From: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)
Subject: sex with gay and bi men (part 3)
Followup-To: soc.motss
Summary: gabe and biff atomized
Keywords: the last, for now, i swear
Organization: pod wardens
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 15:43:18 GMT

remember that gabe and biff aren't real people.  i set up the
stereotypes so that i could, eventually, blow them apart,
fragment them into "types" so numerous that an inventory would
be pointless.

i'll start with that restless energy.  mark is the gay man i know who
exhibits this in its most extreme form.  (he was the immediate model
for this part of the description of gabe.)  he lived in the castro, in
a house with several other gay men, and preferred not to venture out
of the area.  i can't say what sex with him was like (though his dark
good looks and his rapid-fire talk about everything under the sun
turned me on); i saw mark only when he came to visit my dyke housemate
in palo alto.  they were best friends, and lovers, in college.  they
had come out together.  and at the time i'm writing about, each was
the other's "exception".  she was one of the few things he'd leave the
castro for, and he was the only man she'd have in her bed (at the time
she was fantasizing heavily about black women athletes; none of her
partners has ever been black, or for that matter, an athlete, but then
fantasies are so often, well, *theoretical*).  their evident regard
for one another and their quiet physicality with one another were
incredibly touching.

john, my lover of an autumn in brighton, was almost as restless as
mark.  he really could not sit still, and achieved repose only in
sleep.  and he was a fierce, hungry lover.  our first night together,
after one of those mutual i-want-*you* moments in a gay after-hours
disco (where we had been introduced by my distinguished-professor sponsor
at the university, so you can see that this is already not quite
two-horny-faggots-rip-each-other's-clothes-off-and-fuck-like-crazy
story you might have been expecting), involved very little sleeping.
we pretty much ran through all the positions in which he could fuck my
ass and all those in which he could suck my cock (we had perfectly
complementary default preferences in our sexual repertoires), many
scenes in five or six acts (nobody was counting).

it's true that the level of sexual excitement went down a little after
that night.  when your first time together works, it's full of
constant *surprises* ("wow, i didn't think i could feel like that
*there*", "amazing that he can still *breathe* while he's doing
that"), and after a while there won't be many more surprises.
instead, you have the pleasures of familiarity, in everything from the
smell of your lover's body (john was, like my parter jacques,
something of a coriander man, and now i find coriander leaves
intensely erotic) to his tastes in literature (john sought out
eccentric stuff - joe orton, _le petomane_ - and for several years
i would approach volumes in a bookstore with the question "would
this be *weird* enough for john gould?").  for me, the pleasures
of familiarity are the deepest pleasures there are (and so i am
bereft every summer when jacques goes off to maine and i stay in
columbus).

as it happens, john felt the same way.  he wanted to hear everything
about my life, wanted to know what i felt about everything, wanted to
tell me everything about his life, and on and on.  he introduced me to
his friends, almost all gay, and i introduced him to mine, almost all
straight (producing some anxiety in the distinguished professor, who
believed he was not out at the university and was alarmed to find
someone from his gay circle turning up as my boyfriend in his
university circle).  john was intensely *affiliative*.  a lovely
man, and the first to make gay restlessness a turn-on for me;
it came with the package, and i liked the package a lot.

john saw himself as exclusively gay, and as living primarily in a
gay world.  despite that, he shared his house with a straight
woman, who was his best and oldest friend, his collaborator in
various projects of stage design, and by far the most important
person in his life.  (i had no problem with this, but some of
john's other lovers had felt overshadowed by kate, even crowded
out by her; they asked me how i managed the competition with her,
and i didn't really understand the question.)  sometimes, even,
when kate felt depressed and unloved and desperate, john would
make love to her, very gently and slowly.  his exception, and
they both felt these rare occasions "didn't count" (as a sexual
relationship between them, or as a faultline in john's otherwise
seamless gayness).  

you will see that john really did tell me quite a lot, including a lot
about how he felt.  jacques, in contrast, though he is generally in
biff territory, finds it *very* hard to talk about his feelings,
believing that they should be obvious from his actions.  (how like a
man, you say.)  and for years with jacques there was a sense of
competition between us (completely absent for john and me, or for my
more recent lover dean and me) - probably natural for two men who had
spent years married to women; no matter how much you see marriage as a
partnership between equals, you can't help getting *some* of your
society's attitudes about gender roles, so that at some level you
think you're in charge, and if there is now another guy, even one you
love dearly, there's going to be some jockeying for position.
for jacques and me the problem was compounded by the fact that i
held almost all the power cards: he was living in *my* house (and
no longer had one of his own), with *my* wife (granted, his lover),
and with *my* daughter as an instant sort-of step-child (his own
children being largely withheld from him, and over a hundred miles
away as well), and *i* had the status and position in linguistics,
while he was a part-time lecturer hired quarter by quarter.

all of this erupted one day early on in our years together, in a scene
that was one of the sources of the forced cocksucking story in my
first posting about gabe.  i have no idea what it was that we were
disagreeing about, but it was something that both of us cared
passionately about at the moment.  suddenly, jacques felt that he was
utterly powerless against me, but that he *ought* to be calling the
shots, and he was boiling angry...so he tried to fuck me into
submission.  now jacques is notably bigger than i am, and quite
strong, so he had no trouble overpowering me, pinning me down on the
bed and straddling me, spewing out imprecations against me and the
dirty details of what he was going to do to me.  (jacques is normally
a marvelous, but entirely wordless, lover.)

i don't understand why, but i had ceased to be angry myself somewhere
along the line, though i was certainly scared now.  in any case, i was
thinking clearly enough to see that i could possibly, umm, turn this
situation around.  i shouted out that i *wanted* him to fuck me, asked
him to, said how much i loved him and wanted him.  which defused the
situation so effectively that he started sobbing and apologizing...and
pulling out of me.  "no", i said, "i really do want you in me.
please.  make love to me, jacques."  which he did, but in our
then-favorite position, with me sitting on his lap facing him, so that
he could jack me off while he fucked me and so that we could kiss.  he
was contrite, but probably he felt victorious and powerful as well.  i
didn't inquire; sometimes it's better not to think about motivations.
it never happened again.

other gay men with restless energy, a lot of projects always underway:
my (most recent) lover dean, my boyfriend-but-not-lover mike.  but
both of them intensely *with you* when they're with you, and both
with the gift of friendship (with other faggots, dykes, straight women,
straight men, equal opportunity).  my description of sex with biff
fits very well for dean, who was in fact one of the models for that
part of the first posting: lots of negotiation about who would like
to do what (often jacking off side-by-side, each turning the
other on, sometimes one of us finger-fucking the other and jacking
him off, lots of kissing and nuzzling all over the body - oh, those
armpits! - and i was the first man dean knew who *really* liked
having his nipples pinched and played with, which sometimes made
him giggle in astonishment over the effect this could produce on me),
lots of talk about what we found erotic, long sessions together
companionably, slowly working up the curve of excitement.  [you will
see that we are now into recent years, and definitely safer sex.
my repertoire with jacques is much like the one i just described with
dean, minus the nipples - jacques is, unbiffishly, wary of new and
non-standard sexual activities - but plus a lot of our current
favorite, frottage, with me on his belly, with him on my lower back.]

about sex with mike i don't know (he says, wistfully), but i
fantasize it as pretty hot.  but then mike is almost surely reading
this posting, and he can give us any self-report he wants.  (dean
is, unfortunately, now at a site that doesn't get news.  pity,
since he *loves* being displayed in public.  i'll send him a copy
of these postings, though.)

back in the old days, i sometimes picked up married guys at the
baths, guys who thought of themselves as bisexual, and who just
wanted to be fucked, hard, let's not stand around *talking* about
it, ok?  (i have defaults, but like biff i'm flexible, so i obliged.
probably just as well to do without the talk; maybe it's better
not to hear about the motivations, because they might be so different
from mine.)

so where are gabe and biff now?  they're gone, and there are *thousands*
of different guys in their place.  no way to look at them and figure
what making love to them will be like.  you'll just have to find out.

arnold (who failed to get susie bright's penchant for the sheer
         masculinity of old-fashioned bulldykes into this posting,
         though he had every intention of doing so, and now has)



Newsgroups: soc.motss