CRUISING FOR SEX WAS an easy replacement for drinking. It was thrilling inasmuch as I never knew who might be waiting with a big stick, either a dick or a baseball bat. If I couldn’t pick up men in the bars—likely, in hindsight, because I was a charming mix of aggressive, drunk, and sissy—the men in the parks were happy to have sex with me. Someone who’d dismiss my hello in a pub would see me an hour later in the park and silently do me.
In those early years of sobriety, cruising kept me out late with much more success than drinking had; I wasn’t hung over, it didn’t cost me a cent, and I remembered everything that happened. Enlivened by my success and the thrill of cruising’s secret coded underbelly, I began having sex in the parks two or four times a week. I could have as many as three orgasms with, on average, five different men a night.
Around this time, I read the excellent Times Square Red, Times Square Blue in which Samuel Delany, the queer academic sci-fi writer, described his decades of public sex in New York porn houses. He explained how those intercourses were a tool in building community with strangers, where you care for people whom you don’t know, and where you are intimate with people you know little or nothing about. I recognized his argument immediately from my own experiences with anonymous sex. For a lonely twenty-something who rarely got touched, cruising was romantic. Delany’s proof was in the details. I recognized in his candid report of his sex practices (in the fast-disappearing cultural landscape of Times Square) something of that necessity to do yourself justice by being open and honest about who you are and how you live your life. His book rang like a carillon through my body.
So between 2002 and 2004, I wrote a confessional sex column under the guise of my drag persona, Miss Cookie. That column, “Blush,” appeared monthly in Xtra! West. It was a “Do as I say, not as I’ve done” column, meaning I aired all the sex-related events in my life that still made me uncomfortable. Each month, I sat down to discuss a sexual moment that embarrassed me. I worked my muscle of abreaction, despite not knowing the word at the time.
In the same years, I turned some of my adventures with public sex into a porn zine called Cruising. I made three issues, “The Park,” “Bathrooms,” and “Peep Shows.” The zine was an insider’s look at public sex, with a how-to section, questionnaires, cartoons, an “endpage” for readers to send in pics of their butts, and poems and stories, both true and imaginary, of sexual encounters in public spaces. There were graphic photo essays of Miss Cookie engaged in three-ways under the stars, furtively pulling on dick under a washroom stall, and swapping blowjobs with a boy in a cramped peep-show booth. A favourite snapshot is my full-body in trashy drag standing at a washroom’s trough-like urinal with my short-shorts undone, squeezing my erection.
My column and zine were, in my own modest way, attempts to put tell-all strategies into practice. My sex writing began as an experiment in purging shame by celebrating the sexual ditches I fell into.
My early days of public sex were lessons in intimacy. Once, late at night in the park, I remembered that I had an appointment in the morning, so thought I should go home and get some sleep. Only just then, a guy—no shirt, jean shorts, a few inches shorter than me but yummy with muscle—popped up beside me, right out of the blue, and slid his dick into a man’s ass. It happened so fast.
I straightened my ball cap, telling my tired and dreamy self I should leave, but I couldn’t. This little guy was slapping skin on skin. There was the noise his thighs and pelvis made slamming against the guy’s ass, there was the white streak of his torso ramming back and forth, and his thick solid arm grabbing the guy by the shoulder to get a good thrusting grip on him. He was a flesh machine, all levered rhythm and force. He fucked the way I wanted a man to want me: with a single-minded need.
My arms were crossed, my head was cocked to one side, and my mouth hung open; I was agog. I couldn’t believe he was real and I was watching him. I couldn’t believe my good luck. Well, what the hell are you waiting for? I said to myself.
I slid my dick under his perineum. His skin was soft and hot and slick with sweat. His shorts rubbed against me as well, so I got action on all sides.
There were men crowded around blowing each other, some fucking, some watching us. I leaned in and chewed on his neck. He was hard, salty muscle—my favourite flavour. I didn’t last long. I couldn’t handle the power of his ass running over top of me, the feel of my arms around his warm back, and his small nipples erect against my fingers. I came on the dirt beside his feet.
It was so nice, I got a little dizzy; the blood had rushed out of my skull. I smelled the pine trees, the dirt, and my sweat all mixed up together. The cooler night air felt refreshing on my skin after a day of hot sun and my sweaty build-up from fucking. There’s my orgasm, I thought, and now I should go home. But when I turned back to that boy still pounding, I couldn’t leave without seeing him cum. I stood back and watched the show, wishing the clocks would slow down. And then he looked at me like he’d heard me thinking, like he’d heard my heart whispering to him, and he looked at me square in the face, with his eyes two dark glassy stones in the night, and leaned toward me. He wanted to kiss.
I opened my mouth and tasted him warm and sweet on my tongue. There was an aftertaste of fruity gum. His tongue was small and pointed and his lips uncommonly soft. Everything he gave me was wet against my mouth.
I rolled his tongue over and under my own and brushed our lips together. I pulled back and lingered over him, my body held in an open breath above his, waiting for us to touch again. We were millimetres apart, stretching the time like a dull melancholy ache in my guts. I wanted to kiss him again, but I needed him to want me. I needed to feel he was hungry for me like I was dying for more of him. He was still ramming like a piston in the stranger’s ass, and I was giving his lips the softest touch I could muster.
And then we kissed again, lightly, his tongue reaching out for mine. I was weak inside a mess of anxiousness, slowing things down and yet dying to get to the end because the feeling was so delicious. This boy was like nothing I’d ever let myself have before. I’d never seen anything as good as he was, right then in the dim dark of the tree-covered woods. I chewed on his neck, licked up to his ear, and whispered, “I can’t wait to see you cum.”
He didn’t smile. Stone-faced, he said, “I want to cum with you.”
I blinked. He was serious. Almost instinctually—I wasn’t really thinking—I answered, “Okay.”
He stopped everything. He stopped fucking. The guy getting his ass reamed stood up without saying anything. He’d heard us but didn’t complain as he pulled his pants up. My man said, “Let’s go somewhere.”
I told him he could fuck me if he had condoms and he said he had lots. He took me by the hand. We walked further into the woods to a clearing under a tall tree. I told him my name, and he called me Mikey. His name was Nick. He wanted me on my back while we fucked so he could see me.
I took my shirt off and laid it down inside out, then removed one shoe so I could slide my jean shorts off one leg. I didn’t bother to take off the rest because I didn’t need to.
He climbed on top of me, saying, “I’ll go slow, Mikey. Just let me know. I’m going to be gentle. Just relax.” I loved the sound of his voice. There was an edge of old school there, mannered, blue-collar, full of respect.
He pulled a rubber out of his pocket and a plastic bottle, which he opened and squirted into his palm. His hand was toasty warm as he rubbed lube in the crack of my ass.
He fucked with abandon. He fucked like he was determined to drive himself mad in my ass. For the next twenty minutes or more, I couldn’t hold it in; I moaned and swore and grunted and shook and bit the air with the effort of not falling to pieces as he fucked me. My back was rubbed raw against the earth.
Men heard us and flocked around like puppies at a bowl of kibble. Someone stepped on my forehead.
I told Nick through gritted teeth, “Believe it or not, I’m trying to be quiet.”
He told me, “Go right ahead, Mikey, do what you have to do.”
Finally, my back was killing me and I had to stop. We sat up. He invited me back to his place. The men cleared off. We got dressed. He unlocked the car doors and opened my side for me.
At his place, we curled up on a mattress on the floor in front of an aquarium that ran nearly the whole length of the wall. He put his arms around me as we watched the fish darting inside the tank. Then we fucked again.
At one point, I had such a pool of sensation welling up, I thought I might explode into tears. I had to get the feeling out of me. It was like an orgasm of the senses, but it wasn’t cum flying out of me but feelings—living, pure living about to burst out of my skin. I didn’t know if I could handle it much longer, but then the feeling passed and I didn’t lose it and we stopped fucking and he came so far with a hand job that it hit his face.
Then he fell asleep.
We fucked an hour and a half later because it was morning already.
I had to go to a meeting at ten a.m. He took forever to get ready, so I had a shower at his place and we drove to the other side of town where he dropped me off. We didn’t kiss goodbye because rough trade was standing on the street corner just outside of the car. I had his phone number.
At the door to the office where I had my meeting, I knocked. No answer. I was wearing my clothes from the night before: a shirt filthy on the inside, jean shorts, no underwear, and runners now covered in dirt. I knocked again and still there was no answer. Ann, the counselor I saw to discuss my father’s drunken suicide attempts, was late.
My ass twitched, telling me I had to fart. Something didn’t feel right. I farted into my shorts, blowing bubbles out of my ass. With too much lube from the three fuckings, I blew too many bubbles into the jean shorts and wished I had worn underwear to catch the bursts as they clung to my hairy hole. Please, I thought, don’t let me drip through my pants.
Ann arrived. I cleaned myself in the bathroom, and she was none the wiser. For the course of the hour-long meeting, I had to squeeze my ass cheeks together to hold in more farts as we discussed again the various reasons why I couldn’t get a boyfriend.
Bit by bit, sex with strangers became a means to try stuff out, to invent a self. If the school playground hadn’t offered me a means to discover my personality when I was young, anonymous sex gave me a venue to experiment with new selves without risk of exposure.
One winter when it was too cold to cruise outside, I remembered that I’d received a free pass for the phone lines. I posted an ad to fit within its culture: I lowered my voice, spoke in short sentences, and used simple adjectives. After some back and forth messaging, I found a man with his own deep voice who was willing to travel. I had described myself as tall and slim, looking for a fun, friendly guy. I neglected to mention my exact weight.
When Brian knocked on my door, I opened it with a warm smile only to see his expression drop and the words “skinny bitch” flash across his face. He literally glanced at my body and slumped ever so slightly. I’d seen that look a million times: men scanned my coat-rack figure wondering where all the muscle was. Sometimes, when cruising in the park, guys would start to make out with me, grab my arms, squeeze, then drop them and move on. It enraged me every time, but what could I do? I could have called these men out, but half my rage was because I thought they were right. I was too thin.
Brian was broad-shouldered, about five-foot-ten, with sharp blue eyes, unkempt straight hair, and easily two days of stubble. He had that outdoorsman-in-the-big-city look (as it turned out, he was a school teacher who shopped at Mark’s Work Wearhouse). His plaid shirt, hiking boots, and blue jeans made him butch, but without a trace of personal style. He was vanilla-hunky.
Uncertain if I really wanted to risk further insult, I invited him inside, just to see. Gingerly, he came in and sat down. We chatted about work and the leather-and-denim bar and the ’burbs where he lived. He was reluctant to reveal much, which either meant that he was shy and adorable or disinterested and soon to disappoint me. He wasn’t exactly fun, but he was friendly. Despite assuming he wasn’t going to sleep with me, I liked him. He had a way of speaking that was gentle, perhaps insecure, while still being a dude, and that combo felt rare. Plus he was a little cross-eyed. Always a win.
When I couldn’t stand my undies getting any itchier for him, I asked if he wanted to neck. He answered, “Sure,” with a shrug.
Okay, I’m not the hunk he expected, I thought, so thank god he’s hornier than he is discriminating. I jumped on top of him before he could change his mind. I made out with him aggressively, partly to compensate for what I thought he didn’t see in me.
Half an hour later, after teasing, pinching, and slapping him around, he flipped us over so that I was pinned to the bed underneath him. Both of us naked. In that brief pause while we rested, he whispered in my ear, “Do you wanna role-play?”
“Sure,” I said, although I had never played pretend in bed before. Not role-playing pretend, just I’m-with-Jeff-Stryker imaginings. I asked, “What do you wanna do?”
“Daddy/son,” he answered.
As a joke, I asked, “Which am I?” His dick was in my ass crack. He weighed thirty pounds more than I did. It was obvious.
“Daddy,” he answered. “That okay?”
“I can do that, Son,” I said, faking a confidence I didn’t have. I had no idea what I was doing. I was thoroughly aware of his weight and my weightlessness the whole time, but I played my way through it with equal parts wits and imagination. Those I had.
We spent a good hour inventing a family history, mostly with me as the aggressor and him as the penetrator. I was the aggressive Daddy bottom. He was the passive Boy top. That mix was another surprising switch for a guy who dressed lumberjack.
I was shameless in describing to him what we were doing, inventing a history and a context for the moment. He loved it. At one point he paused, resting on his elbow to ask, “How often do you role-play?”
When I told him I never had, he said he couldn’t believe it. It was a win over his first impression, but in that moment, with this grown man with two days of stubble and a chubby dick looking up to me, I felt myself to be unfamiliar. I had a kind of power, a sexual dominance, which I hadn’t known even with Knievel. This man-boy had invited me into a very graphic exercise, demonstrating how my own sense of self had created a set of limitations that I hadn’t seen were there. I could be a successful father figure, despite being younger, smaller, and terrifically unsure.
Brian then asked if Daddy wanted to screw him for a change.
By morning, I’d worn out more than the cliché about what you got and how you use it.
By 2001, I’d had great success with the “Park” issue of my zine, selling 250 copies, some in stores, some by mail. The subculture of public sex was fascinating to me: its rules and rituals, the wide swathe of men who used the park, the range of raunch and tenderness that you could watch or engage in. The writer in me was a people-watcher—I liked to see how men tick, and I liked to see them vulnerable. Cruising was a great way to do both. The bonus was that I got lucky too. Every sexual encounter at the time it was happening was a comfort. It validated me. I felt seen, even when in disguise.
That year I decided to do another issue of the zine, more out of curiosity, I think, than as a reason to get laid. The second installment of Cruising, I decided, would be an issue on bathrooms. I didn’t know much about washroom sex so I asked for a tour from C, a friend who knew which places downtown were popular for lunchtime action. I’d never cruised a bathroom before—everything I knew came from word-of-mouth or porn.
C gave me a few key pointers, such as the foot-tapping under the stall to indicate you were interested, and seeking out washrooms with two entrance doors, especially if the first one was squeaky (so you’d have a second’s warning to straighten up before a new person entered the next door). After ten minutes at the urinal in a food court he’d taken me to, my buddy managed to land a real date-date with a handsome silver fox, a pastry chef popular in washrooms across downtown.
When C told him what I was up to, the pastry chef came out to meet me because he had some thoughts for me too. He told me that if you wanted oral, you could do it at the urinals but anal could only happen in the stalls. You could squat with your legs on the toilet, so that folks only saw one pair of shoes.
“But I knew a guy who used paper bags to give head,” he said, laughing.
I didn’t understand. “What for?”
“To stand in, to hide your legs,” C said, nodding his head and smiling.
The pastry chef added, “So it looks like one guy is sitting on the toilet, with his shopping bags on either side of the stall.”
C chuckled. “That’s thinking ahead.”
A week later, I cruised a public washroom for the first time solo, for research. I was nervous. I’d chosen a mall known to have man-on-man action, especially with businessmen at lunchtime. Despite the informational tour from C, I wasn’t sure what I was shopping for. I wasn’t interested in being arrested, and being arrested seemed a very distinct possibility.
I stepped cautiously through the washroom door. There were three different varieties of man hugging the urinal wall. I thought immediately, I’ll blend in. I took an open spot, pulled out my dick, and waited. In short order, all three guys began pulling on themselves. Another man stood at the sink washing his hands very, very thoroughly, and eyeing us. Behind me, an enormous man lumbered out from an open stall door. He looked discouraged, like he was waiting for a late appointment. Everyone was gay, it seemed, at least for the time being. No one spoke.
For nearly half an hour, men came and went. Men masturbated. A few pumped someone else’s dick. Some guys actually came to pee. The rest of us pressed tighter to the porcelain and pretended to be pee shy until they were gone. Then the skin pistons started their slow rhythms again.
Nobody kissed, nobody bodysurfed a tongue over skin. It was disappointing. I wasn’t buying any of it. I was a fag with all kinds of sexual interests, from the perverse to the banal, but mute, mutual masturbation was too button-down-collar to interest me. Worse still, I couldn’t stand the interruptions. In the middle of the anti-climactic action, I kept wondering, For god’s sake, can’t someone lock that door? Each time the first of the two sets of doors squeaked open, everyone involved jumped to attention, hiding their perky pricks in the basins. I kept banging the head against cold porcelain, collecting germs, I was sure.
We had to wait until each new arrival either peed and left, or he’d assessed who was lingering too long, gave a leer, and jerked himself as well. Too often, kids came in. I’m sure the inappropriateness of place and the fear of being caught are part of the appeal for some men, but I felt the bad kind of dirty. My swollen dick penetrating a piss-filled basin with sweet kids hanging around made me feel depraved. Being queer was an upward effort to leave shame behind, not wallow in it.
I’d had enough public humiliation. When I was sure it was just fags and their lovers left, I grabbed the hand of a cute suit and dragged him into a stall. After I put my feet on either side of the toilet seat, he kissed me sweetly. But even a stall proved to be merely semi-private. The man in the john next to us wedged his face between the floor and the base of the stall wall, peering up at us. Always thoughtful, the suit tried not to step on him.
I introduced my guy to every dick’s favourite new friend: my tonsils. I blew him until he blew.
As I readied myself to leave, the suit tut-tutted and shook his head. He pointed to me, then to the spot where he was standing, then to himself and the toilet seat. We switched places.
He went down on me, tenderly, which I loved. My hands were in the back of his salt-n-pepper hair, trying not to mess it up on his lunch hour. I felt the warmth of his neck in my palms. I must have spent just as long kissing him as he did servicing me. We filled the rest of his lunch hour.
Alas, it had to end, and with a kiss it did. We straightened our respective tie and ball cap and walked casually out of the stall. There were some new faces mixed in with the previous pud-pullers. For a moment, I felt taller, like I was the best-dressed fag in the room. I’d found some very mutual intimacy with a frisky businessman, though by the time I’d washed my hands, he was gone.
About this same time, I started to think that being a public sex slut might have been taking up a lot of the time and energy that I could have invested in a more steady relationship. If I was always whining that I wanted to be in a relationship, why was I spending all my time looking for casual sex?
I started to try out new skills that were closer to dating than cruising, such as meeting men outside of the parks. That helped me to discover a truism I’d never intuited: If you’re out in the world having fun and a guy asks you where you’re going next, most likely he wants to be invited. Before knowing this, if I’d wanted to hang out with someone, I invited myself along. And if I wanted to fool around, I was known to say something witty like, “I live ten minutes away. You wanna take a ten-minute walk?”
Drag queens don’t make their mark being subtle.
So to improve my ability to find a boyfriend, I’d stopped being direct with men. Instead, I spoke in code. One night at a house party, Owen asked me what I was doing next. I said I wasn’t sure, but did he want to go to the Dufferin Hotel where my friends were headed? (I was a fast learner.) Later, at the Duff, I asked if he wanted to walk home with me.
When Owen and I left together, it made my knees tremble. Sure, he had a weak chin and, though twenty-seven, had been out for only two years, but his slow smile was killer. He had a lot of the qualities I liked best: he was artsy, smart, and easy to entertain. We talked about my sissy wardrobe (I must have been in pink) and his twenty-five years in the closet.
Once at my place, I invited him up for a toke. We talked into the wee dark part of the night until finally I admitted I wanted to kiss him. When he took five minutes negotiating aloud whether that would be the right thing for the two of us, I should have been alerted to the subtext—he was tentative—but he ended with a “yes,” and that’s all I heard. We had some very playful sex.
I’m not usually a biter, but he was so into my nibbling that I decided to go there. The more I chewed on his rawhide, the more he groaned in a good way, and the more my molars hunkered down. The next morning, I realized our mistake when Owen went to the washroom and didn’t return.
I found him leaning over the sink with his head in his hands, nauseous. He’d had a small bit of blood in his urine. There was no pain, he said, so I told him not to worry, he’d burst a blood vessel. I’d learned from the sex exploits of friends (who engage in “sounding”) that blood in your pee could happen when you’re a little too rough.
He came back to bed. I fantasized our wedding. Then I had to pee too. While washing my hands in the bathroom sink, I checked my face in the mirror and found large streaks of dried blood smeared across my cheeks. I washed up, crawled back into bed, and gently told him what had happened.
We did the HIV talk, and then I curled into him, purring, “Don’t you worry, I promise that if we ever do that again, I won’t slap your bloody dick across my cheeks.”
“You can’t say a word of this to anyone,” he said.
Without thinking, I answered, “What do you mean? I’ve already hung your bloody boxers out the window like a flag.”
Owen left that morning without a goodbye kiss. He never called. My code reading needed quite a bit of fine-tuning.
For years, I would vow to cut back on public sex, anonymous sex, quickie sex, sex without a bed, but as weeks passed between touching anyone, my resolution weakened. I felt like everyone had acquired some kind of gay man’s code that I wasn’t privy to because I couldn’t convince men to date me. Public sex gave me access to both physical comfort and distraction from lonely evenings.
Most fags I knew had met their partners in the clubs. Even on a bad night for me, the park had more action than clubs. In all my years out, I’d never picked up more than a piffle of men there—less than a handful. There was Dale, whom I took home two weeks in a row from the same Toronto bar, but only after we were both drunk; James, the businessman and father of two who was on a working holiday from hetero-normativity; Domenic, the forty-year-old whose only bedroom furniture was a mattress and television on the floor (and a television, I guess, isn’t furniture); and a blond guy I met in San Francisco’s Detour who kissed me up against its metal chain décor until we took the fun to my hotel room.
I used to think it was my clothes and the body in them that made men reluctant to go home with me, rather than my attitude toward them. If I was indoors, I wanted to wear something cute or pretty. By contrast, in the park where butch is de rigueur, I enjoyed masking myself in a ball cap, jeans, and a baggy jacket to add bulk to my torso. In the dark, I was manly.
One night in the park, I walked slowly, hands in pockets, hips not swinging, carrying my pelvis like a divining rod. I wandered off the path into the bush and found a guy leaning against a tree. He had longish hair, either hippie or trailer park, I couldn’t quite tell. I stepped closer to him. He smiled. He was wearing suburb-style denim. We didn’t speak. I still felt butch.
He slid a palm under my shirt. His hands were as soft as lips, his lips like marshmallows. When I bit them, he grabbed my groin. We made out for a long time, masturbating. We nibbled and pawed each other, dropping our pants, lifting our shirts, giving just that much less than what we wanted—a perfect panty-wetting technique. I grabbed his ass. It was smooth, round, very firm, and moving in ever-widening circles. It was the best ass I’d ever held in my hot little hands.
He turned around, and I fucked him bare. Bareback, because I didn’t have condoms, because he was way hot, because opportunities to do men this macho didn’t come around for me every day, which in turn made me feel masculine, because we hadn’t yet said a word to each other, and because I felt, as usual, that keeping silent was easier.
We fucked until we finished. I considered asking if he was positive. The words I could find all sounded rude, so I said nothing. I pulled up my pants and left.
Walking home, I did what I always did after having risky sex: I unravelled with worry. In the 1980s, I came out with Queer Nation, chanting, “Silence equals death.” My friends worked for Vancouver’s YouthCo. One wrote a column about being HIV-positive and others organized the AIDS vigil each year. How could I do this? I was negative, or had been negative. I may still have been negative. And I knew better.
The next morning when I woke up, my face burned with shame. My gut was electric with panic. I wanted to cry, curl up, and hide. If it had been some other problem, I likely would have called my mother for comfort, but this was too queer for her. I phoned my best friend, Colin, who was only a few years younger than my father. One of my best unconscious strategies for thriving had been to find older people who would invest in me, such as my grade-ten high school English teacher, my best friend’s mother, and Colin.
He said he knew that horrible feeling. He’d done similar risky-sex things before. We decided to try never to make that mistake again.
“Worrying isn’t going to help,” he said, “so get tested in six months, but stay safe till then.”
I talked to a number of friends about that night, and then again later when I experienced others like it, to will the silence away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this strategy had similarities with quitting drinking: I was trying to create a community of witnesses so that everyone would know I had put myself in danger, and I hoped that it might dissuade me from doing so again. That pattern was also cyclical, running in tighter and tighter repetitive circles.
In my first Cruising column, I’d announced a promise I hoped Delany and other sexperts might be proud of: “ … to lay bare the ins and outs of our sex culture as I experience it. We’re going to talk about everything we don’t want people to know. We’re going to wring the neck of shame, roast it, and make a meal. We’re going to get comfortable.” The experience of describing on paper a dirty little secret was exactly as Wikipedia describes abreaction. Confession held a kind of sweet dissipation. The fingers of shame released their grip.
Beyond that particular kind of sexual release was the true gift. As the months passed, it became more and more obvious that I wasn’t just confessing; I was also seeing my own complicity in the messy circumstances. Prior to writing that column, I’d catalogued much of my behaviour as He-did-this-to-me or This-funny-depressing-thing-happened. In the articles, it became increasingly clear that I-had-a-hand-in-all-this-shit. Sometimes literally.
Because I published an uber-graphic zine and a confessional sex column, projects that graphically detailed a sex culture many men engage in but few discuss, a lot of people assumed I was comfortable in my skin. One company, for example, asked me to do glossy magazine photo shoots to promote a new type of clothing for the penis. When I told them that, given my attitude to my body in the very recent past, I considered myself to be the last person they should ask, they thought I was kidding. What most people misunderstood was that I wasn’t baring all because it was easy; I made nudist and graphic sex work because exposing the nitty-gritty of my body, my gender, and my sexuality scared the shit out of me.
Circulating a magazine with my erect dick in it was, in part, an attempt to demystify my sexual body. I exposed everything to purge my fear of being seen. Not surprisingly, my body became less obscene when my sexual life did also. In making my erection familiar, I punched holes in my own shame. My zine said, See me. I’m aroused. No big deal. (It’s an average-sized deal.)
Blush and Cruising were first attempts to pump my sexuality into the narrative of who I am. They created a place to set down my experiences as a sexual creature, to turn them over and find some perspective. I’ve had a simple motto ever since: If you can’t talk about it, you shouldn’t be doing it. The inverse also became clear, of course, though it took many years of fucking up to see it: that just because I can talk about it doesn’t mean it’s wise to do.
Much of my writing has attempted to move the conversation about our intimate lives forward, to use my experiences as a sexual man (a sometimes sexual man, a sometimes man) to hold up a light to Western world queer life in the hope we might read a bit of who we are today from the shadows cast on the bathroom wall.
People have since remarked that sharing these confessions must take a great deal of courage, which I wouldn’t say is accurate. I’ve more candour than courage. To that, they make the counter-argument that it takes courage to have candour, but I don’t believe that’s true either. Courage doesn’t call us to action. Conviction does.