Fruitbowl: An Oral History of Queer Sex

Jaelynn shares stories from her life growing up queer in Mississippi and her evolution as a trans woman. Her stories include misadventures in the sex trade and valuable advice for anyone who wants to get frisky with black women: “Don’t Touch The Hair.”

So I think I first learned about sex with friends casually and usually pretty wrong about it. And family members having fun in their drunkenness in barbershops, lots of barbershop talk. There was a lot of jokes, but things that I took seriously beause I didn't know a lot about sex. And I actually recall one instance when one of the barbers was talking about someone putting a mouse up their ass. And he essentially was using the F word in reference to who it was. And so I thought that's what it meant to be gay is that you had to put mice up your ass. But I mean, I later learned better. And at the time I was presenting as a male and identifying as well, I didn't know what gay was, but as a gay man. 

My earliest memories of expressing my sexuality was a lot of watching HBO late at night after parents go to bed and doing a lot of exploring on whatever I could find on Showtime. Thankfully we had cable. I think Real Sex was happening at that time. And then there was a series, oh Emmanuel? I think they played every single night. That may have been on Cinemax, or Skinemax is what we called it. The show was totally about Emmanuel's sexual adventures. And I don't remember a lot, but there was always a new guy, a new exploration. There was a lot of travel in it too, I think. And I was obsessed with getting out of Mississippi. It was a fem character. In retrospect I identified a lot with her and the way that she expressed her sexuality. There were like five different series of Emmanuel and it was really seductive. And so it was actually a good place to sort of learn sexual play and romance. It wasn't too hard. And there was Emmanuel Seductress. Oh, it's all coming back to me now. There were a few Emmanuels, like part three, four, and 10. I swear to God. It was every night.

I do remember one friend that we used to talk a lot and do some, you know, cautious exploration. He was on the couch under the cushions of the couch and I was on top. And we were, I was humping him as I had seen of course, on HBO. So that's sort of my first explorations and they were all around this one guy too. He was a neighbor kid from around the corner. He was my best friend. And I think he was just curious, like me about sex. He was the exact same age as I was and we were really close. 

What's really strange is I'm trying to think of my first time and I don't quite, it happened really early. There were levels of engagement with sex. There's blow jobs that happened first and then dry humping. And then of course, eventually anal sex, and vaginal sex, and et cetera. Later on, I think the first impactful had to be with another neighbor. I apparently was the little slut of the neighborhood. But it was another neighbor who wasn't always there, but only came in the summers. And I don't quite remember the first time, but I know that it was him that I did the most exploration with. For every following summer when he came until I didn't see him again in high school, he was the first one that I attempted to give a blow job. 

So I didn't really know what a blowjob was. Like sucking dick wasn't really in my vocabulary at the time. And so what does it sound like? We knew it had to do with a penis and a mouth, and so somehow we thought it was blowing. So there was some oral involved. I would get it wet and then I thought the purpose was to actually get the cold feeling on his penis. So I'd get it wet with my mouth and then just start blowing on it. And he liked it, so I guess it did work. And he is the first one where we attempted anal sex. And it was too much, particularly for me. But eventually over the course of summers, we figured out how to do it and he'd come back with more knowledge that he was getting from somewhere in Texas. I don't know where, but he'd come back with more knowledge and we'd do more exploration. 

The experience was very positive for me. The only negative was, of course both of us were Christian. And we were in black Christian society in the south, him in Texas and me in Mississippi. And so we had to hide it, our sexual explorations and felt really guilty about it. It would eventually happen that we'd go through a series of explorations. And before he left for the end of the summer, he would just stop talking to me because he got either shamed, embarrassed or something happened. But then we'd repeat the cycle the next year.

So the most embarrassing sexual experience that I've had. I was living in DC. I had just moved from the south and gotten a job as a flight attendant. I got laid off and so I needed some money. And I was doing a lot of partying, having a lot of sex with a lot of people. And one of my friends suggested, "Hey, why don't you just see if you can make some money doing it because you're already whoring." And so I thought in my mind at the time, that was a really good idea. And I had a lot of friends who were actually sex workers and they had good lives and they were rolling in dough. So they hooked me up with this person. I called and I was a little nervous and he seemed nice. And he said, "Hey I'll take you out to a really nice dinner and then we can hook up later and figure out if it's going to work."

So we go to dinner. It was a hole in the wall and he ordered food for me, it was like a rotting salad. It's really disgusting. But I was like, "Okay, this is fine." The whole time he just kept talking about himself and all the things he did. He was a fashion designer, he was a backup singer. He traveled to Paris and traveled to London. It was just on and on and on. So finally the date was over and we made it to his house, which happened to be next door to the restaurant. So he didn't make much of an effort. The house was cute, but it looked like he had inherited it from his grandmother because it was decorated in 1950s style. I was expecting something different. 

We went to his room and he was a really big boy. And I remember my friend told me, when I thought about doing it like, "He's a big boy." And I was like, "That's fine. I like big boys, love big boys".  But he was a big, really big boy. And so we got to his room and he took his clothes off and I'm like, "Yeah, this is still cool. This is cute." And then he starts talking again about like, "Oh, I sang backup for Anita Baker. And I sang backup for blah, blah, blah. And I designed for P Diddy. And I did this, I did that." And so this is going on while he's naked. And so I'm like, "Okay, well, what do I do?" And so I say, "Okay, I just need to like suck his dick." And so I start taking my clothes off. And I think the words were like, "Bitch, dance for me." Or something like, "Bitch, strip for me." And so I'm like, "Okay." I'm a horrible dancer. So I'm taking my clothes off and jerking, like I do. And I dance because I'm not a great dancer and trying to be sexy. And he's still talking about himself this whole time.

And he pulls out this wad of cash, which was awesome. And he starts balling it up and throwing it at me. And throwing it at my head while I'm trying to dance. And I'm like avoiding the dollar bills coming at my head. And he's still talking like, "I blah, blah, blah. I own this house. And I make so much money." And I'm like, "Jesus fucking Christ." So I think in my mind, "I need to get out of here. This is feeling a little unsafe." And then he's like, "Don't you want this money?" And I'm like, "Yeah, it's a shit load of money. So I'm going to go ahead and do this." 

So he turns around. And bends over and he spreads his ass. And he says, "Stick your fucking face in this." And I'm like, "Okay this is normally fine with me. But in this context I wasn't feeling it." But I was like, "Okay, I'm going to do it." And I got close. And the sides of his cheeks were leathery. And there were like, what do you call them? Dingleberries. And I'm like, "I can't. There's no way I can do this. I need to get out of here." And so I say, "I got to go to the bathroom." And I don't know how, but I got my clothes and I started running for the door. And halfway out the door, I'm halfway naked. I hear him yelling in the background, "I sang for Patti LaBelle!"

It's hard to figure out what my best move is. I think not injuring the other person is a pretty damn good move for me. I can be awkward and clumsy. And oftentimes my good sexual experiences are with people who have a sense of humor so that we can actually laugh about clumsiness. Inevitably, you're going to get hit in the eye with the elbow or something is going to happen. Or I'm going to fall. Or my hair falls off or something. It hasn't been that dramatic yet. I do enjoy sucking guys off. And getting as deep as I can and really getting into it. And it almost feels like I have a full body orgasm when it's really good. Well, I'm not sure how the guys felt about it because apparently, in reflection, I don't know whether or not they liked it or not. But I enjoyed myself.

I wish someone told me that monogamy wasn't a hard and set rule. That I could be proud to explore my sex and sexuality with as many partners as I want to. And within my own boundaries. I wish someone had told me the importance of actually having boundaries around what I want and what I don't want to do. And that fundamentally, the other person will appreciate that more because you're in your zone sexually.

Cruising the piers in 1980s NYC, sexy pilgrims, watching OZ for gay sex tips, first love at fat camp & making consent sexy. These are just some of the themes that Dave and guest host Lee discuss in this episode of Fruitbowl.

I got to dig this up, I was in first grade and it was Thanksgiving and I drew a picture of a Pilgrim with an open shirt and hairy chest, and my mother's like, “You're so artistic!” I was like, “No mama I'm a homo.” So yeah, at an early age I knew that. It was just coming to terms with that and embracing that. I think the moment that I acknowledged that, the only time I watched the Dukes of Hazard, is when I knew that the Duke boys were not wearing a shirt. 

I'm old, so, I mean, back in the day when we had cable, we had a box and there was three rows of channels. And if you were lucky you had the Playboy station, but if you could push down two at the same time, you may be able to flip over to the Playboy station and get like a grainy view of some sex going on. It was straight porn, you know? And it's like, yeah a lot of tit and ass with the females, and if you got a cock out of that, that was a bonus. 

I think for a lot of gays, the locker room is a place of pleasure and pain at the same point. It was like, all right you get to look at your friends and classmates, but also not to be outed at the same time. 

Being an older gay, it was much more complicated because there was no internet. There was none of that. I mean, I had no gay friends. I'm the eldest. So it was really just learning by chance and learning from older men of what goes where and what happens, through experience. It wasn't until my late teens, early twenties, to be able to embrace having sex without being a place of anger or rage or abuse.

I found the Chelsea piers in New York, in the mid eighties, which is a cornucopia of beautiful gay sex in the open down past Christopher Street. You walk down Christopher street, right across the highway and the pier right there. It was the mid eighties at the rise of the AIDS epidemic, so part of the pier system was a “fuck you” to the universe and to our government. It's like, we're just going to be who we are and have sex and do what we want, but basically it was a pier where men just hung out naked and bathed in the sun and whatever happened happened, and that was accepted. We looked out for each other, even if we didn't know each other. If some police were coming, we would all put our clothes on in an instant. So there definitely was a buddy system with that. It was basically the piers that I learned the dynamics of what sex was. 

So I had to be around anywhere from 19 to 21. I didn't have a car yet, so I had to be under 21 and I wasn't legal to get into bars per se. I mean, we all always found a way to get in. But I met this guy at the piers, and it's killing me because I've been thinking about this all day, I can't remember his name. So we'll call him Rich because he was a banker and had some money. And he lived on north shore Long Island, and me living on the south shore. We hit it off. I fucked him in public. We exchanged numbers and we had an affair for like a year. And he would pick me up like once a month, his wife would travel a lot, and I would come over. And look, 19, 20 years old, a date is Boone's Farm and Burger King. And here you have a man that's red wine, and steak and shrimp, and a lot of cocaine, so I was in heaven. 

One night we're hanging out and he actually called me before he's picking me up. He's like, “I want you to fist me tonight.” I'm like, “I have no idea what that is.” I have no access to, again, internet or any of that stuff. So I'm like, “Alright.” And I come over and we're eating and drinking. And then he tells me what the hell that is. I'm like, “Oh, we're going to need a lot more cocaine for this.” Again, it was the eighties, cocaine was like a Colombian hello. It was everywhere. So he's like, “Well, I got an eight ball.” I was like, “Well, what are you going to use? Because that's all for me.” So he had two eight balls and we threw down. 

And one of the challenges about having sex with him is we would go back to his place and he had this Great Dane that would love to watch as we fucked. And I love dogs. I love most dogs except this dog had, like, the bloodhound eyes. I can't handle bloodhounds. They make me nervous. I'm like, “How do I make you happy? You look sad all the time.” So this dog would sit there watching us and he would be like, “Well, it's his house too.” I'm like, “This is creepy, but fuck it.” So the time comes and I'm pretty high, and going in. I mean, I'm a young man so you're limber. I'm able to get in and also do lines at the same time, and plugging away. And then out of the corner of my eye I see the dog. I see the dog, which creeps me out to begin with. It lets out like this weird noise and I just see it fall to its side. I look over and it pisses and shits all over the floor. So both of us stopped, but like, “What the fuck is happening?” And then we realized the fucking dog dropped dead. 

So he's freaking the hell out. He jumps out of bed, totally freaked out, neglecting to realize that my arm is up his ass. Like my hand is holding onto his spinal cord at this point. So I go flying off the bed as he jumps out. Clip the nightstand, hit my head, buckets of blood everywhere. It's kind of like The Shining when the elevator doors open up and all the blood come out. He's on the floor crying, you know, poor dog's dead. I'm on the bed crying. Not because I'm in pain, not because there's blood everywhere, and not because we spilled the cocaine, but because your instinct– What is the first thing you do when you hurt yourself? You cover yourself. And I promptly rubbed frothy shit all in my eyeball. It was awful. So that was our last date.

It was the worst car ride home ever. I actually was too high to go home. He dropped me off at the Huntington train station. I took another eight ball and danced the night off in New York City. And that was the last time we saw each other. So that would have to be it. You know, my worst sex experience. There you go.

My best move in bed is if both parties don't get physically or emotionally hurt. That is a win. 

I would have to say, growing up in my teens and into my twenties, I was with both men and women. And this is going to steal some gay points away from my life, I was good at eating pussy. I loved it only because I didn't have to perform. I'm like, “I will go to town.” That I think enhanced my ability to eat ass at the same point. I don't want Giardia, again. Not a good look. But I would have to say that I'm a hungry little man that just wants to eat, you know?

I love watching other people get off. I love it. If I'm in control and I'm going to get you off, I get off on that, you know? And it depends on who I'm with, then what that looks like. Part of that could be the switch or the power play, which I enjoy. There's also moments of actually being emotionally and intellectually intimate with somebody. And just even having that intimate moment. Or, we're gonna fuck, we're gonna get bruises, we're going to bite and scratch and get rug burns. I mean, it really depends on the context. I really can't say. It's like Sophie's Choice. What child would you pick? It's a cornucopia, why would you limit yourself to one? The person, the environment or sobriety, you know? I mean, whisky dick fuck. 

At my age it's limited. Age. I have some people I'm with that are 20 years younger than me. And they'll call me up on a Monday night at 11, being like, “What are you doing?” I'm like, “I'm in bed” They're like, “I'll be right over.” It's like, “That's not a fucking invitation.” And in your twenties you want to fuck five times in a row. I'm like, “Look, I got three rounds in me. After that it's like rubbing a genie lamp, a cloud of smoke's coming out and you're not getting three wishes. Sorry.” So it really depends on the context.

So if I had the opportunity to go back and look at my baby gay self, there would be a multitude of things. To love yourself, to embrace who you are and to be gentle on yourself. My formative years was the ugly eighties at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. And that just heightened my own inner homophobia. And it gave people permission to hate gay people. It was awful. I mean, it mimics our country now, you know? So yeah, to really just love myself. It took me a long time to love who I am and to love other people. I was great at fucking people. You want a fucking bruise? Throw down, you got it. But to be intimate and to make love it took me years to learn. So I would encourage my younger self to do that.

My childhood was so bizarre. I actually grew up like on one hand quite religious and on the other hand was like a total free range child. So it was a combination of things.

I learned about sex from a book that I read in the third grade about the human body. I was quite precocious so it was probably maybe for a middle schooler. So I read, you know, like the digestive system and the nervous system, and then it was like, oh my gosh, gametes. But I didn't really understand what I was reading yet, but I knew that sperm and ovum existed from the third grade on. 

I was not a cool kid. I was super queer and I didn't know it. I mean, I knew it, but I didn't know it yet, and I just went to the library a lot after school, ‘cause it was across the street from my elementary school. And my parents told me that I had to be a doctor in this really stereotypical Jewish way. So I was just like, I should probably read a lot about science. And so it was like no other reason. It wasn't like I was actively finding it, but like, once that knowledge was gleaned, there was no turning back. And then also I watched Oz as it aired live. I might have still been in like elementary school because I moved in the fourth grade and I remember watching it in like the condo that I lived in until the summer before I started fourth grade. So I was too young to be watching Oz. And so I learned a lot about sex from Oz. And that's not so great for understanding consent or anything like that. But I would say that the combination of the two things: I had the science side and I had the very graphic prison sex. And yeah, that's it. That's where I learned about sex. Notwithstanding, it's still one of my favorite shows.
My house, like I said, was so weird and I found the previous tenant's porn stash. I just was like in the upstairs bathroom, which is like between the room I shared with my sister and my parents had like a small suite, but we shared this bathroom at the top of the stairwell and there was a medicine cabinet tucked in an alcove.

And I think I was like climbing a chair or a step stool to get something on the top shelf like sunblock or something. And I put my hand on top and there was a little dip and I felt something glossy up there. So I just started to pull and I was just like, “Holy moly, what is this?” So I found eight hardcore smut magazines and then they were like mine. I just remember like a lot of shiny purple G-strings and really gross veiny all over like fake tan dudes and like always bald, always like 10 to 15 years older than their female counterparts. And a lot of acrylic nails. Oh yeah, there was penetration. And I hid them. I was dumb and I didn't put them back or I found them. ‘Cause at that point we had lived in the house for two years and nobody else had seemingly had found them. And I hid them interspersed between all my other magazines. And then that's also how I got caught ‘cause I didn't do a very good job at hiding them. Yeah, so that was that story. So they were mine for I’d say like three or six months until I got caught. Just I ran into a shame hole and cried for three days until my grounding was over.

But by middle school or early high school we had gotten internet at home and I was really into this website called girl.com. Like late nineties, early aughts vibe. And it was like watered down what was happening here with Riot Girl and stuff like that.

But it was like, let's talk about how to protect yourself from STDs and boundaries and these other things. So people would talk about their own experiences. So that was when I started to get into more safer spaces surrounding sex and sexuality. But again, like super queer, super burbs. I wasn't like kissing my friends or anything like that. It wasn't like I was in the closet, but it just felt so unsafe. So I was just really living this internet life and just like reading a lot of poorly written soft core erotica written by like other creative teens. And so yeah, I would say that that's like when I really started to seek it out and engage more, even if it was just more like in a cyber sense.

The first time I had really strong queer attractions… My parents sent me to Fat Camp and when I got there I met this fat, butch, Hispanic girl from Sacramento and I was like, done. I was like toast. I just followed her around the next eight weeks between water aerobics and weigh-ins and I think everybody thought that we were sleeping together because there was a double room open in our suite and the counselor… all the people in the dorm were, like, “Let's make it like a fun and hangout room.” And then you saw the counselor's eyes dart to us and she's like, “I need to lock that door.” So nothing ever really happened outside of like stolen kisses. But that was my first like hardcore queer crush.

I have like my first gross straight sex first time. Then I have my more first queer sex first time. And then I have l even though it's like real, like late in the game almost what I consider like more authentic first time.

For gross straight sex, I just got bored and I was like living at my parents' house and I was just like, “Okay, I just wanna start sleeping with strangers like everybody else I know.” So I went on to OK Cupid  and I went on a date with somebody. I think he was skinny. He was kind of lanky and that's it. And we bonded over the fact that we both had worked at Pier One and it was pretty awful over C grade Caesar salads. And then it was just like, “Mmm, should we go back to your place?” “Yeah.”  And then I was just like, “Okay, unceremoniously, this is it. I'm just like over it.” And it was exactly what having sex with a cis straight dude sounds like. You're lying there. It's bad. Like nobody cares. He fell asleep. It was a twin bed, I'm pretty sure. Like I don't even put that much thought into it because I'm just like, “Eh. Like what was that?” And then I remember just sitting naked on his couch, texting my friends, being like, “What do I do?” Leaving and making out with somebody different the next day or like within a few days. Leaving and never talking again. It's sad that these unceremonious sexual experiences are really normal for people, right? And like, we're not part of a culture where we talk about how to think about your partner. I was missing language to describe being non-binary. That was what I was really missing. I just was like, “Everybody else is doing it. I don't have a hangup. I don't wanna be like a virgin at marriage, a concept they don't believe in. I just… I am gonna go get it over with.” And I did.

I was living in a rural part of Connecticut - about as rural as you're gonna get within three hours of New York City. And so it was rural enough that if you wanted to date, you were going to have to drive. So I was like seeing a person who lived in a different town. We both needed to grow a lot as people so it was very tumultuous, but I was just very sexually attracted to them. And so I think on our second date I was just like, “Can I fuck you like already? Can we just get this over with?” And so I was living in the house of a 50 something year old lesbian hoarder at the time and they were living at their sister's house. So we were like, “Hmm, this isn't so great. We're having like teen problems right here.” So they stayed at their other sister's house who lived on a lake and it was really nice and cute. So they invited me over after dinner and we were fooling around making out in their bedroom there. Finally we stripped down naked, starts to get hotter and heavier, and the sister came home and like, not just came home, but that family had real poor boundaries and she opened the fucking door. And I was like, “I barely even know this person that I'm sleeping with and now I'm meeting their sister and I'm naked.” That was probably the most embarrassing sexual experience I’ve had. Unless I've blacked something out deep in my brain, I can't think of anything worse than that and nothing since has happened that can top that.

We went to Provincetown in Cape Cod where her family had a house, and so she zipped the twin beds together because we couldn't have sex in any of the other beds ‘cause like other family members slept there. You can probably sense reasons why this didn't last very long. So we show up in P-Town and then we had dinner and we went back to the house and started to make out. And I remember like making out on the couch and kind of like power moves and they were sitting on the couch and I was kind of dancing a little and like taking my clothes off and the buttons and things are flying everywhere. We go back into the bedroom and at this point we're just naked, hands everywhere, lots of heavy petting. 

And then they're like, “I have a birthday surprise for you.” 

And I'm like, “What?”

And they start like wiggling the fucking harness up and they're like, “I got you a present.” And, honestly, it just was like this unimpressive red dick. And I was like, “Cool.” 

And they're like, “I'm gonna fuck you with this.”

And I was like “Cool.” And it just moved forward from there. 

There was some like gentle dick sucking and caressing and then, you know, like she fucked me. But honestly, it was a lot like the first, first time where I just kind of lied there and it was just very unceremonious after a certain point and I was like, “You seem to be working really hard.” It didn't feel good to the ratio of effort that was being exerted on the part of my partner. But you know what? I think that it really goes back to the same point as my first, first time where the communication wasn't there. So it doesn't matter how hard you're working, if you're not talking during sex, it's probably gonna be bad. It was a cool surprise and I felt very cared for in a way. But on the other hand, like, if you're gonna specifically buy a dick for this relationship, maybe bring me or at least ask me. Cause like, you know, that was part of the problem. It wasn't the dick for me. You know, on the receiving end. And so yeah, it just felt again like kind of unceremonious ‘cause I wasn't consulted in my own pleasure.

In a former life, I was a total pillow princess because I was sleeping with people who were into that dynamic. There was always like so many hang ups and they were not necessarily my hangups, but like the other person always wanted to be in this role. Like, “I'm the top and I'm gonna please you.” And I could never really even get that into it because I was just like, I can do really great performative work, but I cannot make my body do things that it's not wanting to. And so I think I was just tricking all of us into thinking that it was really fun, including myself. So I frustrated many a top in a previous incarnation of self.

I actually really struggled for a little bit cuz I wanted to be a top. And I was like, well, if I'm not a pillow princess, I'm obviously a top, but that's not true. And I really now more identify as vers and really emphasize just like consent and communication over anything else. And so I've given up having a label or having a job, I'm a team player now. And I'm just open to sort of … I'm not gonna say endless possibilities, but I'm gonna say like almost endless possibilities that can occur if two people have a good connection and good communication.

I would say my brand is pretty hot right now and my favorite move is if I'm going down on somebody to just stare into their soul via their eyes. Like, I've made many a person just sort of lose their shit from doing that. But more so than that confusing ability ‘cause like, I am not even sure how I can do it ‘cause like I am not wearing my glasses being blind as a bat, but somehow it still works. I think like my ability to make consent sexy, which has been really difficult to figure out how to do, but to integrate this pleasure and pleasing aspect of sex with consent has been this thing that I've really had to be aware of to figure out how to make the dynamic work and that fine line.

But once I figured out the sweet spot, I actually think that that's my best move. “Do you like it when I touch you here?” Or like, “May I take this article of clothing off?” And then like doing it for them, like really delicately and sensually. Or “May I take my own article of clothing off?” Or like, “Do you like, you know, to be touched here?” And I think that's extra important now I am more having sex with gender queer and trans folks and we have really complicated relationships with our bodies. So like, I think it's also just really reaffirming in those regards and that's what makes the sex good because you're showing respect, right? To people who might have some baggage and so that has been my power move more than anything else.

“Don't trust what you see and what you read,” would be my number one advice to myself in particular. I think it could apply to other people too, but we've talked about my experiences, right? Like I wasn't having dialogues, I was having one sided conversations with media and I think that I had this very juxtaposed exposure to sexual knowledge. I had this very, very in-depth scientific knowledge of how an egg is fertilized and then I had knowledge of hardcore porn and very graphic, often non-consensual sex that was happening in a prison on HBO. And that's not good. Those are very extreme examples of knowledge, especially if you don't have a lot of it.

So just don't believe what you read and what you see as real, that's not what sex is. I think when I was younger, it would've been nice to have more knowledge of consent. Like to learn about consent before learning about sex, learning about boundaries and also learning that sex isn't just penis in vagina. It's so much broader than that. I think having a broader definition and a consent based definition would have been the healthiest thing for me and a lot of other folks I know as well. That was sort of how I knew that like queerness existed was from Oz and even if it wasn't like great portrayals, they did have people who were gender nonconforming whether by choice or by prison structural power dynamics engaging in sex acts, whether consensual or not with other prisoners or other guards or whatever. So yeah, it did give me this exposure, but also it still had this catch of like, somebody is a giver and somebody's a receiver and these roles are really fixed and you are like a lesser person if you're like the receiver. That was still really built into Oz.

So even though it was exposure to not straight sex, it still had a lot of really toxic hang-ups. There are relationships in the show where people are having consensual sex, but a lot of the sex in Oz is violent and coercive. So it wouldn't even fit like my definitions of like, what is sex and what is sexy? It's much more rape. Right? And so that's not sex. But it was being presented as such and I didn't have the other knowledge to discern that because I was far too young to be watching that show. And so I think just being armed with very different knowledge or knowing how to tease what I needed out of it would've been really helpful. Or maybe if they gave me a book that was comprehensive and age appropriate, that could have been helpful too.

Bathroom cruising, navigating three-ways, bathhouse adventures, fingertip sex & remembering our first porn. Tom and Dave compare war stories growing up gay in small town America.

I kind of remember the first real dawning of sexual awareness being HBO's Real Sex. Catching that on after my parents had gone to bed and I'd turned the TV back on and watch it from midnight, hiding in the stairwell.

That was really when like sex as a concept that I was interested in really formed. I think everything before that was just kind of like, you know, titling each other behind the woodshed or fiddling around. Just understanding what's down there, but yeah. Yeah. I remember being like completely fascinated by the first episode of Real Sex when it aired on HBO.

So I remember being, I think 12 years old and going to the restroom at Fred Meyer in Anchorage and going into the first stall and there was a dude on his knees jerking off in the second stall. And you know, kind of wondering what's going on, I stick my head under to take a look and it was just like, "Whoa, okay."

I immediately ran out of the bathroom as fast as I could just mortified by the idea of what I had just seen. But then just pulsing with intense, not quite regret, but like intense desire to have known more basically. And I started exploring the bathrooms after that, basically looking for ways to see dick or ways to get dick. It had black mirrored tiles so you realize that you could be looking down and see into the next stall. So that was why that particular gentleman had been taking advantage of that. Perhaps the person before had just left, so he was still on his knees working away at it.

I found Alaska to be kind of a perfect cruising environment for a blossoming teenager. The Diamond Mall was not far from my house and I spent a lot of time there. My mom went to go to Jazzercise class there every week. So she'd ask me if I wanted to go to the mall. And for a long time the answer was no. But then I found the cruzee bathroom on the second floor hidden away in between an under construction part of the mall, an office tower part of the mall, a part that didn't really have stores. There were the Army and the Navy recruiters there. I remember because the Navy recruiter had a huge dick. It had not so much a glory hole, but a peep hole and then a large handicap stall. So eventually you would figure out if they were interested and  join them in their stall. And as a fairly hairy teenager, I looked at least passably of age even though it wasn't anywhere near it. Maybe the age of consent was 16 in Alaska, but I don't know, I wasn't paying attention. But I wasn't 16 yet. That's for sure. So I spent a number of years doing that. And then realizing that before I was 18, I could get into most of the adult bookstores around the city, they just didn't care. 

So yeah, it was fun exploring the glory holes of the adult bookstores of Anchorage, Alaska. It was a lot of chubby, married dudes in sweaters that weren't seeing it at home. Or were gay and just were out getting it, but were totally in the closet. So it was sort of paradise. It was heaven. Because it wasn't really freaky there. It wasn't a bareback romp fest like you would find at a bathhouse. Anchorage certainly didn't have a bath house. 

I've found that I really liked bathrooms where there were like, just really good ways of seeing dick too. Like my dad liked to go to the VFW hall to eat for cheap and drank for cheaper. And they had removed a handicapped handrail in one of the stalls in the bathroom. And there was, you know, perfect holes to watch right into the urinal basically. So, "Oops. Man, I get a tummy ache every time we go here, dad. I spend forever in the bathroom here, I'm sorry." But it was just perfect for staring at dad dick. Not necessarily my own, but all the other middle-aged guys they're doing the same thing. Glad I never got my ass kicked during that. Why didn't they just cover it up? Because I think either somebody would assume somebody would look or somebody would assume nobody would ever look. So it's either naivete or intentional, one of the two. 

So I turned 18 and moved to Seattle and went to the 25 cent arcade, which is now the Hard Rock Cafe. That 25 cent arcade upstairs, while actually a functioning arcade, did have glory holes and sex booths in the back. And I remember the first time I went this dude bust into my video booth, bent over and said, "Stick it in dry." As he snorted a big line of meth off of his hand. And so that scared the shit out of me. It was definitely not the way Anchorage worked. I was kind of scared out of cruising here in Seattle for a long time. There's always places where you're like, "Hmm, this bathroom seems interesting," and you're hanging out long enough and sure enough it is. But it was freaky enough to have this crazy drugged out person trying to get me to jam my dry dick up their asshole. 

So yeah, I basically stopped when I was a teenager and then I met somebody kind of right away. So that restroom, cruising, glory hole period of my life was really short but intense. And all while I was basically like right up to about 19.  I moved here at 18 like six months before my birthday. It kind of came to an end right about then. I was just barely old enough to where I should be doing that when I stopped,

I was on the internet, very young. I had dial up internet service to the world wide web in '92. So it was definitely exploring the early years of the internet. From 12 and 13 on I was searching the internet for porn already and trying to figure out what I could get my hands on. And then what I was into. It wasn't in my immediate thought that just because I liked seeing penises on Real Sex, that I was gay. It took, you know, more than one or two penises to figure that out. So I would look specifically for sex pictures because I liked seeing penises involved. And then it evolved like, "Well I like seeing older guys having sex with these girls." And I was like, "No, I just really like looking at the older guys."

And I was both having access to the internet, at least reasonably for what you could see on the internet in tiny little movie files back then. And then, you know, just whatever we could get our hands on otherwise. My friends and I loved to consume whatever illicit porn we could steal from somebody's dad or somebody's brother, whether it was Playgirls or Playboys. And one of our friends' moms did have Playgirls. Those were always the ones that I secretly enjoyed the most. But it really didn't dawn on me until later like, "Oh yeah, no I'm into this because this is all dicks. Yep. Got it." I just thought I enjoyed looking at them just as much as the others, but no it was definitely the dicks.

I would print out pictures on my Dot matrix or a really shitty black and white, 1993 printer and hide them in my desk. And I would masturbate to those and I would show the ones with girls to my friends. But of course always has this hot dude jack hammering away at the girl. I'd be like, "Look what I found on the internet." And then my mom would invariably find those and I would get in trouble. 

And then at some point on a trip down to Seattle, what was it called? Beyond the Closet Books on Pine street? Pike street maybe? Yeah, my mom would let me go to Broadway on my own for a little while. And then I would sneak over and buy them. So I had a collection in my desk back home and that definitely was not found before I moved out thankfully. 

I came out to my mom when I was 15 I think. And I was out at school too. I didn't tell my dad until later, but obviously he'd figured it out. It was real easy when I told him, cause it was sorta like, "Yeah. Uh huh. And?" But no, Anchorage was a surprisingly easy place to be out and we dated and things like that. There were boys that were similar age going to other schools or they found their way out of the school system, of reasonable dating material.

 I do remember one instance where just before I left Anchorage, there were a group of us out to eat. One of the things you do in Anchorage, you just go to like 24 hour diners. Because that's like all there is to do in Anchorage. And this guy walks in and like six of us hid behind our menus at the table. And we all looked around at each other and we're like, "We've all fucked him? Got it. All right. Small dating pool. Figured that one out. All right. Time to go." He was terrible, he had a  waterbed too. Jesus. Oh God. I had to watch The Horse Whisperer in order to have sex with him. Oh, it was awful. He thought I wasn't interested. So then once he figured out that I was, then he flipped it over to porn. It was like, "Oh, got it. Okay. This could have happened a lot sooner. Fuck." 

The first time I would really consider having sex I was, oh God, I don't want to say. I was an early teenager, mid teenager. And I met a dude off of the internet. Internet relay chat was a thing and ages weren't really discussed. He was definitely an older gentleman and we had shared pictures. He was probably early fifties, kinda your average silver fox daddy. And I remember he smoked a lot, so he had kind of the super growly voice. So I rode my bike to my local coffee shop, where he picked me up under the pretense that I was going to fix a sound card on his computer. Because you know, obviously the young buck must come and fix the old man's computer, sort of thing.

So there I was fixing his sound card, which didn't take much. He just needed his drive updated or something stupid like that. And all of a sudden he was rubbing my shoulders. And then he's face down, ass up in bed telling me to stick it in. Which, you know, it was definitely my first time doing that. But it kind of comes natural, I guess. Or at least I'd seen enough porn. I'd probably watched a lot of porn by that point. He was at least fairly seasoned in that department. He did not offer much resistance as far as sticking it in, wince. I didn't take too long I guess, but I was able to completely fuck him and come in him and yeah.

And then he dropped me back off on my bike. So that was  definitely like, "All right. Ride my bike home, like that just happened?" He was some sort of pilot that flew like two weeks in, two weeks out sort of thing. And yeah never ran across him again on the internet or if I did, it was just curiosity sort of chatting.

Yeah, that was definitely one of those like, "That happened and probably isn't gonna happen again and probably wouldn't happen again. That's okay. Like, I'm not sad I just fucked you, but I know I can step my game up a little bit."

I mean, there's been bad sex that I've ended in the middle of and left. But I think the most embarrassing thing is that twice I've barfed on dicks during oral sex. Something about eating too much spaghetti before you go down on someone. And both times it was spaghetti. So I've learned, I've learned. Like fool me once, haha. Fool me twice, I'm not going to barf on your dick again. But it was first with my ex-husband and now with my current husband also they have both gotten barfed on the dick. It's not cute. It's not cute. It's not cute. But they were both very forgiving. I mean, that was probably one of the nicest things my ex-husband ever did was not be horrible when I barfed on his dick. I'm pretty sure they both just said the same thing when it happened, which is "Get the towel." That could just be the way that memory blurs. But it's definitely the most embarrassing thing because there's zero recovery from that. There is all sorts of things that can happen in sex that you can recover from. But that, no. Nope, everyone's done at that point.

I sort of feel like one of those Jack of all trades. I make a decent top. I suck a decent dick. I'm good at receiving head. But there's nothing that like I'm outstanding at, I guess. But I've had a lot of threesomes. So successfully navigating a threesome is probably like my greatest skill in the bedroom. Because that's often the most awkward sort of sex is threesomes. But typically they're all smooth sailing when I'm around.

I think experience definitely helps because you kind of get to understand where the body language rhythms come in, where the habits that people have come in, and like understanding the ebb and flow of how sex works. When you've got two people feeding off of each other's energy directly, it's one experience. But when you've got multiple people feeding off of each other's energy, it doesn't always completely flow in one direction sort of thing. So you kind of got to watch and see what's being neglected? When does somebody need to like, watch more than participate? When is something going on for too long? How often do you have to change positions? When everybody is ready to finish? Because then you've got one more person balancing because nobody wants to come like immediately in the threesome. And then you're just sort of there while the other two are going at it. There's definitely a skill involved but it's hard to exactly pinpoint what that is.

I definitely was having sex before I was out. And as a result, I think we're used to a level of cloak and dagger secrecy to even initiating sex. And then we shed that as you know, we go to San Francisco at 21 and watch people cruise on the street and fuck in a Starbucks bathroom. And you're like, "Wow, I want to try that." And then it's great. And you have a good time. And then you're like, "Cool, I'm going to go try the blow buddies or I'm going to go to the bath house for the first time." And then you're like, "Oh, my friends are having a play party. I'm going to try and get invited." And then you have a really good time with that.

You can start to expand your sexual boundaries in a healthy way. At least maybe this is the way it's worked for me. But as far as just the way you kind of pick it up? It sort of continues. Like you find people that will want to have sex only in the dark, light off, door shut. And you find people that only want to have sex when they're at the bath house and they don't ever have sex outside of that, whether they've got relationships outside that prevents it or whatnot. We are good at compartmentalizing sex, I think. Because we have compartmentalized ourselves first and then sub compartmentalized our sex from that.

So I would definitely tell my younger self to have like, just so much more sex. Really there is no reason to not have it. If you're reasonably safe then and with prep coming to you in the future, sex can be a really, really healthy expression. And for a long time you're probably convinced that it's not a healthy expression. That it's something done in the dark, in the back, in the hole, away from the light. And definitely unlearn that sooner than later. Despite having a lot of sex early, I've managed to still attach a lot of shame to sex over the years. Whether that's because my partner at the time had an opinion about sex or the structure of my relationship forced sex into a particular pattern or any number of things. Even just sort of the kind of gay shame that we pick up along the way and don't always set down so easily.

The first time I ever heard about sex was from a babysitter's boyfriend who convinced me that you could have sex through your fingertips. And he showed me his fingers and for some reason the tips of his fingers were callused. And so I believed him. I thought that that's what happened when you had sex, was that you got calluses on your fingertips. And I believed that for a few years after that until my dad finally, didn't necessarily have the talk with me, but he gave me a pamphlet about sex from the Christian perspective. And they went into more of the  mechanics, which helped clarify things. It also went on to describe masturbation, which I actually had not known about until I read about it in the pamphlet. And I remember putting the pamphlet down and proceeding to masturbate and being completely fascinated that something other than urine could come out of my penis. So I started doing that quite a bit after that. Yeah. I became kind of a habitual masturbator. But I don't know if I was any more habitual about it than any other young horny guy, straight or gay.

When I was in grade school I had some obsessions with rock bands. One of them being Duran Duran. I loved Duran Duran. I thought that they were amazing. Looking back, I clearly thought that they were beautiful, like really good looking. So what I would do is I would go to Music Land at the Town East Mall in Wichita, and I would buy my sister posters of rock bands, one of them being Duran Duran. And then I would give them to her so that she could hang them in her bedroom so that I could look at them. Because I think I knew even at that young age that it was wrong, that I would have a poster of a male band in my bedroom. I knew that that was somehow outside the bounds of acceptability in terms of what a young man would have on his walls in his bedroom. Which is kind of crazy because my mom actually let me wallpaper my bedroom in rainbows, because I was obsessed with rainbows and Teddy bears and unicorns.

So I would give my sister band posters to put on her wall. The funniest thing that happened was when I decided that the whole band poster thing wasn't enough. So I actually bought her, this is so embarrassing. I bought her a poster of the SoloFlex guy. SoloFlex was this at home exercise system that you could get and their advertising campaign was famous for having this sexy picture of this guy who is like lifting a shirt up off of his bare chest. And of course he had the most perfect physique and it was kind of an iconic image of the eighties. So much so that they had posters of it at the mall. So I bought my sister that poster for her to hang in her bedroom because I wanted to look at it. And years later, when I came out to my sister, she gave me the poster back.

My parents owned a cabin in Colorado and we would go there in the summertime. And there wasn't much to do, I had a good friend who lived down the street. We didn't have TV. Well we did, but it didn't really work very well. So we had to really occupy ourselves by just sort of exploring the area around my parents' cabin. And my friend Aaron and I found a Penthouse magazine that was hidden under a rock. It had weathered pages and the rain had sort of stuck different pages together, but we could kind of tear them apart enough that we could read the articles and look at the pictures. And one of the articles was of course, the Penthouse forum, which I was completely fascinated by, people writing in to confess different scenarios of what they had done with their partners or with strangers.

So that was definitely like the beginning of my education into kink and understanding what that meant. It was only one issue that we could look at. So we read it over and over and over again. And we hid it in the same place too, so that each of us would come back and read it separately. I definitely remember masturbating out in the woods at least once from having read the articles and stuff. But I think one of the letters mentioned that this woman had had sex with an entire firehouse of guys, like a whole fire station full of firefighters. Which I thought was totally hot at the time. 

I think around my freshman year of high school I started to admit to myself that I was gay. I used to love dancing in my bedroom. It was the one thing I did that I felt completely free and not judged by anybody. And I'll never forget, there was a time at which I was doing that and I stopped dancing and I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, "You're gay. You are a gay man." And I think that that was when I started to kind of shift my perspective from being somebody who was in the closet, who was in complete shame, to somebody who I could see maybe a future where I could kind of accept myself. 

Later on in high school, I subscribed to GQ magazine. And I think everyone who subscribed to GQ also got an automatic subscription to International Male. Because it just started arriving without any sort of subscription on my part. So we did start to get that. And that was around the time that I started to admit to myself that I was gay. I started to look forward to the International Male catalog more than GQ, the main reason being the underwear models that were in the back of the magazine. It was divided kind of evenly between somewhat normal clothing and underwear. And eventually they spun it off and had an entire separate catalog for the underwear, which for me was amazing because I couldn't have asked for better spank material in high school given that I was in Kansas and I wasn't really near any kind of gay porn outlet. So what I would do eventually, because I knew that keeping the magazines would have been too obvious. If I had kept them stored someplace, it would have been too obvious. So what I did was I started to cut out my favorite pictures of the different underwear models and save them in a manila envelope and hid it underneath my dresser in my bedroom.

And so I had this collection of different little cutout clippings of the different guys and mesh underwear. It was really cheesy underwear. So yeah, I think years later, I remember coming back from college and finding the Manila envelope and thinking that most certainly my mom must have found it at some point and looked inside of it. So I was really embarrassed that it was still there after all those years.

Having worked on this, you think I would have prepared for this more. But I think it's also just hard to talk about it and I'm realizing it now how hard it is. And I'm kind of like amazed that people have even agreed to do this for me. 

I learned about gay sex, mostly through cruising bathrooms in the mall near my hometown in Wichita, Kansas. That's why it's hard for me to articulate when the first time is because you could argue that my first time was when I was sitting in the stall in the public bathroom of townie, small in Wichita, Kansas, that I realized that the guy sitting in the stall next to me was masturbating. And I didn't just get up and leave. I knew that I liked that and that I was completely fascinated by the fact that somebody would do that in public and also kind of flattered that he was doing it near me. So I think it was around that time that I started to realize that I was gay because I didn't just get up and leave. And in anger I was kind of flattered by it. And also completely turned on in the sense that it was kind of dangerous and it was in a place that was totally public and not at all in a remote location.

So that was sort of the beginning of my investigation into public sex. What eventually ended up happening was that it wasn't enough to just jerk off next to somebody in a public stall. There was one stall where there had been somebody who had written their phone number on the wall, and I wrote it down and called the guy. And we had a very brief conversation. And as it turns out, I was actually about to leave to go to my parents' cabin in Colorado days after I had called him and we had chatted. 

So he asked me to write him a letter and explain to him where it was I was going in Colorado. Which to me right now, it just sounds completely ludicrous that I would have agreed to do this. So I described to him where I was and also what the phone number was to my parents' cabin there and what times he could call me. And basically we arranged for him to drive nine hours from Wichita to meet me near my parents' cabin in Colorado so that we could have sex. Which just seems completely psycho, somebody I'd never met before agreed to do this.

So he did, he got there. We met through a completely preposterous set of plans. I mean, pre iPhone, pre smartphone, pre anything. Pre internet. The fact that we arranged to do this at a specific time and date to me is still pretty mind blowing. And I had never, ever seen him. Until I got to this Trailhead where we had agreed to meet. And by the time he got there, I was so worked up and so excited about it that I couldn't contain myself. And the sad part is that when I finally saw him I wasn't at all attracted to him. Back then I had certain physical expectations for my first time. Clearly I was like completely seduced by the whole Marky Mark, SoloFlex, perfect physique kind of guy. And that's sort of at the time what I idealized. Now I have a completely different set of priorities. I actually don't really have a type, but at the time I had completely fantasized about this perfect male physique and he didn't have it. There was no way that he could really fulfill any of my idealized versions of what I wanted. 

So we walked a little bit on the trail together and made small talk. I just wanted to run away, but I also didn't want to be a complete dick. So then we finally found a remote spot off of the trail and he started to go to his knees to blow me and I just ended up running away, just ran. And I had actually walked to the trailhead. So I just kept running and I don't ever think that he caught up with me. I think that maybe he knew that he just needed to let me leave. But looking back, it was so cruel and awkward and a little bit painful thinking about it. And that's probably why I don't like really talking about it. I mean, I was a freaked out kid.

Looking back, it does sound like kind of a dickish move to just run away. But at the time I think looking back, I am more forgiving of my behavior just because of the complete newness of it and the awkward nature of not knowing what it meant to be intimate with another person, even a male or a female. I hadn't even been with a woman by that time. So yeah, I was just scared

In the parks in Wichita, there was a huge cruising culture that I eventually discovered. And that was kind of the next step past public restroom cruising. And in Wichita, the sort of next logical step from there was public parks. And I think it was there that I eventually started to experiment with other guys. And that was a little less frightening because I had a car, I could drive, I had a safe space. I could leave whenever I wanted to drive away. There must've been at some point, somebody in a bathroom who I had oral sex with. It's kinda sad though that I don't remember who that person is or what they look like. I think so much of that culture there was about anonymity and not wanting people to know who you were or what you were doing specifically. So I think I kind of internalized that. So yeah, I would cruise the parks in Wichita and for a while it was fun just because it was sort of illicit. But eventually that sort of started to wear off and I wasn't so interested in the fear factor. And I really did want to meet somebody. 

So one day I was driving through the park. Maybe I had started to not do it as often, but I just decided to go through one day. And there was a kid who was there with a girl who was clearly my age and he was dancing. And I thought, "Okay, I'm going to get out of my car and I'm going to go talk to this person because I'm sick of not ever connecting with anybody." I remember specifically telling myself and daring myself to do it. So I did, and it ended up being pretty cool. He was my age. He was in high school. I think we were in the same class. Not the same school, but the same year. And his girlfriend was a great kind of facilitator and a mediator between us and made it less uncomfortable and less creepy cruisy, just because they looked like they were just hanging out in the park with each other. And it wasn't so much about cruising for sex as it was just about hanging out. So I just went up to them and started talking and I think we agreed to meet to go on a date. 

My first date with him was to go see Truth or Dare at The Dollar Theater in Wichita, which was sort of like the second run theater. And the cool thing was that fortunately, nobody else was in the theater. So my first date with a guy ever was going to see Truth or Dare in Wichita, Kansas in an empty theater. And so like we could hold hands and I could put my arm around him. And I actually felt like I could see what my potential future was and it wasn't as terrible as I thought it was going to be. So I started to have a lot more optimism after that. This was just before I graduated, so I had sort of endured a pretty traumatic coming out process in high school. So it was just the right timing in terms of making me understand that maybe the future wasn't going to be a complete shit show. So, yeah, that was good. It is curious though because I remember going to the movie with him, but I don't actually remember having sex with him.

I had a good girlfriend in college who wanted me to meet her gay friend that she had grown up with. And he came into town with his boyfriend at the time. And I'd never experienced love at first sight, but when I met this guy I instantly fell in love with him. I have no idea why. He wasn't even really my type and he wasn't like traditionally attractive. There was just something about him that had a really good energy. And I proceeded to get shit faced drunk. So drunk that I couldn't even function later that night. It was actually kind of a little bit scary. And I'll never forget him and my friend taking me back to my apartment and putting me in bed. And right before he left, I just threw up all over the bed. And it was like the most humiliating thing ever. But the funniest part was that after that he actually dumped his boyfriend and we dated for the last half of my senior year. So I guess there was something about me vomiting all over my bed that he found attractive. So that was pretty embarrassing.

There's lots I like to do in bed. I don't consider myself a top or bottom. And you know, I do think it depends on your partner, what they like. And one of the things I've discovered I like to do most is fuck a guy while he's on his back. And usually it's when I'm standing on the side of the bed and he's laying on his back. So I like to start that way. I'm supporting his legs as I fuck him. And so we sort of do that for a while. I feel like sometimes things get a little bit boring. So what I like to do is throw one of his legs to the side so that he's actually laying on his side and I'm still fucking him. And so I think that that shift in position, I get the idea that a lot of bottoms like that. So I do that for a while and then I'll flip him so that he's on his stomach. So the whole time my dick is still inside of him and he's basically being spun around. I didn't really think that it would work until the first time I tried it and then it did. And it seemed to be that I got a pretty good response. So that's probably my, my best move.

Go and explore as much as you can. Do it in a way that you feel comfortable, but don't feel inhibited at all by what other people think or what society tells you you should or shouldn't do. You should just go out and explore your sexuality and in the most complete way that you can, and it shouldn't matter what other people think is right or wrong. You should just kind of explore and feel free to do that because that's how you start to realize what you like and what you don't like. Go out and fuck as much as you want. Do it in a way that you feel safe, but don't feel scared to try new things. 

Kink is something that should be embraced and not judged. I think I wasted a lot of time judging people and what they did. I mean, I let go of that a long time ago. I think living in New York really helped that. I started to see different cultures in different parts of the gay community. And I realized how much diversity there was and how awesome that was. And I think that that's something that the gay community should really embrace is how different gay sex is to different people. And instead of it just being the missionary position all the time. I honestly feel like gay sex is the best kind of sex. That sounds funny saying that because clearly sex has a procreative purpose, but I actually think that gay sex is the most fun because you're with somebody who has the same equipment as you do, and you know what feels good and what doesn't. So I kind of feel like that's to our advantage.

I think when I was young, because I did have so many encounters with people anonymously, I assumed that that made me a slut. I judged myself a lot as a kid. And I think that as an adult, I can see how experimenting with different people is actually a good thing and it's not a bad thing. Like now I don't necessarily think that people who have sex with a lot of different people are sluts. I think that that makes them actually liberated and it makes them brave because they just do what they want to do and they don't have any judgment of themselves and they really don't care what other people think. And to me, that is the most radical thing that any of us can do is to just embrace our sexuality and express it however we want to. I mean, that's why I think people who are pups or who are into leather or any of that kink are amazing because they know that they have the right to do that and they don't really care what other people think. I think that's amazing. 

But as far as my own personal kink, I like leather. That seems so vanilla, living in Seattle. I do love Seattle because so many people here embrace their kink and they express it openly. I used to live in LA and that town is very much about presenting yourself in a very acceptable, sort of boring way. So I really like living in Seattle and knowing that people here just really don't give a shit. I don't think I could have made this documentary in LA. I was thinking about that the other day. I think people in LA would not have been as honest with me. They would have been too worried that other people that they knew would see it and judge them. People here don't care as much, and I love that. I am excited by that. That's why I'm making the documentary is because there's so many people here who are open and honest about their sexuality and they don't apologize for it. And that's awesome.

Bukkake parties, International Male catalog nostalgia, craigslist adventures and involuntary golden showers. James joins host Dave for an honest conversation about personal sex histories, the evolution of "consent" and owning our kinks.

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