Lesson #4: It’s never a bad idea to be completely honest about the facts.
—Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World
AS I MOVED THROUGH my thirties, it became increasingly clear to me that I hunted for sex more than necessary. If I had free time, I filled it with cruising. Just as with my use of alcohol, even a small sip of porn online could get me drunk on clicking for hookups.
In 2008 I landed my dream job, teaching writing at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, so I packed up my Vancouver life and moved to the Okanagan. A fresh start. I hadn’t had sex in Kelowna; I’d never put myself at risk there. Now, I reasoned, I could re-make my romantic life. All good promises by drunks are about as ephemeral as their intentions. It didn’t take more than a month for the machine to start back up again.
A typical week for me included about five or six nights of cruising online—I sometimes called it “typing class”—sometimes as few as four nights if I had other events that kept me up late. The nights when I wasn’t cruising were ones I spent trying not to cruise.
Compulsion is a mild form of temporary lobotomy. Sexual compulsion is a lobotomy with orgasms. When the machinery of sexual compulsion is turned on, part of the brain shuts off. Like a blind person leaning against a touchpad light switch, you don’t even know you’ve hit it. As the body turns on, the critical, rational brain dims.
I’d always been good at paying attention, so I caught on that in the park the encounters were brief, which didn’t help my goal of finding a more long-term partner. Also I was putting myself at risk of STIs, and I didn’t have any way to contact my sexual partners if I wanted to do the responsible thing and get in touch with them. You can only tell the clinic nurse so many times that no, you don’t have contact information for the person who gave you crabs or chlamydia or gonorrhoea, and yes, you’ve had sex with a bunch of people since you likely caught it, and no, you don’t have contact info for them either, before you figure out that maybe you need to moderate your behaviour.
I swapped out the park for online cruising sites because at least with the latter, there was some conversation beforehand and a means to contact tricks afterward, provided they hadn’t deleted their profile.
Those automatic nights at the keyboard, I surfed porn for at least an hour, usually for about three hours, masturbating. At the same time, I’d be on two other websites for hooking up, one with a chat room and one with a list of other users near me who were also online. I could have my cam on in a room and watch a half dozen other folks masturbating. I could simultaneously chat in private windows with a handful of men, jerk off on cam, cruise porn, text someone local, and browse new profiles as people logged on. In more recent years, I’d also be on two different GPS-based apps on my phone, which were like homing devices for gay guys. Altogether, they made a great immersive distraction, way better than TV. I could have eight or more different options running at once. Vibrant, interactive channel surfing. A mediated frenzy.
When really focussed, I could hit the refresh button about forty times a minute, waiting for a new profile to materialize at the top of a list when a user came online. I might spend the better part of two hours doing nothing more than that.
I could take short breaks to read a profile or watch some porn, but would quickly go back to checking for new log-ons. I got to know the other compulsive users well so that if they created a new profile I’d likely recognize them by their height-weight statistics (they often logged differing ages) and their collection of interests. Rarely was someone online any given night that I didn’t already “know.”
The chat on cruising sites and the too-familiar profiles found there are beyond boring. Compulsion is not sustained by novelty but by its ability to turn off our conscious mind, to distract us. The less we have to think about, the more automatic and easy it is to disengage from the present. Having a dozen different sites going at once offers just enough distraction to be effective.
Ninety-nine percent of all my chat conversations were routine and predictable. We shared statistics of height, weight, dick length, sometimes girth (idiosyncratic, I guess, considering everything else I got up to, but girth just seemed like overkill), age, sexual interests, and, for the sophisticates, hair and eye colour. I often changed profiles, or I’d have two different sessions going using my other profile. I kept one that was more a dating lure and one for sex (which consistently had more bites).
Eventually it got late enough and I’d been masturbating long enough that I’d give up on being fussy and agree to meet some guy who didn’t want to kiss or had a wife or didn’t like condoms but wrote that he only wanted oral (in theory, not practice). We’d meet at my place or in a cemetery parking lot or a dog park or bird sanctuary, alongside the highway at a specific intersection, under a bridge, beside a building, in an alley, in his truck, in the parking lot of a fruit-packing plant, in the park beside his house, or on rare days, at his place, if the family/roommate/parents were out of town. One single-parent father used to invite me over while his fifteen-year-old son slept upstairs, but that just weirded me out. Anyone who tells you to be quiet when you come over should raise flags. Save yourself trouble and always decline.
On the best nights, the hottest nights, from the moment I signed off with a rendezvous until we met up, my body trembled. It was an odd mix of deliciousness and fear, like licking the sugar off a witch’s cabin in the woods. Yummy, with a pound of peril in the recipe. (My friend Colin had a similar experience when he was acting out. “My trembling was more like walking toward the guillotine and pretending it wasn’t there,” he told me, which is also apt. The fear made the thrill more thrilling and made it more necessary to feel like an automaton.)
My legs would shake like I’d run a marathon in heels, barely able to hold me up. My hands were late Katharine Hepburn, my arms, Jell-O. Even my stomach felt strapped into a body vibrator, shaking the cellulite. Sometimes my teeth rattled so hard my jaw began to hurt.
Much of the compulsion was in response to stress. The more stress, the deeper I wanted to slip inside the automaton. If you know anything about addiction, you will understand the perfect loop of compulsion, which is like a snake swallowing its tail—the stress of fucking up from acting out causes you to want to act out more. The more you screw up because you disappeared, the more you need to disappear again. The more sleep you lost last night, the more likely you are to lose sleep tonight too.
Compulsion has long been a means to cope with a fucked-up life. Gary the Therapist tells me that we can’t get rid of our compulsive lizard-brains, but we can choose which things we get compulsive about—the lizard won’t disappear, but it can be channelled into writing, for example, or playing board games or sports or doing crafts.
When I was young, I channelled it into reading. I could stick my nose in a book for an entire morning, afternoon, and night, preoccupied with finishing the story. Nothing could penetrate that imaginary world—the parents, the chainsaw next door, the slamming doors, my sister calling my name, or the phone ringing, all disappeared. I read two or three books a week in addition to reading for schoolwork. When I was done reading my own books, I read my sister’s, even though she was two grades ahead.
TV used to disappear me too. You could try talking to me when a good drama was playing, but you’d be lucky if I noticed you’d walked into the room, let alone spoke. My attention has always had the potential to be immersive. It’s a great device for finishing novels. It can really help put you ahead of the pack at work. It means you rarely lose things, because you tear the house apart five or six times until you find it.
In my early years as an adult, compulsion wasn’t much of a problem. I poured my attention into school and books. I lived with Dana, then with Paul. But when I stopped drinking in lonely Vancouver, I kept up cruising, in full force, because I had more time. Many days I walked home at dawn with the birds chirping madly overhead. They were comforting. Dawn is a gorgeous time of day. I rationalized how lucky I was to be able to see the sun peeking over the city and smell the air before the exhaust thickened, despite what might have transpired in the hours prior. When I got home, I went to bed, happy to be safe. When I woke up, I’d vow not to waste so much time, do so many men, put myself at ever-increasing risk. In a day or two, I’d do it all over again.
The depth to which I clued out was proportionate to the risk—if the risk wasn’t high enough, I was too conscious. For a time, it was thrill enough to meet people anonymously. Sex with strangers turned my critical thinker off. When that got to be routine, it was fooling around with someone in a park. Then it was a cluster of men in a park. When parks got too routine, it became peep shows and too-public bathrooms. Peep-show rooms were great because they were a public establishment—technically only one person per booth was permitted, though nobody, not even staff, paid attention to that. The narrow aisles made it easy to watch all the drama (this too was better than TV). When the aisles and booths got boring, there were glory holes for peeking through. Then using.
It took years to get accustomed to any particular environment. The clientele changed enough from one night to the next that the lustre of the illicit remained intact until both the behaviours of a place were recognizable and my own response was predictable. I recognized that this or that behaviour would prompt a particular response in me. When I grew very adept at recognizing the patterns of a place and its clientele—because I studied the rules—my automaton stopped taking over. It got bored, I guess. In some ways, cruising was an elaborate testing lab for human nature. I’d spent my childhood learning how to read people so I could keep out of harm’s way, and now I was using all those skills to put myself in danger, to curate that experience.
Although the compulsive mind was at the helm when I was cruising, it could check in with the critical mind for advice without releasing control. It would dip into knowledge when necessary—how to avoid being mugged, arrested, molested by someone undesirable, penetrated without a condom. It was like the compulsive mind had enough wherewithal to keep me out of harm’s way, but just enough to do its work; too much danger would have threatened my ability to continue the behaviour.
Everything about cruising is an exercise in reading and control. If you’re in a public place where everyone might have their dicks out, but you want to be groped only by the men you find attractive, you learn that the environment requires great sensitivity to the subtleties of reading other men as well as keen strategy for how to manipulate the situation—where to stand, what to touch, when and how to bend over or stand up, what body language to send out or retract.
You aren’t just working the people around you but must also be keenly attuned to the guy you’re with. Is he into this third or fourth guy too, and if so, how do you accommodate that? As an adult child of an alcoholic with a classic preoccupation with people-pleasing, cruising meant a master orchestration of making everyone happy. Sometimes I curated the men around me—I could ensure I’d keep the interest of the man I wanted by hitching a competitor to some compulsive cocksucker I’d seen earlier. I’d literally face one guy toward another and let them play out their furtive dramas. Grab a dick and point it at a hole. That usually worked reliably, though I had to make sure I got the right people facing the correct direction to ensure that those I wanted were left available.
In my attempt to be more careful, I’d try to set rules for myself—only blowjobs, only men who kissed, only one man at a time, only three men a night, only someone whose features I could see by the light of the moon—but each time I grew more comfortable in a particular scene, the rules dropped away to ramp up the stakes. Risk was the tool by which I disappeared. With the press of a button, fear locked my anxiety behind a heavy wooden door.
Living hard shit is a spiral—sometimes you walk in wider and wider circles, reeling uncontrollably, and sometimes you move in the other direction, travelling toward the centre, where you can see it all in perspective.
You would never know by the hours a week I spent in chat rooms that I wasn’t fond of meeting men online. The orgy of dick shots in every profile struck me as too bizarre. I didn’t want someone to date just my dick. I preferred to see the face I was going to suck far more than the cock. Eventually, during sex, the prick disappears in some hole or another, but the face, that sticks around.
I didn’t have a problem with the promiscuity—I’d always said if you were having sex with one guy every night for four years or different guys, it was the same amount of sex, so what’s the big deal as long as it was safe? But I was getting increasingly less safe. Sometimes I’d leave my bedroom door unlocked and invite a man I’d met online to come over and find me “sleeping.” Once a guy brought a friend and they smoked crack on my couch, then tried unsuccessfully to get hard. I met men in alleys beside their homes as their wives slept upstairs. I fell asleep behind the wheel one night at three a.m. after a hot date with a closeted minister and woke up halfway across the yellow line. I began to bareback. A lot. The more I tried to stop, the greater was my attraction to acting out, and the greater the risk when I did.
In my early thirties, I decided to create what I thought was a perfect rule: abstinence. When I walked into a room I no longer wanted my primary goal to be finding a man to sleep with me. I didn’t want to turn off my libido, but to act on it differently. I planned to be abstinent for six months to learn how to meet men without trying to bed them. I wanted to see what I had to offer other than sex, and to increase the intimacy in my life. As a safety net, I also allowed myself the option of re-negotiating my terms depending on my evolution.
At first, I masturbated even more. Eventually, a great number of things became clear:
At thirty-three, it’s still possible to have nocturnal emissions.
People enjoy you more when you’re not drooling on them.
No matter how good it feels at the time, never penetrate yourself with a bar of soap.
I was always looking for men who wanted to sleep with me and not men in whom I was interested: that meant I felt rejected by nearly everyone instead of by a selective few.
By week three, my body noticed that other than a hug and kiss hello with friends or an occasional briefcase against my thigh on public transportation, I didn’t touch anyone. Ever. I began a healthy program of curling up with any friend who’d let me. At six weeks, I decided to make out with men without bedding them since that was practicing intimacy. I went on dates. I didn’t fuck. It was great fun.
With all the busyness of cruising put aside, I suddenly had time to hear myself think. The usual fears appeared. I was a failed man; my body was an ironic guffaw. Four months in, I asked myself again why I was so hungry for the muscles of other men. What was it about their bodies that set me apart from them?
The answer I came up with was currency and its lack. I hadn’t given my stick arms and legs any value. Despite thinking that men as thin as me (there were a few) were sexy, I didn’t think other men thought so. There was a double standard that I used unfairly against myself—skinny boys were hot in their skinny jeans, but I wasn’t.
In the fifth month, I met a guy I dated for a few uneventful months. I used my re-negotiate clause to begin shagging him. After five months of successful abstinence, the irony that I had given up sex to realize that I felt undesirable, despite having had a (sexually satisfied) cast of thousands, was not lost on me.
That realization conveniently evaporated when my anxious mind wanted to dim again. When I became that guy who made a rendezvous on a back road between my city and his, when his car pulled up with its headlights glaring, and I did as he’d asked—blindfolded myself and left my car door ajar—then grew rock hard riding the fear as I anticipated the sound of his approaching feet on gravel, and when he finished with me and walked away so that I never saw his face, it got pretty clear I was making even more dangerous choices than I had been when I was drinking.
One late night, I drove across town to meet up with a twenty-something straight guy at a garage where he worked. The building was classic small-business auto repair. The exterior was run down, with an office for the shop on the far left and a half dozen beater cars parked in the lot.
I was told to knock on the door to the workshop, next to the two large garage doors. From the exterior, it was impossible to know if anyone was inside. There were no windows on the front of the building to show any light. When I knocked, the door opened on a young ox in a ball cap. He was barrel-chested, about five-foot-eleven, with arms thicker than my thighs. He must have weighed well over 200 pounds. He could have bench-pressed me with one arm.
He didn’t say anything right away, so I said, “Hey,” and gave a nod.
All he did was step back to make way for me.
The door didn’t open flush with the floor; it had a foot-high lip that I had to step over to get in. When I passed through, he closed the door, and I noticed that he locked it with a key that he put into his pocket. That was my second clue.
The garage interior was filthy, of course, with a mess of tools and car parts. A Corolla with its hood up was parked on the right side of the room. The back wall was lined with hubcaps; the floor had pieces of the bodies of what looked like three different vehicles. On the left of the garage was an exposed second level, full of junk, and underneath that were counters stocked with more tools and car parts, the walls lined with stuff. The only window was along the left wall, and it was barred.
I asked how he was doing and he nodded, giving the smallest of grunts, which I thought might have been, “Good.”
He regarded me for a second, then looked to the floor, staring straight ahead. I waited for him to say something, but he wasn’t snapping out of it.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Nervous,” he answered. When we’d been chatting online, he’d said he was straight and this was a new thing, so it was no surprise he was uncomfortable.
“Do you want to change your mind?”
He shook his head no without taking his eyes from the spot on the floor he was staring at. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Just relaxing.”
We stood like this for some time, a couple minutes, maybe, while I watched him struggling with himself. He was a handsome enough guy with a round face, blue eyes. His muscles seemed unreal, packed into his shirt, like thick pillows wrapped in a sheet.
Five minutes must have passed. He barely moved.
“I can go if you’re not comfortable,” I said.
He shook his head no and lifted a few fingers up, gesturing “stay.”
“It’s the coke, I did some coke, it … messes my speech.”
He spoke like he had three large marbles in his mouth. He was having trouble pronouncing his words. There were pauses in his phrasing, like his tongue went wild for a second and he had to rein it in.
“Just nervous.” He looked at me a second. “Never done this before.”
“Ever?” I asked.
“Just one guy but we … didn’t do much. Jerked him off.”
“We don’t need to do anything,” I said gently. “We can just talk.”
He sort of nodded again, slowly.
There was another long pause during which I looked around the room, trying to be casual. “We can just make out, if you want,” I suggested.
When I glanced back at him, his lips were moving. He was talking to himself.
I waited another minute for whatever debate to subside, but it didn’t.
The room began to feel wired with electricity, like everything was buzzing. The smell of rubber tires grew more intense. The fluorescent lights were brighter, the oil on the floor more black.
“We can just talk,” I said. “We don’t have to do anything.”
His head didn’t move but his eyes snapped to me. “I want to. I’m ju-just relaxing. Wired.” He glanced back to the floor for a second, then sprang forward, walking to the nook with shelves and tools. Rummaging in the pockets of a jean jacket hung on a nail, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, removed one, and lit it. He smoked, staring at the floor, mumbling to himself.
I felt invisible, like he was ignoring the fact that I was there. And at the same time, too visible, like I shouldn’t be witnessing this guy’s crisis. I shouldn’t be within it. The door was locked. He had the key. Nobody knew where I was, and it was midnight. When you’re in a situation that is potentially dangerous, you want to convince yourself that it isn’t. You think, Maybe I’m imagining things. Maybe I’m assuming the worst. I can’t know what’s going on in that guy’s head. He’s just weirded out. He’s probably not crazy. It’s the coke making him talk to himself. That could be normal. You don’t know what coke can do, except that in movies it makes people violent. Maybe the movies lie. Maybe this guy who is so muscular he doesn’t have a neck isn’t violent.
I tried to talk to him about what he might like to do, thinking that if I got him out of his head, he’d be fine. Often the fear of a thing is far greater than the doing of it. But his answers to my questions were brief or he just didn’t answer. He barely looked at me, preferring to stare at a spot on the floor ten feet ahead of him.
He took a drag on his cigarette and asked me, still looking at the floor, “What’s your dick like?”
When I answered, he nodded. He continued mumbling, this time more intensely. His lips were speeding.
A sort of visceral, animal fear crept up my limbs. I’ve only experienced that Spidey-sense one time before, in Hawai’i when local friends convinced me to walk on a silver-coloured lava field to see a glowing hole—all of which thoroughly freaked me out—before we moved around to the other side of the opening and realized we’d been standing on a wide foot-thick shelf over a creek of yellow flow. Fear like that is instinctual.
A cold sweat crept behind my ears. If he was going to freak out, it seemed wise to be prepared. My phone was in the car. There was no back door. I looked around to see if there was anything particularly good to use as a weapon—a saw, a rubber hammer, long bolts, a tire iron on the wall about eight feet away. What did he have near him? Dozens of metal objects he could pick up and use. Often I’d just quickly fuck my way out of a situation I didn’t like—the sooner a guy cums, the sooner I get to go home—but each time I envisioned approaching this guy, I imagined him picking up a tool and bashing my brains. The compulsive mind wanted to just have sex and get it over with, while the rational mind couldn’t see any way to do it without getting maimed. At best.
I looked to the door of the garage, as if I could confirm that it was as locked as it seemed. Getting the key from his front pocket would be impossible, so where in the garage could I go if he came at me? Was there some way to scramble to the second floor and barricade that door? How might I push him off the ledge if he tried to climb after me? What would be the best tool? If I pushed myself under the car, would he be able to pull me out? Would I fit? If I locked myself in the chassis, would he have keys? Would the doors lock? Could I lock them all before he got one open? And then what would I do? Wait him out?
Because I’d already mentioned I could just go home and he’d replied that he wanted me to wait him out, I didn’t want to say I was leaving in case that pissed him off. Somehow I had to get him to unlock the door.
“I might like some pot,” I said, “to calm me down too. Do you smoke weed?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’ve got some in the car. In the glove box. We could smoke that.”
“C-can’t smoke in here,” he said.
“I can smoke in my car. We can, if you want some. Nobody will see us.”
“Don’t want any,” he said.
“Okay, but I’d like some. I’m just gonna go get it. I wanna relax too.”
“The door’s locked,” he said, turning his head to look at it.
“Sure. I’ll be right back. Just need a little toke.”
He nodded again, then walked to the door.
I watched him pull out his key, insert the teeth, turn the latch, then swing the door open. Streetlight fell onto the oil-stained asphalt in the garage. Calmly and decidedly I walked past him, stepping over the lip.
Unlocking the door to my car, I opened it and crawled in, reached across the driver’s seat, as though into the glove box, then came back out. He was standing outside, next to the entrance, ten feet away.
“You know,” I said, “I’m bagged, Buddy. I should go. It’s probably better we try this another time, when you’re less nervous.”
“Okay,” he said. His face, which had been pretty expressionless up to this point, seemed to fall. He suddenly looked innocent, a kid who didn’t get ice cream as promised.
“I’ll see you around,” I said, trying to sound light and jovial.
Not until I was on the highway did I think I was free of him. I looked in my rear-view mirror to see if he was getting into a vehicle, but the door was closed again on the garage, and there was no sign of him. Only when I arrived at my condo did I notice my hands were aching from my grip on the steering wheel.
The facts added up far too neatly to ignore: I had a sexual addiction. It was really fucking shitty because I was already an alcoholic. I could handle that. But now I had to admit to being a sex addict too? Totally unfair.
From 2010 onward, thanks to health benefits coverage from the university where I worked, I began to see a psychologist in Vancouver. Gary was a kind of bald uncle, with big ears, handsome socks, and great taste in décor. A sophisticate with an amazing garden, which he used, he said, to channel his own OCD tendencies. The office was neatly arranged, with a grey couch, two unassuming chairs, and a glass-top desk.
The first thing he confirmed for me was that, yes, life is unfair. From that basic premise, we moved forward. He worked with me to not lose my critical self in moments of cruising. Since there were times when my rational self wasn’t totally lost, sometimes it shed enough light on a situation to keep me out of danger. Gary tried to teach me to keep my conscious/caring/critical self lit at all times.
He gave me four main tools. The first was to create a mental shell that oversees my life. This greater self, the Observer, would have awareness beyond the immediate moment. The Observer has continuity. The Observer sounded to me like a cheap superhero. I’d no faith in what he was talking about. Please tell me this guy isn’t a flake, I thought. He explained it twice more and the words made a tidy string of nonsense. He described how I could create a shell that could see what was happening without getting emotionally attached to the moment. I could gain a greater perspective by maintaining a sense of removal from a situation. I could avoid a knee-jerk cause-and-effect reaction. This Observer, he told me, exists outside the immediacy of the now, meaning it knows the past, it can remember other moments; it is witness to this time and has access to the memory of other times. It holds self-reflection and memory, which are tools for placing the immediate feeling into context and history.
I looked at him in his crisp plaid shirt and tidy blue jeans. These weren’t the clothes of a flake, unless he was cleverly disguised. The office seemed legitimate. His hourly price was real. He seemed confident, his blue eyes regarding me, steady and calm.
“So when you say ‘detached,’ ” I asked, “you don’t mean dissociated from the moment?”
“No, no. The Observer sees the greater perspective, that this moment isn’t the one you’ve always felt.” He raised a hand from the arm of the chair, gesturing to the air around us. “So you don’t feel like the current feeling is the only one you’ve ever had or will ever feel. You can remember other times that were better, you can imagine better times to come. You don’t get stuck in that spiral of hopelessness.”
I hadn’t mentioned my hopelessness. I looked to the windowsill with its cluster of succulents growing toward the glass. The windows of the office tower next door were reflecting light from the sun hovering over English Bay.
“And how do we do that?” I asked.
“We practice mindfulness,” he answered.
Definitely a flake, I thought. But please let him be a flake with tricks that work.
To get to mindfulness, Gary gave me a device. “I use the bus driver,” he said. “I imagine I’m a bus driver, and emotions are the passengers on my bus. Everybody gets to ride the public bus. You let each emotion on. You don’t try to make them go away, you just acknowledge them as they enter. You say, ‘Hello, Sadness, my old friend. Hello, Loneliness. Welcome.’” Gary nodded to the imaginary emotions, monk-like, beaming.
“I don’t think I can be happy about inviting them onto my bus, Gary.”
He held up his palms. “They’re all equal. All your emotions are equal. You can’t let some people on the bus and not others. If you want Happiness on your bus, you have to allow his old friend Abandonment too. Everyone gets to ride the bus.”
When I imagined this scenario, I was always a passenger too. Even now, remembering his description of the bus, I’m never the driver. The best I can do is to imagine some dumb guy in the driver’s seat smiling as a parade of reckless teenagers step on. I just want to get off and walk. My sense has always been that abandonment, sadness, loneliness, hopelessness, and any of the other lovely fuck-ups I’ve been entertaining over the years are more like the drivers than the passengers.
“I feel like I’m riding those feelings,” I said. “They’re driving me, Gary.”
He nodded. “Okay, but you can choose which ones you pursue. Which you invest in.”
“I can choose which feelings I climb on the back of.”
“Exactly.”
“Like emotional ponies,” I said.
That phrase descended from out of the blue. With it materialized an open grassy clearing in the woods of my imagination. A slew of small ponies gathered together, grazing. One spotted brown and white pony—Depression—trotted over to me, lowered its head, and presented itself. I imagined what it would be like to climb on its back and travel along a dark, wicked path through the woods. The image was Disney-fied, but acute. Clearly not a wise choice. And then a sandy pony with a blonde mane offered up his back—Happiness—and I rode him slowly through an open field in the sunshine. He stopped to graze again. The sun was warm on my face. The air was sweet with pollen. Emotional ponies were metaphor magic.
If the metaphor was apt, and Gary claimed it was, I could choose which emotional equines I mounted, which to follow. So with my father’s home life deteriorating, for example, and his drinking sometimes even more wildly out of control, I would usually have climbed on the back of Guilt for not doing more, or Depression for how awful it was that my father was so hopelessly committed to self-destruction (which, even at the time, I could admit was ironic). Concurrent with my own self-destructive behaviour, I excelled at work, with its amazing safety-making salary, I’d published a new novel, and my friends and family were being loving and supportive through my own crises of compulsion and risk. I had plenty to concentrate on that brought me comfort. It just never occurred to me that I could invest in all that goodness without having to wallow in the darkness or feel guilty for not wallowing in the darkness.
Gary was full of what I would normally have thought of as woo-woo advice. But having spent much time with the Radical Faeries, I knew there was some decent shit in woo-woo too. “We’re creating new frames for you,” he said. “Reframing your experiences so you regard them differently, so they have different effects, or fewer negative effects.”
The goal of this particular bus-driver/emotional-pony exercise, he explained again, was to practice mindfulness, a concept that was also unintelligible to me. It was my mind that was fucking up—how was being more within it going to help? It took two visits for me to connect the dots. Being mindful was another way of asking me to practice embodiment, of being more aware of my physical self. I had to move my consciousness into my body. That simple change in language was key—for a kid who grew up hating his body, being asked to pay more attention to the moment-by-moment workings of it, and most especially to not lose contact with what was happening physiologically in times of stress, was a substantial project. My body had been like the city of Sodom—I’d been afraid to look at it, for fear my monstrous lack of esteem would destroy me. The power of self-loathing can sound far more hyperbolic than it feels.
I’ve now had sex with a couple thousand men. The majority were blowjobs in Vancouver, either at Stanley Park or the Fruit Loop by First Beach. In the last decade, however, most of these encounters took place at my home.
There are advantages to having had thousands of sexual partners. It’s a good workout for deep-throating, the fine qualities of which can be improved and maintained only with practice. I became a gourmet of my own desire, exploring the intricacies of what I did and didn’t like. I learned how to kiss well by practicing broadly. I became an expert at reading a kiss to know how someone would be if we dropped our pants. I learned a lot about how men are in the privacy of the night, even if those were publicly private moments. I gave a large number of men pleasure through orgasms, tenderness, touch. I held their secrets, most left unspoken.
I got a sober measure of my dick, which is nowhere near the largest around, but far from the smallest. It’s neither the thickest nor thinnest, hardest nor softest. It’s not the hairiest. It takes longer for it to cum than most, but that means it stays harder longer than average. Given that my parents didn’t explain to me what a foreskin was (though I remember my mother explaining how to clean it thoroughly), it was also a great relief to see and hold a small percentage of uncut men. That’s still a decent number of foreskins, given that we’re working in four digits. My self-evaluated rating of normality increased with every night of cruising.
Numbers help you blend in using averages. Numbers, after a time, are just that. When you’ve seen as many dicks as I have, you develop a few personal tastes, but the quantity becomes far less important than the quality. Personality begins to shine through.
Despite all the work/sex it took to get to a greater truce with my body—by the age of forty-one, I had fifteen pounds more on my frame, thanks to the gym; at 150 pounds, I weighed in the “normal” zone for my height; I had shape in my chest, beyond the speed bumps of my ribs; there were bananas in my triceps and apples in my biceps; my foreskin was an asset, not a freak show; my back acne was reduced to an odd blemish or two, and nobody freaked out when they saw it; some people found my body hair desirable—I’d long tried to distract myself from the emotional life contained in all that flesh. I’d been terrified of the world from the inside out. I was terrified of my black cloud. My psyche was a hummingbird, too speedy for predators, trying to outrace panic.
Embodiment, or mindfulness, meant slowing down in many ways. Gary had me practice looking around the room to notice there wasn’t a threat. There was nothing here that needed escaping.
The last strategy he proposed was to work with my OCD tendencies, rather than try to get rid of them or control them. Gary suggested that I could channel my compulsions; I couldn’t make the OCD go away, but I could pick which things I got obsessed over. I could have healthier obsessions. I could watch a TV series instead of cruising on the Internet, replace Grindr with sewing (I love making things with my hands), and anonymous cock for a boyfriend’s cock.
I saw Gary for about a year, and when I thought I’d learned enough for the time being—which meant I felt like I was repeating myself without gaining much ground—I decided to take a break and put some of his advice into greater practice. Talking through my troubles every two weeks gave me an outlet to feel like I was working at it, but in trying to be honest with myself, I realized I was sometimes using therapy to make myself think I was working at it. I was still cruising, still disappearing; I just had someone to complain to on a bi-monthly basis.
Stopping for a time would give me a push to enact what I’d learned about disappearing, skills soon put to a great test.