Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (10 page)

Often, there was fence that blocked off the woods, and a break in that fence cut by someone who had been there before. There was a path of mud through the grass, worn down by use.

In the woods, we’d find a clearing, and there, many things would happen. So many people and bodies, all looking for the same thing. So many of us past the fence, in the woods, under the sky. It was easy, at times like that, to see that there are far more men in need of other men than anyone knows.

And just as people’s identities blurred up, so did the idea of place itself; that was part of the appeal. Once I saw a bag of con- doms nailed to a tree with a sign that read, b
e
s
aFe
G
uys
. It was a kind gesture, but it somehow felt like an intrusion. Because these places weren’t quite places, they weren’t destinations; not for most people. They were away from hookup websites; away from houses, bars, clubs, lives—removed from the world. And when the world crept in, it made the experience less real, less itself.

Intrusions came in other forms, too. The police pulled into a rest area I was at in Rhode Island once. It was night. I calmly leaned my car seat back and pretended to be sleeping. They shined a light in and I rolled down the window.

“What are you doing out here,” one asked. “Just resting,” I said.

They looked at each other. “All right. Well, you know, a lot of guys come here for fun and games.”

“Fun and games?” “Yeah.”

“What, like drugs?” I asked, playing stupid.

They couldn’t say it. They couldn’t say anything. They told me to take care and drove off.

The police are a constant threat to rest area sex—they want so badly to blend the world into it.

That’s the opposite of why people go. Some of the men at rest areas are stepping out of their lives. They’re not simply escaping their marriages, or their parents or their circumstances; at rest

areas, they’re allowing themselves to be honest.

Once, after hooking up with a man in a stall, we walked out into the calm day together. I saw him go to his car, a car I hadn’t noticed before. In it, his children were waiting for him. Who knows what his life was like outside that stall?

His children were young and excited, crawling over each other in the backseat. He opened their door and said something to them I couldn’t hear. They calmed down and buckled up. I leaned against my car, with nowhere to be, and he got in his and drove away and did not look back.

It’s not “fun and games.” It’s men yielding to something they might be trying to deny, but can’t. These places give wholly dif- ferent lives to some people. I don’t know if these men are “gay” or “straight.” Does it matter? At a spot that for most people is on the way to somewhere else, men can meet each other and meet themselves.

I live in San Francisco now, and there’s more acceptance here of sexuality and identity than anywhere I’ve ever been. There’s also very little anonymous sex. “Anonymous” sex here means meeting a man online or on Grindr or at the bar, learning his name, going back to his apartment or mine. It’s not a bad thing, of course, but I miss being a nobody at an in-between place, a no-place. Here, I have to be somebody, everything is so defined around the edges. At the rest area, I could just be a body, be there for some other body that I didn’t know, that was longing for the sort of comfort and love that only no one, nowhere could give.

When on Fire Island… A Polyamorous Disaster

n ic holas Gar nett

My wife, Rachael, and I stood by a Jacuzzi on Fire Island with a dozen gay men. We were all watching Jason have at Mandy. Again. It was sex, but it wasn’t particularly sexy—more Animal Planet than Spice Channel. Mandy had braced herself against the edge of the blue fiberglass tub, her ropy black hair spilling down in front of her. And with each of Jason’s thrusts, a swell of water cascaded over the lip of the tub to the deck below. The sound of water slapping wood blended with the couple’s moans in an oddly syncopated rhythm. It was a pretty slick groove, actually—some- where between bossa nova and Barry White.

The men gathered around were rapt. Who could blame them? This was at least as good as any porn movie.
And
it involved a real man with huge muscles and tattoos. But Rachael sighed and walked by me in a huff, slid open the screen door leading to the living room and shut it loudly behind her. A sinking feeling

pierced the haze of my high. Jason and Mandy showed no signs of letting up, so I headed inside to find Rachael.

It was Rachael who had opened the door to this world. Before I met her, I’d been floating through life, brooding, adrift, like the down-on-his-luck male lead in a film noir, nursing his drink in some saloon, wondering what was next. But Rachael was beau- tiful, smart and driven. So were her friends—witty, confident gay men who reveled in their success and flaunted it with cool cars, beautiful clothes and impeccably decorated homes. Rachael loved them, and so did I.

It was the mid-’90s, the era of Clinton, boom times and surplus. Over cocktails and cocaine, there was talk of Human Rights Coalition fundraisers, hot tech investments, the cost of kitchen renovations, vacations to Tuscany, and second homes in Rehoboth. In this world, Rachael and I were the exotic ones— the hot straight couple who partied like rock stars with the boys. There were group vacations to Provence, Cancun and Istanbul. There were parties in Miami, New York, Amsterdam, Montreal, Mykonos and San Francisco. We became a major subculture’s minor celebrities.

In one important aspect, though, we remained outsiders. Most of our gay friends, even the ones in committed relationships, were having sex like it was the last days of the Roman Empire and they were Caligula. We heard about threeways, fourways, orgies, sex parties at home, sex in sex clubs, sex in cabs on the way back from sex clubs, sex in public bathrooms and in truck stops.

Rachael and I were curious. Everything else about this life- style seemed to be working for us. Could promiscuity? Not ac- cording to our best friend, Christian.

“I’m telling you,” he said, “you’re asking for trouble.”

“You manage just fine,” Rachael said. Christian and his male

partner of nearly fifteen years had avoided the emotional mine- fields of playing the field by employing a policy of full participa- tion when they were together and discretion when they were not. It was an arrangement I referred to as “don’t ask, don’t smell.”

“It is different when it’s boys,” Christian said. “Most of us have a knack for separating our heads from our penises. My advice: Treat it like live porn. Or a yoga class with a happy ending. Keep your emotions out of it. Set some ground rules and talk about them
before
you go there.”

“Damn,” I said. “Should I be writing all this down?”

Christian patted my cheek. “Laugh now, but you’re getting privileged information here. Hard-earned, too. Truth is, straight or gay, it’s a crapshoot. Everything’s going along fine, then someone sticks his willy somewhere and the damn thing blows up like an exploding cigar.”

Still, we were determined to find out for ourselves. The op- portunity to do just that came in the form of Jason and Mandy, two personal trainers we met at a club during gay pride celebra- tions in Boston. Jason was straight; Mandy was bisexual. Most of Jason and Mandy’s clients were gay, as were many of their friends. It seemed so perfect.

Then came Fire Island.

Narrow boardwalks wound through pine forests and connected the houses together like the yellow brick road. Trees reverberated with the
clickity-clack
of big men pulling little red wagons full of groceries and luggage to and from the ferry terminal. There were miles of desolate sand dunes and achingly beautiful sea grass– lined beaches. Then, shoved into this bucolic utopia were New York City sensibilities, as over the top as William Shatner re- citing Shakespeare: designer-decorated homes where a summer share cost the same as a three-bedroom rambler in most parts of

the country; huge, lavish parties; smaller, yet more lavish parties; social climbing galore; one-upsmanship; balls-to-the-wall, 24/7. The only nightclub, the Pavilion, was a wooden sweatbox. In the morning, a stream of clubbed-out zombies shuffled shame-

lessly along the walkways looking for an after-party and sex.

The owner of the house in which we stayed was Ramon, also known as the cha-cha-doctor of Chelsea, who specialized, ironi- cally, in the research and treatment of AIDS. (Though Ramon was not really his name. I’ve changed all the names in this piece, for what I assume are obvious reasons.) He was the perfect host. Anything you wanted—as long as what you wanted was sex or drugs. There were vials of everything, everywhere, all the time. If it wasn’t in front of you, all you had to do was ask: K, G, X, poppers, weed, Viagra, crystal—especially crystal. Snorted, smoked or shot up, only crystal could keep the party, and the sex, going full-tilt for days.

The first people we met were the Porn Boys, feature acts in a series of videos. We nicknamed them Tweaked and Chipper. I kept forgetting their real names. This was awkward considering how often I ran into them traipsing around the house naked. The first time I walked by the Porn Boys’ room with the door open, I saw what looked like a naked rugby scrum. Based on what I heard, it was a high-scoring game.

Rachael and I saw the last translucent veil separating us from our friends ripped away. We hung a welcome sign on our bed. Jason and Mandy jumped right in. High as I was, the sex had a dreamy quality, as though I was watching myself perform por- nography through a Vaseline-coated camera lens.

Then, just as Christian predicted, things came undone. I happened upon Rachael and Jason having sex in the poolside shower. I tried to ignore the stab of jealousy and resentment. But

I couldn’t. Mandy, jacked up on nearly everything, woke me up in the middle of the night to see the stars. We jumped in the pool and had sex as the sun came up. Mandy’s sex with Jason was raw, animal-like, but with me she was tender and sweet, a perfect counterpoint to her rock-hard body.

I fell into a crush. And that’s when, with the two of us standing in the shallow end of the pool, her legs wrapped around my waist, she made a confession:

“You know, I think I’m a little gaga.”

My heart raced. “That makes two of us,” I said.

“It’s not just his looks. I’ve dated plenty of guys built like him—you know other trainers and bodybuilders.”

Oh.

“I see,” I said.

“He’s so good to me. A genuinely nice guy. Slide back a little.” I did. She swiveled her hips and lowered herself onto me. “There,” she said, “that’s better.”

“Does he know?”

“Oh, he knows, all right. But I just can’t get him to make a commitment. At least not the way I want him to.” Her thigh muscles pulsed against my hips.

“So, you’d be willing to be exclusive if he agreed?”

“Sure. I’d be monogamous in a heartbeat with him—and with you and Rachael, of course. Pull my hair. Harder.”

In the midst of having sex with an acquaintance, Mandy was proposing a monogamous relationship involving four people: two couples—one of them married—living in different cities, a union composed of two heterosexual men and a couple of bisexual women.

Then, things got really complicated.

Rachael, Ramon and I walked into the guest bedroom and

found Mandy pancaked between Jason and Ramon’s boyfriend. Ramon played it off as though it didn’t bother him. Rachael was mortified that our guests had appropriated our host’s partner. It did strike me as bad form.

The next evening, we all went over to the neighbor’s pool to watch the sunset. Rachael and I left Jason and Mandy, who gave in to the urging of the crowd and had sex on a lounge chair. The applause carried all the way over to Ramon’s house.

Jason and Mandy had become the show. My crush had been crushed. Rachael’s anger was smoldering. Behind my hurt feel- ings and Rachael’s indignation hid another emotion. We were jealous—and not just of each other. We were used to being
the
hot straight couple in this scene. After having the spotlight for so long, neither of us was okay with second billing.

What followed next was a naked version of a comedy of man- ners—minus the comedy and the manners. Rachael confronted Mandy in the kitchen. Mandy burst into tears. Jason confronted Rachael in the bedroom about confronting Mandy. Rachael burst into tears. I confronted Jason in the living room about confronting Rachael. Rachael and Mandy burst into tears. When I confronted Rachael about cavorting with Jason, things got personal.

“You’ve got nerve,” she said. “After that late-night stargazing session in the pool?”

“Why don’t you go and snort up a few more lines,” I said. “It brings out such a lovely side of you.”

Our experiment had gone haywire. Someone in charge needed to pull the plug. The problem was that no one was in charge of anything.

Jason and Mandy began staging special command perfor- mances in various venues, including the living room, the pool deck, the second floor balcony, the outdoor shower, the kitchen,

and most recently, the Jacuzzi, where Rachael had just left me— high and dry.

I turned the corner into one of the guest rooms. There was Rachael sitting on the bed with the Porn Boys. She was just about to inhale white smoke from the end of a small, glass water pipe. Privately, Rachael had been deriding the Porn Boys for smoking crystal, which she said hit too close to the utterly un-fabulous act of smoking crack. I had to admit, the distinction was lost on me. Rachael saw me, lowered the pipe a few inches and shrugged. “When on Fire Island…” I sat on the edge of the bed in the Porn Boys’ bedroom and watched Rachael press the glass pipe to her

lips.

Except for the muffled moans coming from the hot tub, the hiss from the small butane lighter was the only sound in the room. A thin tendril of smoke streamed into Rachael’s mouth.

Tweaked said, “Hold it in.” Rachael puffed up her cheeks and waited. “
Now
,” he said. She exhaled a small plume, like breath on a frosty morning.

Chipper pointed the pipe in my direction. “You want?” “Yes, he does,” said Rachael.