Category: ultragay

Soapbox

I’m not participating in A Day Without Weblogs. This is not because I don’t think AIDS awareness is important, or because I think it’s a hollow gesture to remove your weblog for a day. On the contrary, I think any effort to shock people out of any complacency is vitally important. I think, though, that I would rather participate in World AIDS Day by taking a moment in this forum to make a call for continued dialogue and continued openness about the issue.

People I love have been deeply affected by AIDS and HIV. It’s touched my family and my friends, and it’s been the cause of grief, anger, and fear. The fear is the worst part, I fear, in terms of how our society on the whole deals with the presence of AIDS in our lives. When people react, ond overreact with fear, it breeds a climate that punishes the sufferers rather than battles the disease itself. I don’t want to live in a world where peope are ostracized and feared because of a health condition, especially one which is preventable and containable. I don’t want to live in a world where compassion and understanding and lucidity are shoved aside by hysteria, suspicion, intolerance, and moral indignation. Screw that.

I have friends with HIV, and it doesn’t freak me out. I have a brother with HIV, and it doesn’t freak me out. I’ve even dated guys with HIV, also: sometimes I’ve known about it, and sometimes I haven’t at the time. Either way, I’ve discovered that it doesn’t freak me out as much as I once thought it would. I’m grateful to know so that I have a chance to be a voice of reason rather than fear. What I’ve discovered each time I’ve learned about it is that it doesn’t change who that person may be, or how I feel about that person. The presence of HIV in their lives and mine may sadden me or make me angry sometimes, but it’s not the carrier I mind, it’s the virus. And it’s the way people react to it.

Don’t fear HIV. Don’t fear AIDS. Learn about them. Be smart and compassionate and careful. Prevent the spread of the virus. Don’t make martyrs or victims or pariahs or villains out of the people who have it. It’s not a judgement, it’s a disease. People get it, and that’s a tragedy, but pretending the tragedy doesn’t exist in your world will never ensure that it won’t.

Sorta Second Dates

Twice in the last week I have run into (ahem) cute, smart, attractive guys with whom I hit it off like gangbusters. With each one, we realized at some point while hanging out that we have had completely tawdry, anonymous sex with each other at some point in the previous year. And each time, I had wished that I had gotten more of a chance to follow up and get to know the fella in question. sometimes, serendipity sends a nice curve ball just when you could use a little cheering up.

Meat Market

Forget all that queer counter-culture posturing you keep encountering on the Internet. Every gay blog I’ve looked at today has confessed to watching The Sexiest Bachelor in America last night, just like I did. We’re all ashamed. We were all horrified (if that eerie picture on Fox’s page for the show isn’t ominous, I don’t know what is). But we all made sure we didn’t have to pee during the swimsuit competition. (Which was lame, by the way. You know guys, there’s a reason the rest of the world makes fun of Americans for swaddling themselves with so much fabric on the beach. We look silly in all that fabric. And not as sexy as people are obviously hoping for.)

Despite the trashiness of this particular televised meat market — and for once it’s good to see men being the meat and not the shoppers, I might add — leave it to American televison to make sure that the winner was the most wholesome of all when it came right down to it. As if the only way to excuse such a tawdry (yet fun, in its way) celebration of beefcake was to show that in the end, it’s just good manners that matter the most.

But maybe that’s being a little too cynical of me. After all, this was on Fox, a fine, upstanding network if there ever was one. I’m not crazy about the lucky Mr. Virginia, but I was surpised and pleased that the judges (by coercion or actual fairness) would grant the prize to a guy who was all hairy and beefy, but not cut like a gym rat, the way the other guys were. Watch the swimsuit competition: he’s puffing up his chest so much to hold in his gut that he might pop a lung. Good for him, even if he was the blandest of them all.

I Would Like a Boy

Just to throw you all a bone, I contributed my own list to Lori’s really fun and sweet I Would Like a Girl/Boy… project. It was surprisingly hard for me to put the list together, because when I sat down and thought about it, I realized that there are very few things that I actively seek, just a vast array of things I respond to. Recently, David at (the totally excellent site) PlanetSOMA managed to articulate some of the key points better than I ever could:

I love cute little geeky guys. They’re only one of many types which can get me going sexually, but they’re probably the only type which will ever have a real shot at me romantically.

By the way, I’m not using geek as a synonym for “computer nerd” here. The two types merge sometimes but not always. My definition of geekiness is based more on an active intellect combined with an almost childlike enthusiasm for a few really esoteric subjects (one of which may or may not be digital in nature). The “childlike” part is very important; a good geek is first and foremost a big kid.

Also, now that I’ve just gotten a reasonably swanky new digital camera, I’d wanted to do something for Behind the Curtain, until I realized that it was a one-time thing, not an ongoing project. Well, screw that: I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway. Watch for an unveiling, here or at UltraSparky. If my ISP ever manages to get my freakin’ DSL hooked up (and increase my hosting allotment in the process) I’ll also get around to filling this place up with a bunch of new pictures and content and stuff. I mean, don’t hold your breath or anything, but it could happen.

Hormone Levels

Much to my surprise, I haven’t actually been very horny all this week, despite all the free time on my hands. When I’m busy my urge to fool around is usually a welcome distraction that often motivates me to actually get the hell out of my desk chair and leave the house (often with very constructive results, if you know what I mean). In those rare moments when I have a bunch of free time on my hands, it usually just gets a bit more intense. I remember the week after I left my job in Connecticut and started loafing around the house again, I almost went off the deep end I was so self-indulgent. That back-and-forth between being kinda horny (and perhaps not taking advantage of it) and really horny (and giving in to it) has pretty much been a constant for the last year-and-a-half.

Part of the explanation this week is that I’m exhausted, and I just don’t have the energy to do that much at all. My body, realizing that for the first time in a while it can just shut down and sleep whenever it needs to, is making sure it gets its rest while it has a chance. It seems to have sent a memo to its various parts making sure I don’t get all worked up.

There’s also not a lot of stimulus here on the island. For one thing I’m here with an old friend who’s more like a sister. And it’s off-season, so it really is a ghost town — all the hot surfer boys have gone back to Rutgers or wherever else they go to school. I mean, the garbage man I saw yesterday was pretty hot, but that’s about it. The Olympics are serving up an impossible bevy of chiseled jaws, gorgeous arms, and and firm buttocks, but in sort of an abstract way that’s not worth getting too hot and bothered about.

Also, I’ve been realizing for a while that I’ve been more interested in settling down again. All these months of lots and lots of sex have been fun but have reminded me just how much more satisfying I find it when I can really get to know someone and care about him. A little variety is fun and all, but tricks are for kids. Or at least for kids who don’t get as turned on by guys’ minds as much as their bodies. When I don’t meet guys who stick around for long (and I’m as fussy as anyone else, so this is no “woe is me” cry), I don’t get to experience that deeper, more holistic variety of attraction. And I’m jonesing for it.

But there’s always hope, right?

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

I want you all to give a big, internet-style hug to my pal Steve, who recently had The Talk and came out to his folks. I’m glad to hear that things haven’t been as rocky as they first seemed after Steve dropped the bombshell, and I hope they continue to go well.

I was pretty worried when I first read that Steve had made the announcement and that his folks seemed upset, because I have been one of the people encouraging him to tell them, and I hoped I hadn’t made a huge mistake. A lot of the advice I ever give on the subject of coming out always draws from my own experience, which was pretty good, and from the reaction of my parents, who love their kids enough to get used to almost any new idea, it seems. There was this fear, though, that I hadn’t been a sterling example of the benefits of coming out to your parents and friends, but rather that I was just meddling in the life of someone I liked chatting with but just didn’t understand at all.

Those worries aside, I still believe it’s better to come out than not. Even if the process is fraught with anxiety, in the end I think it’s better to give people the chance to know you in a more complete way. When I came out to my folks (and basically everyone else at around the same time), it was just the first step in a larger effort to have them get to know me, and to get to know them — an effort to relate to my parents as friends and people I respected. It was good for all of us. Certainly it was good for me to be more open about the person I was with my folks, my other relatives, and with all my friends, and the world at large. It was good for them, too, because once they had a chance to think about it, to think about how being gay fit into a larger context of who I was, then they realized it wasn’t a tragedy, it was just another detail. It wasn’t some terrible thing that happened to other people’s kids — it was just another way to go about living one’s life.

That’s the value of coming out that I don’t see people talking about as much: the benefits for the people you tell. When you come out to the people you know, you give them a chance to reconsider how they have felt about relating to someone who’s gay. You give them a chance to grow a little, and to develop a fuller understanding not only of you, but of other people in the world. Yeah, it may suck if your mom breaks into tears right away or your dad gets all stony, but what happens later? That’s the important thing: What happens after you’ve given people a chance to really look at their preconceived notions and decide whether or not they’re valid? You give people one of hopefully many opportunities to develop a fuller, more open-minded understanding of how the world works, and of how people can live their lives. I think that’s good, even if the short-term results aren’t so spectacular. When someone really freaks about your being gay, it’s not only a tragedy for you, but also for that person: that’s someone whose mind has been locked down, who won’t let in a new idea, or who won’t care enough to let you choose your own path in life.

Granted, I have a pretty obvious bias on this subject, but can you blame me? I know lots of incredible people who like a little man-man or gal-gal lovin’. And I bet each of us has, at some pooint or another, made that light bulb appear over someone else’s head that siginifies, “Hey, it ain’t such a big thing after all, is it?”

Social Niceties

Another public apology to Jonno: I’m sorry I ran out of Fat Cock 29 so soon after you arrived last night. It was great to finally see you again, and I certainly wouldn’t have been so impetuous if I didn’t know we’d be boogeying at P.S. 1 with Dori and the Minx later today. It’s just that I’d gotten there early and ran into my friends Alan and Vincent and then Alan introduced me to some friends of his, including this cute, cute boy I couldn’t stop staring at. You know the one, the one I introduced to you. Well, you can imagine my surprise to discover he was staring at me the whole time, too — that kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me that often, especially in bars full of delicious downtown hotties. So we were chatting, and then pushed together by the crowds, and then flirting, and then kissing and stuff. Since you guys hadn’t shown up yet, I figured you may have decided not to deal with the long line outside. So when this fetching young man suggested we beat a hasty retreat, I was all over the idea. Then there you were. Doh! I didn’t mean to be rude or anything, I swear. I’ll make it up to you.

Boys Suck

Either he’s been kidnapped or he doesn’t have the nerve to start that Final Conversation, because there hasn’t been any response to my messages. I have a pretty good idea which of the two it is. I’m sad, because I thought we may have been on to something. He was scared for the same reason. Or maybe it was the both-of-us-having-the-same-name thing. Who knows? Yeesh! Kids these days!