Men on the Make: True Gay Sex Confessions (7 page)

Nonetheless, the girlfriend and I made a tour of the bars, so I could see it for myself. Bourbon was indeed choked with celebrants, but no local sets foot on that gaudy main artery even during the dead seasons. Still, there were plenty of joints off that neon-splattered strip, and we walked through a few of the Quarter’s gay bars.

Here was where we socialized, anyway. Queer culture in the Quarter is so all-encompassing you don’t even need to be gay to be a part of it. Your butchest coworker might be an unapologetic weekend transvestite. The fey, soft-mannered gent you always see on a corner stool at gay-friendly Good Friends could have a wife who knows exactly where he goes three nights a week. Sexuality was fluid in the Quarter.

My live-in girlfriend had known about my dual carnal preferences going into our relationship, just like I knew about hers. Paired bisexuals may be the salvation of the human race, but that’s a debate for another time.

It was at Good Friends, in fact, that I saw my first outright public sexual act.

The bar was crowded but not violently mobbed, as were the dance clubs and phony jazz bars on Bourbon Street. We were up on the second level, and not six paces from where we stood a young male stood with the waistband of his pants stretched between his good strong thighs while another male
bent over and took his erect cock into his mouth.

My heart rate doubled. The beer suddenly tasted electric on my tongue. My girlfriend saw my gaze, glanced, shrugged, and said something dismissive, along the lines of “Yeah, there’s a lot of that around tonight.”

It was the casualness of the act that seized my interest. I’d had plenty of man-on-man sex in my time, but I’d never had my cock out in public or gone down on some dude in full view of a bar crowd. Patrons milled past. Some looked; some didn’t. And a few minutes later the pair slipped away into the night.

Later still, we were walking back toward our apartment on Dauphine. I halted, and the girlfriend took one or two more steps. When she looked back, I had a wide-eyed helpless look on my face. I remember the tightness of my skin on my cheekbones, the feel of the half-grin, half-rictus I wore. My heart still beat fast in my narrow chest.

“I’ve got to go back,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. Nonmonogamous bisexuals don’t get to object to such things.

I probably kissed her and thanked her for being so cool, but I honestly can’t recall any of that. I turned and fled back toward the scene of rioting sexuality.

This was the mid-’90s. I was twenty-seven, my hair full and ungrayed, body adolescently trim and wiry. It was the last real flush of youth for me, or so it felt. My writing was at an ebb at this stage in my life. I was selling next to nothing, just dribbles of science fiction and fantasy picked up by the occasional small press magazine. I’d already had some of my porn published, in stroke digests like
Options
, but my heyday as a ten-stories-a-month smut writer lay in my future.

None of that mattered then, on that livewire night. But as my younger self made his way past Good Friends in favor of
an even wilder gay bar called Lafitte in Exile, it is the present middle-aged me who must question the reality, the reliability of all this. I know these things happened. I know the sex I will soon be embroiled in truly occurred. Minutes later I waited at the foot of a stairway to go up to Lafitte’s second story, bypassing the wide open ground level, sensing the carnal chaos that was likely underway up above, amid that dimness and anonymity. House music pounded. Finally the bouncers let a small troupe of us up the narrow staircase. That happened. I remember it. But was the scent of male sweat already filling my nostrils? Did I trade sly conspiratorial winks with the others on the steps as we hurried upstairs?

If I were writing a story, those details would be present. Then again…I
am
writing a story.

I knew Lafitte’s layout, having been in here plenty of times. Tonight, however, the landscape was overrun. Male bodies jammed the place. The hardwood floor was a swamp of crumpled napkins and crushed plastic cups. The lighting was ridiculously dim, and the pulsing music further disoriented. A serving kiosk did nonstop business, cramming patrons isolating the hard-working bartenders as they fueled the revelry.

Beyond, where Lafitte’s pool table stood, shadowy movements caught my eye. It looked almost hive-like. Masculine suggestions squirming and wriggling in the near-blackness. The shutters that opened out onto the balcony lay sealed. This was no private function; but to see the orgy you had to participate in the orgy, no oglers welcome.

That was fine by me. I hadn’t come here to gawk.

But I bought a beer first to be polite, a Heineken, and I drank it. And while I did, my heart still sped, and my skin tingled, and I was halfway hard just thinking about those shadows beyond this kiosk, in the deeper part of the upstairs bar.

During a pubescence and adolescence where everything about myself bothered me—my looks, my lack of any musculature, the way I freakin’
walked
—the fact that I had always found both males and females arousing had given me about fifteen minutes of worry and shame. I liked pussy. I liked cock. That’s not a confession, and it sure as hell ain’t no apology.

I set down the emptied green bottle. And I made my way into that all-male mass.

The pool table had been covered over, and that flat surface had been appropriated by numerous men in various stages of undress. I gazed rapturously in the low light. I had fallen into a kind of churning tour of the premises. The crowd on its feet was moving in a slow, shuffling clockwork circle around the centralized table. Other males, who had gotten here ahead, populated the waist-high shelves that ringed most of the room. On a less mobbed night, you would set your drink on these shallow platforms; maybe while you shot a game of eight ball on the table’s felt.

Tonight, though, the shelves were stocked with a variety of manly merchandise, every centimeter of space taken up, men sitting thigh-to-thigh. As we performed our slow circling, it seemed like some eroticized cotillion. Partners picked each other out. Mouths fell suddenly together. T-shirts climbed stomachs and chests, and lips fastened to hardened male nipples. Cocks were freed from tight jeans, and knowing hands cupped swaying testicles. Distended mouths rode up and down straining shafts. Swollen cockheads gleamed with spit, even in the near-blackout conditions.

That half-assed blow job I’d witnessed at Good Friends seemed quaint, like an air-kiss between girlfriends.

I was pressed on every side by male shapes. I wore boots, jeans, a long-sleeved mesh shirt and a skimpy black jean jacket.
The air was torrid (
there’s
that good word) with body heat. I felt sweat at my hairline. My eyes danced in their sockets as I beheld the gorgeous wonders of unbridled gay sex. This was the stuff of fantasy, jerk-off imaginings I might have conjured in high school to see me through lonely times.

The gradual circulation of men around the orgiastic pool table threatened to carry me right back out to the kiosk. I needed to anchor myself. I needed a partner. So I looked deliberately for one, astonished by the assortment available. By now I felt feverish, my cock aching in my jeans, my body hungry on every level. This was a kind of excitement I’d never known before. I’d had a threeway, but this was in some other class of sexual possibility. This was a free-for-all, nameless and shameless. I felt like my whole life had been setting me up for this experience, that this was some grand payoff.

I looked past the jostling shoulders and heads. I craned my neck. And my gaze locked, and I held it there until the eyes returned my stare. I grinned. There was no fear of rejection, none of that squirmy despair that might have been present at, say, a school dance. This guy might not want me, but that seemed unlikely. The air was charged, the atmosphere crackling. I was as likely a carnal suspect as anybody else in this overcrowded hypersexualized space.

He smiled back. I eased toward him.

The crowd was cooperative, unlike other crowds out on the streets and in other bars tonight. Here there was a palpable sense of camaraderie. Everyone was invested in everybody else’s happiness. I don’t give a fuck how cornpone that sounds. That was how it felt. There is a great harmony at the heart of every useful orgy.

He was the physical type I like best—thin, a bit scruffy, maybe even a hint of punk about him. About my age. His hair
was a woodsy brown, and his jaw was stubbly. He occupied a place on that long shelf-like space along the wall. I didn’t notice the men squeezed in on either side of him.

I stood directly before him, my thighs pressing against his knees, our heads inches apart. There would be no small talk. For one thing, no one was going to hear anything over the relentless
thump-thump-thump
of the house disco. But words wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I hadn’t approached this attractive male to make his acquaintance. I was shoved up onto him with a hard-on in my jeans and lust swimming in my bloodstream.

There was nothing to do but kiss.

So we kissed.

It was lovely. Some imaginative women understand the beauty of the man-on-man kiss, the rasp of the stubble and the mutually sanctioned masculine aggression; just as some guys grasp the sublime compatibility of one woman passionately kissing another, beyond that act’s porn-movie gloss. To kiss an individual of your own sex is to take what you’re doing seriously. It requires a commitment that goes beyond diddling another guy’s cock. They say prostitutes won’t kiss a client. Neither will dilettante males who won’t admit to their true longings. If you don’t
kiss
the other man, y’know, like some faggot would, then you’re not queer. So goes the primitive thinking.

I kissed this man, deeply, lavishly. Our lips parted, and our tongues met. My pulse throbbed in my throat, in my belly, at my groin. When we finally broke the kiss, my head lolled on my neck and I offered up another grin. To tell him I’d liked it. To say I wanted to do more with him.

All around similar wordless arrangements were entered into. There was no coercion, no distasteful compromising. The sense of cooperativeness only deepened as I now joined in the happy fray. I laid my hands on the brown-haired man, feeling his lean
but nicely toned body. He reached under my jean jacket and felt ribs and drum-tight flesh covered by festive black mesh. I pulled on his shirt, and soon it was raked up to his pectorals. I touched his nipples; he tweaked mine. We paused often to kiss, and it never got tiring.

I put a hand between his legs. His bulge was enticing. I felt his heat on my fingertips as I traced his ridge. He tugged on the fly of my black jeans. I’d already undone his and now hurried to catch the brass tab of his zipper.

With abbreviated bump-and-grind movements we assisted each other in freeing our cocks from their denim confinement. He held me, and I held him. It was another glorious moment, one that froze the whole scene for an instant. The writhing dark paused, and I counted the beatings of his heart in that firm length I gripped. I ran my thumb over the swelling of the crown, finding the oiliness of his precum. His thick underside vein lay along the crease of my palm.

I clutched him tighter. I pumped him some. The nameless man did the same to me. I pushed against him, the crowd swaying against my back. I took the opportunity to take hold of both our cocks in a single heroic grip. I squeezed us together, length upon length. My jeans were halfway down my thighs. I pumped my doubled handful, delighting in the sensation. Suddenly, a fingertip was probing my ass. Some faceless stranger in the slowly rotating crowd had seen my exposed backside and now delved me, like it was a perfectly natural thing to do under the circumstances. Which it was. I did nothing to stop the intrusion, letting that digit snake its way up to a knuckle and wriggle about my hole. Then the finger disengaged. I never saw the disembodied owner.

Now, were this fiction, the scruffy hottie with the wood-brown hair would have remained the absolute focus of the view-point
character, and the two would get off in some mutually satisfying and vaguely plausible manner, a sweet shared come accompanied by some emotional epiphany.

But there was another specimen sitting immediately on the man’s right, and he was muscled and half-naked, and I reached for his cock with my other hand. Again, this was perfectly natural under the circumstances. In fact, there seemed to be some balletic coordination underpinning all this, a lovely queer choreography to it. Every move felt just right. When my scruffy lover started kissing the man whose cock I now held, I thought,
beautiful
without a whisper of jealousy. Now we were three. I shared the handling of our new friend’s fiercely hard shaft.

We kissed, each in turn. We fondled. Excitement rose.

But this was truly a free-for-all, and another player was introduced into the proceedings. On my left, slightly behind me, a male shape squeezed against me. In the thumping dimness I saw a man older than me, maybe by a decade, maybe by two. Maybe he was the age I am now. I didn’t count that against him, didn’t lay any cruel youthful club-boy shit on him. He was good-looking. And when he took my cock in his hand, it felt good.

When he smiled hopefully and bent over and swallowed my achingly erect member to the hilt, it felt even better.

I hadn’t had a taste of cock this whole time, which is certainly how the scene would have played for a magazine story. I like sucking guys off, and I possess formidable deep-throating talents. But this was reality, and reality has ugly edges. This was a roomful of strangers, and while acquaintance was no guarantee of safety, I was more comfortable blowing a man I’d at least talked to beforehand, so that I knew something of his own habits and precautions.