It’s been quite a few months now, since I had sex. I won’t share the exact date of my last liaison because that would be a little bit more information than my friends who read this would care to know.
I have found I can write about sex in the past, and how I’ve had lots of it, and that doesn’t get remarked on. But if I mention a particular encounter in these pages, then I get asked all sorts of probing questions about it, where did I meet him, what was it like, did you swap telephone numbers, was he nice, etc. etc. Answering them is like trying to explain why a joke is funny - sex, like humour, is all a matter of timing. So forgive me if I’m not forthcoming. It wasn’t as if it was particularly enjoyable. He wasn’t, as they say, a good shag.
I used to protest loudly when an ex of mine used to refer to the men he had sex with as shags. I felt it was dehumanising, appalling, how he could objectify sentient beings so, that they could be just another notch on his bedpost, as disposable as sticky tissues. That is, if a bed was ever involved, which, knowing him, was highly unlikely. Slings and backrooms were more his kind of scene. I didn’t mind that so much as the guilty little-boy act he used to put on afterwards with me, as if I were a prissy scolding parent.
Perhaps I was, in a way. That was during the time when I believed myself to be a sex addict, and fell into a 12-step way of thinking about sex. Steeped in shame, in a very Catholic way, I wanted all the bad men to go away. And all the bad sex, which meant all the sex that was outside marriage, or at least a loving faithful relationship. I distrusted every instinct I had that was about seeking sexual pleasure, tried valiantly not to concede one inch to the effects of testosterone in my body, and I grew to hate anything that was associated with a hedonistic lifestyle on the gay scene, that triggered an eruption of my volcanic id. Everything around me in my gay “community” seemed to condone a lifestyle of perpetual adolescent indulgence. But when I “slipped”, as I invariably did, as all sinners do, (it’s part and parcel of the quasi-Christian shame cycle that underpins the 12-step theology) I would find myself getting up to all sorts at the end of a night in an iniquitous den, and feel crap the next day. Or, I would tell myself I felt crap - often I’d have a spring in my step and I’d see my face fresh and relaxed in the mirror next day, a prim tautness gone. But I’d immediately torment myself with flashes of what I got up to the previous night, tell myself that I would be forever single at that rate, and if I only “saved” myself, till I found myself a decent man, then I would find true happiness. I was stuck in the body of a randy man in central London during its own, highly sexualised fin de siècle, living the emotional life of a 1950’s woman dreaming of becoming a housewife. (Oh, that’s my mother’s generation. Moving swiftly along...)
So where does it all go, all that sexual energy that used to rule me so absolutely? Since removing myself from the sweetshop that is London I have, of course, got plenty of cravings for sugar since, but they’ve gradually diminished. In visits to various metropolises recently I’ve not even bothered to go a-hunting - it didn’t even occur to me the last time I was in Dublin. Except, a few weeks ago, when what seemed like an army patrol of muscled blond Polish guys jogged down Dame Street in shorts, then it all came flooding back. But so unreachable were they, I might as well have watched them on TV or in a porn flick, which, as I’ve said before, doesn’t really do it for me. They were, simply, a pleasure to watch.
And that’s what it’s all about, pleasure. Though plenty of people are willing to tut-tut after a dalliance, few Irish people will admit, in real time, to the extraordinary pleasures of sex. The sport of it. The temptations, the negotiations, the palpitations, the expectations, the frustrations, the invitations, the anticipations, the incantations, the exhortations, the exertions, the exaltations. How one can be willing to forget everything in pursuit of it - how for a few glorious seconds and minutes everything feels gloriously perfect, desire and power and achievement and joy and ecstasy, all rolled into the same experience. Magic.
I’ve simply got out of the habit of it - which is a far more neutral and kinder way of saying I’m no longer addicted. Addiction has such a limiting, deadening, pathologising ring to it. I’m not an ex-sex-addict. I’m busy with other things, exciting things, challenging things, daunting things, engrossing things. Existential things. And I’ve allowed my hair to grow, out of years of skinhead denial, and I’m now a middle-aged, grey-haired man, emerging gradually out of a rather interesting mid-life crisis. I don’t feel like a plaything anymore.
But I know one thing for sure. There will come a time when I’m back in the sexual swing of things again, when my libido has me back on my knees, in contemplation. And, I suspect, the timing of it will not be in my control.