The layout allows those checking in to overlook the lower level and to look out through large windows to the gates and runways. The entire airport seems more intimate, and passengers checking in feel that they have more information by being able to see where they are going (how long lines are, what planes are at the gate, etc.)

Updated on May 25, 2010

Now that the iPad has been released, I frankly can’t see the Kindle surviving any longer unless it can retool into a generalist device. There was a time when people had a device geared for this feature and one for that feature and one for the other features (remember the old Dilbert strips with the belt full of gadgets?), but the cell phone with text message capability killed the pager, and the smartphone killed the generic cell phone. The Kindle could beat (live in parallel with) the netbook because it could do things the netbook could not and be used at times the netbook could not, but the iPad lives in the Kindle’s space and does more; the Kindle’s only advantages become the non-lit display and massive battery life, which aren’t enough in the long run.

What is a “Bear”?

2010-01-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

Along the same lines as my “What is a ‘Twink’?” post from 15 months ago, the question of “What is a ‘Bear’?” came up via the comic Blur the Lines on January 19.

A bear is (select at least two):
Large Bodied (could be either Heavyset or Muscled)
Hairy
Bearded
And thus:
Big hairy guy, clean shaven? Bear
Beard and fur, but slim? Bear
Bodybuilder with a beard? Bear
Fat guy without either much hair or beard? Not Bear
Cub (young bear), Otter (thin bear), Wolf (medium bear, or loner bear, or agressive), Pocket Bear (short bear), Kuma (Asian bear) — all variations on a theme. If you want to slice and dice the labelling, go for it.

As for “Behr”: when the Bear Code was put together 20+ years ago, this meant “Bear with a moustache but not a beard”. Another sometimes useful variation on the theme.

You can see that the Natural Bears Classification System does indeed have an “h” for “the BEHR factor”, for moustaches.

Unaddressed in that is the question of what we call someone who sure looks like a Bear, but who is adamant about not being one. (I vote for “Traitor”.)

My Bear Code: B3h f t dc k+ s+ e+ q (“B3h” indicates a B3 beard with a standout moustache.)

Not Recommended #1

2010-01-04T13:59:00.000-08:00

Hand sanitizer.

As sex lube.

Twice in one evening.

Dream Journal: December 29, 2009

2009-12-29T13:02:00.000-08:00

Last night, I woke up at about 5:30 am with runny nose congestion and such, unable to sleep. Got up for a few minutes and just sat in the living room, then went back to bed. Had one of those dreams where you constantly revise the plot as it goes, like you’re making drafts of a short story, coming in and out of the dream several times. Here’s what I ended up with:

I was apparently about 19 or 20 and gone home for the weekend with my boyfriend. His parents were gone but his little brother (8th grade? 8 years old?) was there. My boyfriend stayed at the house while I went out for a walk with the little brother and two of his young friends.

We were walking on a sloped hill, partly covered with grass, the rest soil and small rocks, going down into some ditch or small stream bed. I slipped (or did I?) on the loose stones and slid down the hill, losing consciousness. When I woke up, one of the boys was holding up a big chunk of concrete, threatening to bash my head in, while the little brother asked “Are you my brother’s butt buddy?”

I apparently didn’t get my head bashed in because the next thing I knew, I was at one of the neighbours houses, ringing the bell. The mother let me in and I explained to her and her husband that their son had tried to bash my head in with a chunk of rock. They called the boy in and he denied it and said I had tried to have sex with them. The parents screamed at me and I left. I then went to the other boy’s house and said the same thing to the mother, who was from India. She just nodded and said “I understand.”

Next thing I knew, I was heading across a field of well-trimmed grass (soccer field, I think), and the little brother, his friends, and several other boys all ran at me and started attacking me like a pack of wild dogs.

My boyfriend said he also had a dream last night:

He dreamed that he broke the new tiki mug I gave him for Christmas.

I joked that he broke it by hitting me with it in an effort to make me stop snurfling from the congestion and let him sleep.

Updated on February 26, 2010

Dream Journal: November 15, 2009

2009-11-17T13:56:00.000-08:00

Wow, two rememberable dreams in a month. And this one is a doozy in the WTF dream logic department:

I dreamt that I was pregnant (but still male!) and about to give birth. My boyfriend and I were riding through San Francisco on a scooter, heading for the hospital, and we were running out of gas.

We didn’t make it to the hospital, but rolled to a stop in front of a Catholic church, which had some sort of medical services in the basement. They were willing to take me in for the birth of the baby, but they wrote up a bill ahead of time, with charges of $2800 — because I wasn’t Catholic! (Being a pregnant gay guy didn't seem to enter into it.)

I screamed “Fuck you!” at them over and over, and we stormed out of the church basement. My boyfriend then called an ambulance. (Dream logic says not to worry about why we didn’t do that earlier.) The medics were hesitant to take me to the hospital, though, because saying “Fuck you&rdquo to someone was legally the equivalent of attempted assassination.

We ended up suing over that, arguing that since the Supreme Court had ruled in the FCC case earlier this year that the word “Fuck&rdquo could not be separated from its procreative origins, and since procreation is the opposite of killing, “Fuck you&rdquo could not legally be the equivalent of attempted assassination. At worst, it could only be considered attempted rape.

I think we won the case.

Updated on February 1, 2010

Europe 2009: Aftermath

2009-08-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I had some nasty constipation after returning home, almost nothing passing through. No pain or cramps, just minimal movements, despite ample food going in. I finally realized that I’ve suffered from this before. It’s the lack of intestinal florae, washed away from the repeated fisting cleanout regimen. I need to get some live-culture yogurt in me to restore things. (Yup, that seems to have helped; started improving just a couple hours after a dish of yogurt.)

In Berlin, I bought a 2010/2011 (two year) large format flip calendar, with the imagery on each page being some good, strong BDSM pics. (That is, pics that look like real BDSM scenes, not stuff staged for porn videos.) At €10 a pop, a good deal. So I bought two, the second to be donated to be a fundraiser item: a large format German BDSM calendar should easily be auctionable for more than $15.

Out & About, a gay guide webzine from Denmark, has an article about the Mr. Leather OutGames contest (among its other coverage of the OutGames), including this pic of the five contestants. (Photo by Claus og Tonny Bønløkke Hertz.)

Updated on February 5, 2010

The calendar sold for $20 at GLPW’s Spanksgiving event on Thanksgiving night. Frankly, it should have gone for almost double that; we need to find a way to boost attendance (and participation) at those events.

Updated on May 19, 2010

Tentacle Porn (in a bad way)

2009-08-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

Last night, while engaged in kinky sex, I was blindfolded.

I tend to do sex visualizations when closing my eyes during kinky sex. Circles and rings that glow and come closer and get larger and such, even sometimes turning into tunnels or portals to what’s on the other side.

(Yes, shallow metaphors, I know.)

But last night, with the blindfold on, the visualizations went a layer further. I envisioned a ring with a starfield behind it (like a viewport). In the middle was a rust-colored cylinder covered with scales like a pangolin, with some of the scales acting as lids for huge staring eyes. The column was moving upward — constantly, like it was infinitely long — and the eyes were looking all over. Including at me.

I managed to dismiss this one, only to have another viewport come in from the left. This ring was completely filled with wet green lizard skin, one huge eye, and a couple tentacles with spikes on the end. And it was bulging through the ring.

Ever hear of H.P. Lovecraft? Elder gods, the viewing of which can cost you your very sanity? Yeah, like that.

I ripped the blindfold off and stopped all the sex activity while I fought to stop myself from doing something between screaming and crying. It took a good ten minutes before I could make any words to describe things.

It probably doesn’t carry across in this description, but… Seriously Fucking. Scary.

Updated on February 8, 2010

Updated on May 17, 2010

Europe 2009: Berlin (Sunday, August 2)

2009-08-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

Since there was another party I wanted to go to that night, I headed back to Schöneberg. On the way, I passed by the gay sunbathing areas of Tiergarten. Apparently nude sunbathing is permitted! I also met a cute Italian boy, Kurt — no, he wasn’t naked at the time mdash; dressed in A&F gear with his collar turned up.

Kurt gave me a heavy cruise in Tiergarten, so I sat down on a bench and got him to approach. Cute, but in his A&F attire, I figured him for a bit of a twinkie. (He says A&F is pretty much only worn by gay boys in Germany. I told him that’s true in the States, too, even if those wearing it don’t quite realize it!) I offered to invite him back to the hotel, but said he might be scared. To the contrary, he said it was the red stripes on my shorts that he was attracted by. And on that note, I had one of the best fisiting experiences of the trip, one that we had to cut short because he was meeting a friend at a local bar. I would have happily skipped the party that night to play a few hours more with Kurt.

I took the U-Bann out to Prenzlauer Berg, to the bar Stahlrohr 2.0. (2.0 because it had moved a few years back.) Several of the guys from the Kellerloch party were there again.

The Stahlrohr party was, of course, a fisting party. Walking from the U-Bann, I met and talked with Matthieu (I’m doing my best guess for the spelling of some of these guys’ names, you realize), who spotted my black and red leather wristband. Joachen, who had invited me to Kellerloch, fisted me, although I don’t think he got all the way in. My ass was getting tender! I was making lots of animal noises, though, and a bunch of guys stuck their heads around the corner to see who this new guy was whose voice they didn’t recognize. I then talked for a while with Sebastien, and Marcel and I had a rematch of the previous night, well, of the part with my hand up his ass.

One pleasant surprise I’ve had this trip is the simple willingness of Europeans to engage in safer sex behaviors. In the States, you find way too many guys who not only like to bareback, they will only do so. You find ones (often enough to not be rare!) who will call things off if you want a condom to be used (whether as top or bottom), and occasionally ones who will actually be angry with you for wanting safer sex. (And this almost never has to do with latex allergies.) Seemingly not so with the Europeans; only a couple even tried any barebacking (including one in a dark room in Amsterdam whom I pushed away, disgusted; he might not have been European, in retrospect), and not a one made a peep at pausing to put on a rubber.

Actually, though, I didn’t do a whole lot of pursuit of fucking, and much of that was in fisting party contexts, so maybe this is the mark of fisters more than general Europeans. While many prefer to play without gloves (and I could go into the pros and cons of that), it was always a negotiated part of each play session, and none I played with would say no to using gloves or having the top use them. As I think of it in the States, at the big parties I have been to in Seattle, DC, and Chicago, I do think that this is more a standard behavior of fisters worldwide, perhaps. But I’ll still think positively of the Europeans in this light, regardless.

Updated on February 23, 2010

Updated on May 18, 2010

Europe 2009: Berlin (Saturday, August 1)

2009-08-02T14:47:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I cruised around the Schöneberg neighborhood, visiting the leather shops and such: Connection, RoB, Mr. B, and a couple others. I bought some t-shirt gifts — a Mr. B shirt that glows in the dark for my boyfriend, a brown and gold Berlin shirt for Rusty (who is house/cat-sitting while I’m away), and two for me, a red Berlin shirt with the bears with entangled tongues and a black Kinky Tulip shirt. I met a couple guys (Mario and Stefan) from Bavaria outside Mr. B, along with their friend Donovan.

(Just because I name check someone in the blog, doesn’t mean I had sex with them. Might have wanted to, though…)

That evening, I went to a private party called Kellerloch, although I didn’t know that was the name of it at the time — an online buddy invited me without specifying the name of the party. A couple people online had asked if I was going to Kellerloch, but I had told them no, because I didn’t know at the time.

Kellerloch (“cellar hole”, per Babelfish) is, yes, another fisting party, held at the south end of Schöneberg in a basement. There were probably 20 guys there. I got fisted by Klaus, and then returned the favor. Then by Marcel from the Netherlands, and again returned the favor, getting each of may hands in about 4" past the wrist, the deepest I’ve ever fisted someone. And then fisted Marco from Zurich, to a similar depth, and then he fisted me on all fours. And one point, he sat on my lower back (shades of Brüno!) and fisted me from above.

Back at the hotel, I thought I should cum, since I really hadn’t done that for a couple days. Got out the sling, put in the Fist Pack video, lubed up the inflatable dildo and pumped it larger than I have before and went at myself. But to no avail. I pissed like crazy, splattering myself good, but couldn’t manage to cum. Too worked up and worked over!

Updated on March 1, 2010.

Updated on March 2, 2010.

This article claims that “cellar door” is one of the most beautiful phrases in the English language. Can we make a parallel claim that “kellerloch” is one of the kinkiest in the German language?

Europe 2009: Copenhagen to Berlin (Friday, July 31)

2009-08-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

At the Men’s Shop — “adult novelties”, if you will — I used my certificate from the contest for a video (Fist Pack 20). I had to spend another 25 DKK — $5 — above the certificate price, but no problem. (Having since watched chunks of the video, I recommend most any other edition in the FP series. The first scene goes for like 20 minutes before getting to any digital insertions, which was kind of the purpose of getting the video. I haven’t watched all the scenes yet, though, so others may be quite a bit better.)

I went back to the hotel for some e-mail (free WiFi) and blog time. Finally made contact with Ole from X-Rated Leather, then traveled to his shop for measurements. What sort of a custom piece to get, though. I want a piece that is special and notable — why have it otherwise? — but it also needs to be mainstream enough that I actually can and will wear it. (As stated, why have it otherwise? I have a couple pieces like that, actually, that I can only wear once per city per year, and sometimes not even that often.) Obviously, he prefers to do a couple actual fittings for his custom pieces, which would not be possible (Denmark being a bit far to go for a fitting).

The idea I had was to get a custom-made vest, with lightning bolts across the back which exactly match the pattern of my lightning bolt tattoos, but with color — yellow bolts with a bright blue “shadow”, to echo Lightning Lad’s costume iconography that they are drawn from. Per Ole, the vest will be lined inside with leather (rather than having one side raw as is usual in the States, which tends to leave suede crumblies on your shirt, and sometimes even dye stains), with a pair of zippered pockets on the inside. He’ll also put some yellow and blue piping on the front to echo the colors on the back. I will send him the computer files from the tattoos so that he can use the exact shape to match.

Is this a €500 (US$750) value? Probably not, technically, but if you think of the prize as intended to be “a custom piece of leather clothing, value up to” the amount. And given the physical distance between his shop and my home, I’m satisfied with the result; I think it’s an adequate solution, given time and location and desired uses.

The master’s cap arrived by post this afternoon from the Anco, before I had to leave. Thankfully!

The hotel in Berlin is quite a trip. This is a leather-themed hotel/bed & breakfast, with semi-themed rooms supplied with kink play equipment. (The most well known of these is the Black Tulip in Amsterdam, an obvious antecedent in the name department; Seattle once had the Gypsy Arms, too.) The hallway was lined with a dog cage, mannequins with straight jackets, a display case with assorted electric gear, and so on. The room had a sling, a vertical bondage rack, and an adjustable fuck bench, plus a selection of medical furniture. (And a closet, TV with DVD player, and sink, and a single bed that was originally a medical bed of some sort.)

After a quick nap, I went out to Mutschmanns, then to Scheune (as I had been directed; the crowd shifts from one to the other around 2:00 am). There I met Pieter (from Berlin) and Graeme (from Los Angeles), and we all eventually went to New Action (where the crowd shifts to after 4:00 am). Pieter was dealing with a friend of his who was suffering from lung cancer who had essentially moved in with him for the duration.

Graeme was a good piss boy and drained me a couple times.

Pieter gave me a piece of candy, which I later realized was probably Ecstasy, although if it was, I don’t know what effect it had on me, if any. We also shared a cigarette laced with hash (I think), but again, no effect that I really can identify. We ended up back at my hotel room, but he left soon after. He tried to lay a trip on me about not being interested in him and just wanting him as a handy dick or fist, but he was feeling depressed about his buddy with cancer and that was more of the issue, I’m sure. And maybe some drug effects as well.

Updated on February 26, 2010

Updated on May 17, 2010

Europe 2009: Copenhagen (Thursday, July 30)

2009-07-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

This was my day for really focusing on the competitions. So after the usual breakfast and puttering with the blog posts, I got everything set for the Physical part of the leather contest, laying out all my outfit pieces and putting them on (except for the boots). I had mostly set this up in Seattle, but made a last minute change to use the other harness, and of course I now had to use the cowboy hat rather than the master’s cap (since the cap had been left in Amsterdam).

Then I did likewise with the Presentation part, running through the routine a couple times, watching myself in the bathroom mirror. I also turned the netbook on its side and propped it up on a high shelf and used its webcam as a second sort of mirror. I had to figure out how to do the costume change part within the very limited time frame; I ended up settling for layering two t-shirts, and slipping off the braces and rolling one shirt over my head to show the second one. (More later.)

Then I headed over to the K3 nightclub for the afternoon practice. Because of schedules, the other two Americans were not there for practice until later in the afternoon, and the Canadian had pulled out due to a schedule change for a conference meeting he was attending. I did get to scope out the European competition, though — Erik from Denmark and Walther, the current Mr. Leather Norway — and got to see them do their presentations (fantasies). Mine is storytelling, Erik’s is a standard-style leather contest fantasy, and Walther’s is a solo dance routine preceded by a speech about HIV; quite the range, and we’ll see what the other two add to the mix. It was very difficult to design a fantasy that I could do by myself and would carry to an audience mostly European.

After that, I practiced for my line dance competition and then did the competition, winning two golds and a silver, plus overall for my division. They finally did the awards and finished them just after 10:00, so I had to grab my clothes and really hurry to K3.

Of course, for all my hurry, it was halfway unwarranted. I scrambled over to K3 and got upstairs to start changing. By the time I got changed, the entertainment went on, a leather song medley from Ask Helga (Copenhagen’s camp drag troupe, real singers), called “Nights in Black Leather”. I only paid a little attention to it, between changing and fanning myself from being very sweaty, and holding my head from where I kept banging it on the rafters in our changing area. (I’m 6 foot, the ceiling was 6 foot, the rafters were 5 foot 10, and they seemed to be over the places we could stand to change rather than over the benches and table. Bang bang bang, ow ow ow.)

For the Physical part of the contest, I came out in chaps, red-stripe t-bar (so my ass and tattoos showed), red-piped muscle police shirt, and cowboy hat. On stage, I stripped off the shirt to show my red and ring harness underneath; good crowd reaction. The question to me was about the most masculine moves done in country-western dance. I told them that they didn’t let us do some of those for competition, as I faked a jack-off action, so then I showed dipping a partner lower… lower… lower… all the way to the floor, and then I would drop him and walk away (with a big finger snap). The crowd really liked that: it played with the cowboy hat, it showed strength and good body form, and it was funny and a little mean, just right for a leather competition.

For the Presentation (Fantasy), I told the story of Leather Pinocchio. Gepetto, the leather daddy woodcutter made himself a new sex toy, a leatherboy. Pinocchio wanted to be a REAL leatherboy, and the Red Fairy (who gives fists rather than wishes) told him how: become a donkey (pony play!), find Monstro (Girth and Mirth!), and compete in a leather competition in Copenhagen (the crowd liked that joke). Unfortunately, when Pinocchio became a REAL leatherboy (this was when I showed the second shirt, which said “Leatherboy”), he lost his “woody”. But he learned if he still told lies — “You’ve got a biiig dick!” — his dick would still grow. His rubber inflatable dick. “I am a top! I am a top! I am a top” as I pulled the inflated dick out of the shorts, all the way.

The crowd reaction was small at first, partly because the volume wasn’t up loud and the first two lines were lost. (I recorded the Pinocchio, Narrator, and Red Fairy voices myself on my iPhone, artificially lowering the Red Fairy voice with another program, and edited it all together with Garage Band. Impressive job, if I say so myself!) By halfway through, though, the audience was getting it and laughing at the funny bits. If I ever get to do it again, I’ll use the 3:39 length original version, which has a couple more jokes and a little more breathing room in it; might even pad a couple more seconds for the costume change and add a few at the start.

In the end, I got 38 out of 40 points — which means I probably got 20 of 20 for the Physical part — and ended up as 1st Runner-Up (and another Silver medal). I’m happy with that, as I got two prizes: a €40 gift certificate and a €500 custom leather item. Erik from Denmark won first place; his fantasy was definitely top notch (better than mine), he deserved it for that.

Afterward, I hastened back to the hotel with all my gear, showered and changed, and then came back to K3, dressed in my 501 shorts and the chainmail harness. Originally a gay disco, K3 is now a straight club but it turned back into a gay club for the night. Three or four floors, two different DJs — the one upstairs was pretty good, and that’s special coming from me, since I don’t like club music much. They had dark rooms set up and everything, and they even ran out of beer so the guys from SLM had to go raid beer from their clubhouse. Very successful party, I think. I ran into both Jeffrey and Ho & Jens again.

Ho sucked my dick while we sat in one of the lounge areas, and we got some very approving looks. (Or were they jealous?) He offered to fist me there, too, but I declined. I would have liked to, and I would have really gotten off on the public display, but even the dick sucking was beyond the level I saw anyone else doing, so I didn’t want to push the envelope all the way into confetti!

Out in the courtyard, as it started to sprinkle, I met Peter and he went down on me, really ramming my cock down his throat, PA and all. (My cock is pretty thick and longer than average, so this was impressive.) He did this right in the middle of the crowd, and again, there was very little similar activity from anyone else, but lots of fun looks. He did this for some time, as the crowd dispersed and the party ended. We then headed back to his place, where I hoped for his fist.

But no such luck. Instead, it was me on my knees (and etc.) for the next couple hours, and with major tit clamps on my already sore nipples. And lots of really good poppers! Never got his fist or even his dick in my ass, but it was a really good time anyway. I had to call it quits when I suddenly started seeing huge snowflakes that glowed blue and yellow and pink — too much poppers and endorphins, I guess; very trippy and out of my head. Got back to my hotel at 5:15 am. Yawn!

Updated on February 25, 2010

Updated on May 14, 2010

Europe 2009: Copenhagen (Wednesday, July 29)

2009-07-30T05:33:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

Tuesday night was the Naked Party at the SLM clubhouse. I got fisted by two guys (a couple; Ho and Jens). Jens had pretty big hands so he only got in once before his other half took over, then he got in again a few times later. Briefly fucked a guy from Paris later, and then had my ass played with (but not fisted) by Jeffrey from New Orleans (who had neither a Southern nor Cajun accent).

Updated on February 24, 2010

Updated on May 12, 2010

Europe 2009: Amsterdam and Copenhagen (Tuesday, July 28)

2009-07-29T04:04:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

Tuesday evening was a party at the SLM clubhouse. It was a fisting party. I have a goal of a fist a day while in Europe, you know. I fisted two guys (Allen was one, although I’ve likely misspelled his name), got fisted myself (Pascal from Paris), fucked and fisted another guy (got 98% of the way in him, missed his fist cherry by millimeters; bet the next guy will get him done), and then got almost (95%?) fisted again while standing up and blew a load all over him.

Cleanout was a bit easier here than in Amsterdam, because the hose head will fit over the shower head in the bathroom here. Got a lot of air bubbles, but I didn’t have to strain as much.

One “problem” I have when getting fisted is that when the fist comes out, I piss. Happens nearly every time, and the more liquid I’ve had in me (orally, that is), the more volume I piss. I can usually keep that confined to the pad we have under the sling at home, but at the SLM clubhouse, that would end up on the concrete floor and be more of an issue (could be slippery for others). Solution: I put a condom on my cock while I was being fisted, so I could piss to my heart’s content (bladder’s content?) and not worry, so long as the condom itself didn’t come off. Worked very well tonight.

Updated on February 23, 2010

Updated on May 12, 2010

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Monday, July 27)

2009-07-28T01:53:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

I bought myself a new nose ring at a piercing place. It’s a staple with rectangular edges and points, like an inverted trident without the middle tine. Kind of cool.

I ran into Dael and Kev again at the Argos. I sucked and got fucked in the dark room, But not by Dael and Kev this time.

Checked for the missing nose ring at the Eagle’s lost-n-found, but no luck.

Updated on February 9, 2010

I proceeded to lose the new nose staple in Denver in September, either during play at the Denver Eagle or during wild sex in the hotel room. We couldn’t find it later, so probably at the Eagle.

Updated on May 12, 2010

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Sunday, July 26)

2009-07-27T03:05:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

Wandered around a while, then trekked 30 minutes southwest of the Centrum to a fisting party I had been invited to, at a bar called Sameplace

I was wearing one of my kilts, the tan canvas and black leather one from MacLeo. It got a number of looks, but I trained myself long ago not to make eye contact back on those. Just let them pass by. Unfortunately, the heavy canvas rubbing against my PA apparently unscrewed the ball and then worked the entire ring out; it was gone by the time I got to the party. I think I remember hearing a “ding” noise which may have been the ring falling out, and I felt a jab of one of the kilt snap backs at one point which was probably shortly after the ring fell out. (Bad things come in threes, eh: three piercing rings gone in a week! Fortunately I have a couple smaller spares with me. I didn’t plan on new jewelry being a main souvenir on this trip, but it looks like I’ll go shopping on Monday at the leather shops and a piercing place on Warmoesstraat.)

I met a couple guys at the party — Patrick and Chris, expat Brits — and went out to dinner with them to a pizzeria called Paprika (they tell me most of the Italian places in Amsterdam are Turkish owned) where we talked politics and same-sex marriage and sex stuff, and then went back to their apartment. I had fucked and fisted Patrick at the party, and then fisted Chris (after finding out they were partners); I almost got both hands in Chris. Back at their place, Patrick fisted me. Met their cats, Desmond (Abyssinian, but he doesn’t look much like it to me) and Molly (Desmond’s daughter, half Somali).

I was told that the big gay social networking (hookup) site in the Netherlands (and maybe the rest of Europe?) these days is GayRomeo.com (at least for leather; anything listing fisting as one of the top-level search options is a plus), along with Recon. Stuff with a big presence in the States like Manhunt and AssPig have almost no membership here; Manhunt doesn’t even have Europe as an option! Bear411 is still a presence here.

Later that evening, I caught a cab and visited an online buddy from GayRomeo.com, Mauricio, ironically within blocks of where the party had been. He fucked me until I came, then fisted me with each hand, came, and fisted me some more until I came again. (pig) Walked back to the Centrum late at night (1:30 am); beautiful weather in the high 60s, me in shorts and tank top.

For clean out, I have been using a portable shower head, intended for attaching to the sink or tub faucet when a shower isn’t available. (European and American pipe sizes or threading differ, so I didn’t bring my shower shot.) This doesn’t work quite as well as a shower hose, and in Amsterdam, the sink was about an inch too high to deal with comfortably, so I have had to perch with one foot on a chair and one foot tiptoed on the floor to get my ass over the sink to evacuate. Fun fun. (Stretch and strain.)

Updated on February 8, 2010

Updated on May 3, 2010

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Saturday, July 25)

2009-07-26T02:50:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

Went to the Argus, Dirty Dick’s, and the Eagle. Met up with Robert, a guy from Haarlem I had been chatting with online. He tells me that the religious government is cracking down on things in Amsterdam, that it isn’t as wild as it once was. Plenty wild to my inexperienced eyes, but I take his point. He also said Dirty Dick’s is likely to close soon, because the building foundation is rotten. Always a shame, but that bar was quite empty for a Saturday night(to my eye), so maybe not a huge loss.

I sucked dick upstairs at the Web in the afternoon; I got off but he didn’t. Sucked dick in the dark room at Dirty Dick’s; we both got off.

Updated on February 5, 2010

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Friday, July 24)

2009-07-25T02:06:00.000-07:00

This is just the sex parts of my European trip report. For the rest of the report from this day, click here.

The Web has a “dark room”, a small cruising maze like a mini-bathhouse. I got reprimanded by the bartender for coming into the bar, nosing around, and heading upstairs without buying something first. I ’can’t blame him, and 5 minutes later, he gave the same spiel the same to another guy (so its a common event). I typically spend a couple minutes in a new bar before deciding I want to stay long enough to have a beer, and I walk around the place to get a feel for it; there isn’t usually a dark room like that to explore in the process, in the States. The only times I’ve seen such at bars in the States were the Pit at the Chicago Eagle (now closed), and the brief time that the backroom was open at the Loading Dock in San Francisco (also now closed). (Well, formal backrooms. Lots of bars have had informal grope areas which the staff turn a blind eye to, until the cops eventually notice.) Turns out all the leather bars here have them. (I visited them in the Argos, Cockring, Cuckoo’s Nest, and Eagle later that night. Well, passed through most of them.)

Other than the dark rooms, the leather bars should look familiar to Americans. Maybe a bit small. The exception is the Cockring, which is a leather dance bar downstairs and a bar and cruising area upstairs. It’s rare to find a dance floor at a leather bar in the States; Detroit Eagle is about the only one I’ve seen, other than places like the Cuff in Seattle which added a dance floor and stopped being much of a leather bar. (“Why don’t leathermen dance?” “Because they’ll bruise themselves with their keys!” <twitch hips back and forth, say ow ow ow as the keys smack you>)

I met a pair of bears, Dael and Kev, from the Midlands (England) upstairs at the Eagle.

I sucked and got fucked in the dark room at Argos; got the guy off. Nipple play in the dark room at the Eagle; ow ow ow. Threesome at my hotel with the Midlands bears, got almost fisted by one, then fucked and fisted by the other; only one of them came.

Updated on February 4, 2010

What is a “Twink”?

2008-10-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

This question recently came up on a list I’m on, and one person was tickled enough by it that he suggested I “publish” it. By your command, edited for blogability…

It’s shorthand for “Twinkie&rdquo — which we all know is golden sponge cake with cream filling, light and fluffy and full of preservatives and pretty much nutrition free, but (to some people) oh so yummy.

Ergo, a “twink&rdquo as a person is light and fluffy and full of cream (and often blond, and usually gay), without a lot of substance to him, but (to some people) oh so yummy. A male airhead, like, you know? (And I’m sure that somewhere, female twinks are referenced, too. Probably letter-shifted to “twynks”.)

It used to be almost always a derogatory term, but these days, I gather it’s a mark of pride for some boys. (It’s still a negative term in my book, though. I never use it as a favorable reference.)

Updated on May 3, 2010:

I recently read more details on the origin of the term — when it was first used, whether it’s connected to the Hostess treat, etc. — but the details were inconclusive. One of the more intriguing connections was to a British perm lotion called Twink, which inspired Britsh psychedelic musician John Charles Adler to adopt “Twink” as his stage name. Adler was involved in bands called The Faries and the Pink Faries; draw your own conclusions.

Another possible origin for the word might relate to stars, as in “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.” A twinkling star appears insubstantial and not stable.

Updated on February 11, 2011

Retroactively added another version of the definition to the blog, merging in from my older blog. Complete with a nasty exchange from someone who misinterpreted humor for hatred.

What Were They Thinking? — Dr. Laura Masturbates

2008-03-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

On Monday morning, driving to work, I scanned past the conservative talk radio station KVI, which recently decided to pull off the morning talk show “The Commentators” in favor of Dr. Laura.

We love her.

The bumper (“end of a car”?) music was this New Wave classic:

“I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls

(Actually, it may have been a more recent cover, since the voice sounded higher than in this recording. Same difference.)

Just wrap your head around that for a moment: Dr. Laura, and a song about jilling off.

Updated on February 9, 2010

Ireland: Saturday, March 1

2008-03-02T02:55:00.000-08:00

Written Sunday, March 2 at 2:25 pm, Dublin (at the hotel)

Well, I never made it out to the pubs. I got “ordered in” via Manhunt, and went out to the apartment of a couple locals. A little leather hood, a little restraints, a little spanking, and little fucking, a little getting my dick sucked by an additional guy who was there, and little (but not enough!) ass play. I had been thinking about going to the local sauna (bath house), the Boilerhouse, but back to the hotel after 2:00, that’s not going to happen. (And their cover is steep, anyway, so I’ll just save some bucks, er, Euros.) Wish the scene had lasted longer, but I can’t complain.

Updated on January 13, 2010

Ireland: Friday, February 29 (part 3)

2008-03-01T14:28:00.000-08:00

Written Saturday, March 1 at 2:28 pm, Dublin (at the hotel)

Made eyes at a couple bearish types at Pantibar and The George last night, but nothing beyond that. Came back to the hotel around 1:30. (Pantibar is named for an MTF transsexual performer, and I guess owner of the bar, Panti. Part of the decor is red women’s and men’s underwear as light diffusers over the lampshades.)

Updated on January 12, 2010

Ireland: Friday, February 29 (part 2)

2008-02-29T22:11:00.000-08:00

Written Friday, February 29 at 10:11 pm, Dublin (at the hotel)

I hooked up with a Dublin guy early in the evening via Manhunt. (He’s actually from “the north”; don’t know if that means Belfast/Northern Ireland or not.) Ended up as and interesting encounter: he asked me to put on some of my leather — I only brought a vest and some boots, to keep the weight down — and that plus a nice fat dick made him want me to fuck him. No problem. Except that he’d never been fucked before (and hadn’t done much fucking himself, I gather; I guess he was mostly an oral guy). Fat dick + cherry ass = probably quite the memorable time for him. (Moreso because of the Prince Albert piercing — I only have the 6-gauge curved barbell in, so nothing nearly so dramatic as if the 2-gauge ring were in, but still, multiple new sensations for him!) Did he like it? He wasn’t sure; he had some definite pain, and he didn’t know what he should be feeling (and I could barely tell him, it’s been 18 years since I was in that place), but he stuck with it like a trooper and eventually decided he just needed to jam himself on down. (First time I’ve deflowered a guy, to my knowledge. He took it easier than some have, though!)

Updated on January 11, 2010

Ireland: Friday, February 29

2008-02-29T12:25:00.000-08:00

Written Friday, February 29 at 12:25 pm, on the train to Dublin

I’ve got the starts of a couple play sessions for this evening set up already, although how well they’ll play through remains to be seen. (As is always the case with such.) Being “fresh meat” in Dublin will probably help boost them to working, of course. First one will likely be 6:30 pm or so. A lot will depend on Internet access at the hotel or close by.

Melts in Your Car, Not in Your Hand

2007-07-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

One of the radio stations this morning was asking callers to tell of the strangest things they have had melt in their vehicle. Answers included a plastic purse, a cell phone, a jug of milk, and almost 5 tons of ice. But here’s my story (I didn’t call it in):

It had been a hot summer in the San Francisco Bay Area, in 1994, I think. I had left a couple lubricated condoms in the glove compartment… and they didn’t just melt, they exploded. I had known about the resulting mess for a few days, but hadn't cleaned the goop out yet.

Then someone decided to break into my car one night while was I was at one of the bars. Smashed the passenger window, opened the glove compartment, grabbed the gas book… and got a fisful of gooey, sticky lube. You can just imagine the squeal the thief must have let out.

The thought almost (but only almost) makes having to fix the window again worthwhile. (I think this was the fourth of five times that car got broken into. Four smashed windows and one pried-open door frame. Two break-ins were in view of the police station.)

Updated on December 18, 20009

Here I Sit All Broken Hearted

2004-09-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

It amazes me at times what you can see in a bathroom stall which the previous user really should have cleaned up.

The most common — and perhaps most disgusting (but please don’t offer up worse things, thanks very much) — are mystery trails of dried liquid. Many a clueless man (I’ve talked to some of them) has sat there and thought “What a lousy paint job, to have missed those drips” or “The cleaning staff needs to wipe up the disinfectant dribbles better” before realizing that the drops are the seminal remnants of previous stall users. Cum, that is.

What kind of an idiot feels the need to beat off in the bathroom stall at work, especially at a high tech company where the employees are in theory a bit better educated and refined? (In theory.) Are they wanking over the hot chick in Human Resources, or maybe the bear cub in Tech Support? Do they do it in the middle of the day, while someone else may be grunting over squeezing out something else in the stall next to them? Or are they working late, maybe cruising porn sites, and came in for quick relief?

But more to the point, why the fuck can’t they clean up after themselves? Grab a little toilet paper and jerk off into that. Or catch it in your hand and wipe the cum off from there. Or for God’s sake, if you can’t control yourself any better than that, at least wipe off the wall when you’re done! Are you trying to “mark your territory,” akin to a dog pissing on a tree? Is there some secret thrill that you get from knowing that other people may come in later and see your dried slime trails? And what does the mirror in your bathroom or the wall behind your bed’s headboard look like, since I assume that if you can’t be bothered to clean up the stall at work, you must not do it at home, either.

I guess the one thing to be thankful for with this is that I’ve never found the slime trails when they are wet.

But dried cum isn’t the only mystery substance to be found in the stalls. (No, I didn’t find a baggie taped behind the toilet tank!) This morning, glancing under the stall wall while using the urinal, I saw a bunch of short hair trimmings. Three possibilities:

The guy got a haircut on the way to work and was shedding clumps which the barber did a lousy job of brushing out. I’ve had little shreds litter my papers and keyboard before, but this was a lot more than that.
The guy trimmed his beard in the stall, probably while taking a dump — might as well do double-duty! You would think over the bathroom sink would be more efficient, although
maybe he had a mirror he hung on the back of the stall door. But it sure looks like he would have ended up with prickly beard trimmings in his underwear.
Or he was trimming his pubic hair in the stall.

Whatever. Just clean the fuck up after yourself!

(Weblog Title Reference: From the infamous bathroom graffiti poem, “Here I sit all broken hearted / Tried to shit but only farted / Then one day I got the chance / Tried to fart but shit my pants.”)

Updated on September 7, 2004 (less than an hour after initial post)

And let’s not forget spitting in the urinal but missing, leaving the loogie to drip over the side and congeal and dry into a frothy mass. Ick!

Updated on April 19, 2011

What is “Kinky”?

2004-08-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

I’m not about to try to define the word.

It seems to fall into the same class as obscenity: “I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it.” Pinning it down (ooh, there’s something kinky… maybe) is impossible, because
the specifics differ from person to person.

What I will say, though, is this:

If you do it, it’s kinky.
If they do it, it’s perverted.

(And if you don’t do it but you’re still oddly intrigued, then it’s edge play. Because you’ll probably try it someday.)

Updated on March 16, 2011

What is a “Twinkie”?

2004-06-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

For more than a decade, the term “Twinkie” has been in use in the gay community, especially in the leather and bear sectors, to describe a certain type of guy. While it is usually used derisively, in good queer form it has been embraced by those it was used to describe and turned into it’s own self-affirming and descriptive term.

It amazes me, though, the number of people who apparently have no idea what the term means. They have this hazy idea that it means “young guys” or “club kids,” but they miss the what-should-be-obvious derivation. (Maybe this is an indicator of the post-modern nature of our society today, that we refuse to look for the obvious or surface connection, instead expecting irony or conspiracy in everything.)

Here, then, is a definition (as posted to the Handball list at QueerNet):

A "Twinkie" is made of light, golden sponge cake, stuffed with cream filling, loaded with preservatives, and not very good for you. (With apologies to Hostess.)

Ergo, human Twinkies are likewise fluffy, full of cream, and not very good for you. They are often quite young, but if Twinkies have an alleged 17-year shelf life, so may human ones…

(Hostess also used to make both chocolate and chocolate-covered Twinkies, just in case you think the human variety is only blond.)

Comment by Fritz (from New York) on June 28, 2004

You may think you are being witty, Jim, but by posting that drivel publicly, you not only offended our young friend in San Diego, but potentially everyone on the list who is under 30 or maybe interested in guys under 30. Please note that this is not a public post, it is private to you. What I find astonishing is that a self-styled “daddy” who is 36, turning 37 soon, would put out a public post so contemptuous of younger guys. If you are not interested in meeting, connecting with and perhaps helping younger guys, because, according to your post, they are all “fluffy, full of cream, and not very good for you”, what in hell gives you the right to call yourself a “Daddy”? I’ve earned that right, boy, both by benefit of age and by being willing to meet and judge any man on his personal attraction for me and to me, his willingness to learn, and his intrinsic merits, not arbitrary standards of age, race, class, income, etc. There is a word for such arbitrary judgements, and the word is bigotry. By my calculations, legal age plus your shelf-life of a “Twinkie” is 18 +17 = 35. Since you recently passed that barrier, do I detect a faint whiff of bitterness from an ex-twinkie who now wants to pretend to be a daddy? Get a life, and learn a little humility when talking to a forum of men who have far more experience and compassion than you are willing to demonstrate. If you consider this a flame, so be it. One of the benefits of my advanced age — I’m approaching 60, and proud of it, and I’d hate to see your opinions of older men — is a flame-proof asbestos suit against wannabes on the Internet who think they are being clever.

Two words, Jim. Grow up!

And my response back to him, which I sent back publicly (intentionally so, despite his original comment being not to the list) to the list the original definition was posted to, also on June 28, 2004

I’m sorry you were unable to see the humor intended and (I think) inherent in what I posted. Several other people e-mailed me to say they enjoyed it (but that’s just anecdotal evidence, I realize). But you know…

The surest way to get me to air something publicly is to all but dare me to post it, to let the world see you attempt to smack someone down. Want to try to avoid having them smack you back? If you’ve got something foul to say about a public post I made, dear, you can say it publicly. Or I’ll say it for you, in your own words, by letting everyone know exactly what you’ve said. Especially if you are someone who repeatedly shares his “wisdom” and “goodwill” with the list, establishing a gentle and fatherly tone.

Any respect I had for you is gone, Fritz. But I’m sure you expected that, and that the feeling is mutual.

Updated on February 11, 2011

In other words, Fritz somehow assumed that (a) I hated the fact that I was in my mid-30s and growing older and (b) that I believed that “Twinkie” applied to all gay men in their 20s. Neither of which was true, of course.

But to reiterate for clarity:
If a guy is fluffy, full of cream, and not very good for you, he's a “Twinkie”. Such gay guys are often (but not always) young.
Apropos of nothing, Fritz died in 2010.

This was the first blog post I’ve done addressing this. See also this one for a later one, with some research into the origins of the term.

The Nose Ring

2004-03-05T13:08:00.000-08:00

Three weeks ago tomorrow, I got my septum pierced. (That’s a ring through the cartilage at the bottom of the nose. Think Ferdinand the Bull.)

Why did I do it? Well, with winning the Seattle Leather Daddy contest in November, I got a certificate for a free piercing from Troy at Apocalypse. I’ve already got a pierced ear and a Prince Albert (head of the dick, going through the urethra and out the bottom), and I’ve previously had (and removed) a nipple ring and a tongue stud. So it is was septum, labret (below the lip), guiche (between the dick and the asshole), or a lorum (a bar or ring at the base of the dick where it meets the scrotum). (Or I suppose I could have got something bizarre like a uvula piercing.) I’ve always thought septum piercings looked cool — and with a small retainer in place of a ring, they can be tucked up into the nose, nearly invisible — so that’s what I went for.

(Not that I had to use the certificate, of course, but I wouldn’t want to spurn the generous donation Apocalypse made to our club.)

At the time, I had the choice between a split ring (with a gap at the bottom and two balls), a captive bead (where a ball sits caught between ends of the ring, or a retainer. I chose the split ring because it can be rotated up into the nose to hide it for a while (such as if I have to visit my mother). I could have gone with the retainer, but I figured that if I find the piercing just a little irritating (and I have at times), I might be tempted to remove the retainer and just ditch the piercing, which I’m unlikely to do with the full ring. I wanted to make sure I stick with it.

After eight weeks, it should be healed enough to change the jewelry. At that point, I’ll probably go to a retainer for daily wear, saving the ring — or getting more dramatic spikes and such — for weekends and special events.

The set of reactions I’ve had since then have been unusual. In general, people do their best to just ignore it. I haven’t noticed many cases of people looking at the ring rather than the rest of my face. A few co-workers have asked some specific questions about it — like “What did you do to your nose?” (“Nothing,” I replied. “The piercer did that.” <grin>) — but no vocal negative reactions. Of course, this is Seattle, which was one of the places the trend of facial piercings came from. That, and people generally just try to be polite.

(And of course, there’s the typical “Did that hurt?” question. In gay circles, I answer that quite matter-of-factly: “Just enough that my dick started getting hard when he shoved the needle through. With my teenage step-daughter in the room, watching.”)

But the last weekend of February, I went to Texas for LUEY.

Walking through the airports in Dallas and Houston (but not in the hotel I was at, which was hosting the mostly-black attendees of a Narcotics Anonymous convention [I note the race just because it was the situation there, not because I draw a connection between blacks and drugs; heck, maybe it means blacks are more apt to try to recover from such addiction than whites!]), I kept getting cruised. Or so it seemed, but when I would try to make eye contact and cruise back, I kept getting deep scowls, of the “That guy is gay, isn’t he? I don’t like queers” sort.

It wasn’t until coming through Dallas on the way back that it hit me that the guys weren’t scowling, precisely, but were instead staring at the nose ring. The scowl was more one of confusion than dislike: “What the hell does that guy have hanging from his nose?” Hard to say if I was being cruised as well, or not.

Or maybe the look was “Who let Ferdinand the Bull loose in here?”

Updated on March 9, 2004

Updated on November 8, 2005

Comment by Adam D. (Columbus, OH)
In the deep dripping South, it is sometimes held by religious precept that you should not place any marking on, or hole in, your body, because it’s going to make you unworthy of resurrection.

I think there could be a fundamentalist-Christian thing there… Oh, looky Ma a sinner… he’s going to Hell.   Same reason, I suspect, that until last year (or maybe it was the year before?) you could not legally be tattooed in South Carolina.

Genesis 1:26-27, God said, "Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals and all the creatures that creep along the ground."

[That verse sometimes gets used to bash tree-huggers, i.e. we’re all fucking Masters of the Universe…what a bad idea that is.   And the very next verse is one that some of those guys try to use to get us Gay folk in trouble:

Genesis 1-27: God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.]

The anti-tat, anti-pierce idea is, I think, that God is flawless and unmarked, and so should we be also.   Don’t ask me where the notion of circumcision comes in — I’ve always been happier dreaming of God’s person as being male with a big uncut dick. At any rate, seeing one always gets me to fall to my knees.

Updated on December 20, 2010

Hmm, looks like Ferdinand the Bull didn’t actually have a nose ring!

After a few days of trying to conceal the nose ring by turning it up, I gave up and just lived with it down. Once I changed jobs, it was well enough healed that I switched to leaving it out during the week, putting it in only on weekends and times I’m going to engage in leather play or such during the week. Except for those days I forget it is in and wear it to work. Oh well, not like working for a music company in Seattle, people haven’t seen facial piercings!

Heading toward seven years later, I still have the nose ring — and I’ve added a lorum and had both nipples done (second time for one of them; “like punching through shoe leather” the guy said). Still haven’t decided about a guiche someday, but might get another lorum ring.

The Passion for the Christ

2004-03-01T11:25:00.000-08:00

Blasphemy ahead. You’ve been warned.

I have zero interest in seeing the new film, The Passion of the Christ. Seen one crucifixion, seen them all. (Can’t we just rent Monty Python’s Life of Brian again?) We needed another moving Easter film like we need another novel about growing up gay in the South.

Then again, maybe I will go see it. I hear the whipping scene is hot. Total wanking material.

Updated on March 2, 2004

Updated on December 15, 2010

Maximum Nipplage

2004-02-03T12:41:00.000-08:00

I don’t know who won the Super Bowl this year. Heck, I don’t even know who played in it. But I sure do know that Janet Jackson has her nipple pierced.

I’m not offended by the accidental baring of the nipple of Ms. Jackson (since I’m nasty). Per the CNN story, the intent was to rip away the bustier and leave the bra intact. I’ve been a dance performer before, and I know that costumes don’t always behave as intended in the clinch. (And although not actually performing at the time, I’ve had a pair of leather pants rip down the fly, through the crotch, and across the ass in the middle of a dance move, leaving my naughty bits hanging out for anyone to look at if they wanted. Two boys from Sacramento wanted.)

Assuming it was an accident, of course. The one buzz in the back of my head is the statement from Justin Timberlake on the subject: “I am sorry if anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance at the Super Bowl. It was not intentional and is regrettable.” Note the avoidance of a real apology (I’m sorry that you were offended, not that I caused offense); compare to Dr. Laura’s March 2010 “apology” for offending gays and lesbians a few years back. And note that the final word of his statement is “regrettable” — this means something which can be regretted, not which I do regret. These sorts of press statements usually have their wording very closely analyzed, so no word or phrase in them is accidental.

Talk radio — conservative and liberal alike — is going great guns on this, wanting to know “Are you offended?” Damn right I’m offended. I’m offended by the implication that I should be offended!

Won’t You Wear My Ring… Around Your Neck…

2003-12-16T15:05:00.000-08:00

Mistress Matisse writes the “Control Tower” BDSM column in The Stranger. I wrote to her back in August [slightly edited here]:

Hi, Matisse.

I enjoy reading your column in The Stranger each week. I especially like the recent one on “fetish etiquette,” all-lowercase names, and so on. While I do my best to respect the stated desires of others in such arenas — if Joe wants to be referred to as “boy joe”, I’ll try to comply — I find that it’s easy to cross the line from submissive into pretentious.

That said, a question for you which perhaps you could address in your column.

My boyfriend’s imagination has been captured by the (gay) “leatherboy” movement of late, and as part of that, he wants me to “collar” him. While I’m perfectly willing to — I love him dearly, and the thought makes me hot — I also want to take this idea slowly enough that we are both sure of what we are doing, what it will mean to us, and what it will mean to others.

When I go online for some research, as you observed in the earlier column, I find a whole bunch of stuff dealing with kinky het slave relationships, elaborate rituals for collaring (some including blood exchange; thank you, but no), “collar of consideration,” and so on. In other words, not a lot of info on the meaning of collars in a daddy/boy (or equivalent) relationship and a lot of pretentious crap (although perhaps quite important to some couples, I’m sure; I despise some elaborate wedding vows, too).

I’m hoping you can devote a column to some discussion of this topic, as I suspect it would be both interesting and enlightening, especially if you could include something about how collaring
differs along the straight/gay and slave/boy axes. Hmm, and maybe goth vs. leather?

I’m sure that he and I will wend our way through on our own just fine, of course. But if your thoughts help enlighten and guide us, so much the better.

In the December 11 issue, she largely replied to the general parts of my query. I still haven’t formally collared my boy, but I think we both have come to understand a lot more about the matter in the intervening months.

[Weblog title reference: From a song by Elvis, of course…]

Comment from Troy (of Seattle, WA) / received December 16, 2003:

[When I saw Troy last night, he held up his hand and pointed to his wedding ring.]

“Silly leathermen. That’s what this is for.”

Updated on October 28, 2010

2003-12-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

I won the title of Seattle Leather Daddy 2004 on Saturday, November 29. (The title would be the equivalent of Seattle Leather Daddy 15 if numbered sequentially.) Seattle Leather Daddy’s Boy 2004 is Rusty Jones.

My title e-mail address: SeattleLeatherDaddy@earthlink.net

A Distaste of Leather

2003-10-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, a friend of mine was the publisher of a fetish-oriented magazine (In Uniform Magazine; not hard-core porn, but still “adult”), and he sometimes used other people whom I knew personally to do illustrations for the magazine. I didn’t buy the magazine regularly (uniforms aren’t my thing), but if it had art from one of the people I knew, I would pick it up.

One shop (A Taste of Leather in San Francisco [no website, apparently]) I went into had the latest issue, which I hadn’t seen yet. They had two racks of magainzes: the new magazines were wrapped in plastic, in a rack behind the counter, and another one was in the back of the store with thumbed-through (to the point of uselessness) jumble of other magazines, presumably used stock which they didn’r curate at all. (It was probably worse in that shop that just about anything outside a stuffed-full comics spinner rack, though, indicating that they considered that other magazine rack a lost cause and didn’t monitor it at all.)

I asked if I could leaf through the latest issue. I was told that I had to buy it first. I explained my interest in only selected issues, and thus that I needed to briefly see the contents before buying. I was told I would have to buy it first; they didn’t want the issues damaged like the ones on the open rack. I promised to buy it if it had the content I was after, and offered to leaf through it quickly right there at the counter in front of the clerk (and the store was otherwise empty, so that wouldn’t have been a drain on his attention). Nope: I could only see the interior if I bought a copy first, and there were no refunds for any reason.

Needless to say, I left the store. I then wrote a letter of complaint to the store management. They sent me a letter back in just a few days, which impressed me until I read the content: “That is our store policy. You’re welcome to shop elsewhere if you don’t like it. We don’t need your business.” (That’s a paraphrase, of course, although the last sentence was explicitly in their response.) (Note that I don’t blame the individual clerk for adhering to the store’s policy.)

They don’t need my business. Let’s hope not: I’ve never shopped there since.

(I don’t necessarily bring up old grudges like this regularly. But a mailing list I am on had a thread today on the subject of shrink-wrapped CD’s and thus the eventual potential of shrink-wrapped books which would have to be bought to be read — or accessed at an in-store “reading station” — and which then could not be returned except in exchange for a copy of the same title.)

Updated on October 12, 2010

Trapped!

2003-07-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

You know those big metal donut ball stretchers/ball weights, the ones which come in two pieces that screw together? Like these? (Note: link includes photos with male nudity.)

I sure hope I can get a hex key of the right size (about 3.5 mm) at Lowe’s or Home Depot before I have to board the plane to San Jose on Tuesday morning.

(Yes, I did get free. I had to get a new set of hex keys, and then found the one I lost. And then on my next trip, I had the single key in my carry-on and they seized it at Security.)

Updated on September 1, 2003

Updated on October 21, 2003

Updated on September 2, 2010

Updated the link.

We Should Be On Our Best Behavior

2003-06-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Over Memorial Day Weekend, I attended International Mr. Leather in Chicago. For those who have never attended, think of it as the “Miss America” of leather contests, plus a huge leather trade show, plus the world’s largest leather bar. Thousands of leathermen (and hundreds of leatherwomen) from all over the world descend on Chicago for this long weekend of leather pride and debauchery.

In my opinion, this is the leather community’s opportunity to strut and show our best side to the rest of the world. It’s a chance to wear our finest leathers (rubber, uniforms, etc.), network with like-minded men and women from all over, and prove ourselves to be the community we call ourselves. Unfortunately, every community has some bad eggs. Some leatherfolk take an event like IML as a chance to act out, to freak the mundanes, and to push the fact that we really aren’t any better than anyone else.

Most prominent is simply the fact that the host hotel completely fills with people in for this weekend event. (If there is anyone else staying there, the hotel is foolish, as neither the leather folk nor the other guests really want to be around each other that weekend.) Because we occupy the entire hotel, giving them 100% occupancy and spending a lot of money on the overpriced beer they sell at the special bar they set up for the weekend (and frequenting the hotel restaurants, and so forth), some of the IML attendees take advantage of the situation. They are demanding of the hotel staff, they intentionally leave their rooms messier than usual (and think what state leathermen can leave their sheets and towels and such in), and they are just generally rude.

This year, dining at a steakhouse at the hotel, I observed the patrons of the restaurant: about 80% IML attendees, but also a fair number of general public outsiders. This is a classic interface, not just between us and the staff but between us and the general public. “No shirt, no shoes, no service” is there for a purpose, both for health code reasons and for simple decorum. And yet, probably 10% of the leather diners were wearing just a vest or harness. The most egregious I noted was Mr. Las Vegas Leather, wearing just his title sash on his upper body. Sorry, man, but dinner at IML is not a sash event.

I wish that the manager on duty at the restaurant had refused to seat each and every one of these men who were dressed inappropriately. It would have served them (us) right and might have served as a wake-up call to our community. We are still guests at the hotel and other businesses, gentlemen, and the staff and other diners are people who deserve appropriate dignity and respect. If we push the envelope too far, we will be told to not return, no matter how much fucking money we bring in.

(Of course, these concerns aren’t just about the leather community. Written in late June, they apply just as well to behaviors at Pride parades and celebrations across the country.)

There is a line between celebrating that which makes us special and behaving inappropriately, and really, it’s a fairly thick line, easy to see. Use some restraint. I’ve got some nice leather ones you can borrow.

Updated on July 29, 2010

Whip It! Whip It Good!

2003-03-31T15:20:00.000-08:00

Seattle Men in Leather’s Tribal Instinct lecture series on BDSM on April 18 (third Friday of every month at the Wet Spot [now known as the Center for Sex Positive Culture]) will be on singletail whips, and it will be followed, as usual, by a Men’s Play Party, this month with a “Biker” theme.

The organizers missed the boat on the theme this month and should have gone with the St. Andrew’s Cross. April 18 is Good Friday, after all!

[Weblog title reference: From the song by Devo.]

Updated on July 7, 2010

Added links.

Mr. Monogamy

2003-03-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

That’s certainly a misleading entry title, because it isn’t me. Or at least I don’t think it is. It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to find out.

What I do know is that I draw a distinction between “monogamy” and “fidelity”. I separate them on physicality grounds. That is, “monogamy” is about the sex side of things, about fucking only a single person. “Fidelity”, on the other hand, is faithfulness, being mentally and emotionally true to a single person. Fidelity is (should be) the true goal of relationships, in my opinion. We want someone to love, someone to rely on. What are the roots of monogamy, after all, but a means of forcing fidelity? (“If he fucks only me, then he is more likely to love and rely on me.”)

(Okay, there are other roots to monogamy, too, such as insuring an heir: “Since she fucks only me, I know the kid is mine” and “Since he fucks only me, I know my kid is his heir.”)

I believe that it is possible — and desirable — to achieve fidelity separate from monogamy. You (both of you) can then have both the mental/emotional benefits provided by the former and also the physical benefits provided by the latter. Or as dialogue, “I love you, honey, but you know, I’d really love to fuck him.”

Not that this is manageable for and by everyone. First and foremost, the goal has to be a goal for both members of the couple (or however many are involved; more than two is usually a mark that you’ve already gone past the start of the question). And you have to have discussed it — not “discussed” it as when one says he wants it and the other says he’s okay with that but secretly isn’t — really discussed it. And then you have to find a way to make it work for the two (or more) of you: some ways it works might include only fucking others when out of town, or fucking others at their place but never sleeping over and never bringing them home, or a limit on how many times you can fuck someone else, or even only fucking others as a couple. And for some relationships, strict monogamy is simply the way is has to go, if that’s what both partners want.

The point is, our culture has heavily ingrained us with the idea that fidelity and monogamy are the same thing, and although they are not, we all have our personal levels of comfort with how different they are. For a separation of the two to work, everyone involved has to be on the same page and willing to compromise to a certain degree.

The compromise between fidelity and monogamy should not be an all or nothing game. When that happens, someone is going to lose, and a relationship should not be a competition.

(Note that I intentionally chose to use the word “fuck” throughout this, to avoid euphemisms like “play around” or “sleep with,” or even just the passivity of “has sex with.” Euphemisms breed [ahem] a lack of clarity and boldness. Of course, no term is unable to be misinterpreted; my use of “fuck” should not be read as laying everything at the feet of the “fucker” and excusing the “fuckee” from any responsibility. It takes two to fuck.)

[Weblog title reference: From the Irving Berlin song “Mr. Monotony”, originally heard in Easter Parade.]

Updated on March 20, 2003

Updated on October 21, 2003

Internet Search Engines

2000-04-10T12:07:00.000-07:00

After a tiring Saturday night, not enough sleep, and my neck out of joint — I guess I shouldn’t have been in that position against the wall at Blow Buddies for quite so long — I was still trying to get through the late afternoon and then go dancing. Joking, one friend said that I could always buy some speed (an illegal drug that keeps you up for hours and hours).

“I don’t know where to buy any,” I said. And then I covered his mouth, saying “And I don’t want to know. I suppose I could always do a web search. Yeah, I could go to Ask Jeeves and say ‘Where can I buy speed in San Francisco?’”

And then we laughed and postulated what would be returned:

“Where can I buy a fast car?”
“Where can I get a map of San Francisco?”
“What movies starred Keanu Reeves?”
“How can I set up my own crystal meth lab?”

We weren’t all that far off. Check it out for yourself.

(Where’s Eliza when you need it?)

Erotica (definition)

1999-04-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

Erotica is the porn you’ll admit to reading.

Updated on October 27, 1999