It's been a week full of gay sex. Every night on television this week there have been gay men talking about their sex lives.
Last night there was a monogamous gay couple (8 years together) talking about how the trust that they've established between them has, paradoxically and unusually, coincided with a consistently hot sex life. The night before, there was a programme showing the most realistic depiction of the London gay scene I'd seen yet; including interviews with a variety of men involved. One man spoke of how much he enjoyed sex, having it three to four times a week; how it got boring with one person after a few weeks, so it would be time to move on.
He was a good looking man; he'd managed to erase any namby-pamby effeminacy from his demeanour, by which I mean that he showed no feelings whatsoever. Stony-faced cool, cropped hair, cold eyes. He walked around a seedy club with the lights on, revealed in all its tacky horror, which I eventually recognised as my own local. He was talking about what went on there, showing the grotty little backrooms with flaking mouldy paint, explaining how it can get wet in there on rubber nights, because people get into watersports. In one scene he sat in a toilet cubicle and recounted how someone gave him a blow job there.
As he spoke, naming that which happens every ten minutes in that cubicle on a busy night, I had a sense that he was embarrassed. Or maybe it was me. Later on in the programme, his mate talked about how, with that lifestyle, sometimes it got a bit much, when he was feeling down and just wanted to stay in and watch the telly and have some companionship; but he announced brightly that he'd just got a puppy, so that should fill that need. And his face lit up with warmth and irony.
The trouble with me at the moment is that I'm in my "I'd rather have a cup of tea" mode regarding sex. I've overdosed with it all, and I've stopped. Again. My relationship to the fast-food sex available on the phone or online or in a pub/club/park/sauna/street near you, is not one of condescension. Neither have I converted and found the One True Way to enlightenment. Sex is never really off my mind.
But having it with people I don't know is bad for me, and that has begun to really sink in and make a difference. I know this sounds banal to some, but it also sounds radical to others. It's been bad for me for quite a while and I was oblivious to it.
It's like ecstasy; while giving you the illusion that you are having a fabulous time, your brain reacts chemically in the same way as if it has been through an incredibly stressful trauma, and you have to look after yourself in the same way afterwards to recover properly. They discovered this only in observation in hospitals with those who'd overdosed; naturally they can't do clinical trials on E. (Imagine the queues outside the hospital). But knowing that doesn't stop me taking it, once in a while, when the company is good and the music is fun. It's as if recklessness is essential to incorporate into my life somehow; I'd collapse in a heap with inertia unless I was pushing some limit, testing some boundary, trying to feel alive by not being dead to adventure.
Having gone through the fast lane and come out the other side of sex is weird. I don't know what to say any more to those who are still completely sex-obsessed, and who spend all their time talking about it.
It's weariness, I think. The last time I had the possibility of having sex, when someone with a pretty young face, who was quite off his face, was being introduced to me, I realised that, like so many times before, we'd never know each other, really. It's the loneliest thing in the world to be with someone who doesn't even know enough about you to like you or not. I'm tired of isolating myself that way.
One of the men talking on one of the documentaries this week talked about how meeting men for half an hour's sex in a toilet was better than being on your own; and he didn't see anything wrong with it. I'm now seeing that it's much much worse, for me, to attempt to fill the loneliness with a quick fix of sex with a stranger. The loneliness is not for physical contact, but for some sort of soul contact, some meeting of hearts and minds. Sex with strangers exacerbates that soul-longing, and does not alleviate it.
Christ, this is all so fucking Catholic. Beam me up, now. It's a mindfuck. Somewhere along the line so many of us queers have lapped up self-loathing like it was mother's milk. We've got so used to it that we'd do anything degrading to stop feeling lonely; anything to avoid our own company. And we don't see that it's degrading; we've become blind to it. We think we're ruled by our dicks, but we're not. It's something else. It's as if we cannot imagine liking ourselves, on our own; it's as if we lack something. Someone, Mr Right, Mr Knight in Shining Armour, is going to come and rescue us from our plight.
We don't need him, guys. Really. n