Infidelity and the Gay Man

I’ve often wondered with our over-sexualized media culture — something which I acknowledge I contribute to with my catalogue of gay erotica — if we are separating love and sex, and thus we’re being encouraged to cheat.  I think this argument could hold true for society at large, but I think it’s a much stronger argument when we look at just the gay male community.

As a gay man — even as one who is not all that plugged into gay culture — I’m constantly bombarded with sexual images and ideas.  My local pride festival invites a handful of celebrities in for pride weekend, and half of those celebrities are gay porn stars.  (The other half of the celebrities are drag queens.  My local pride organization seems to think this is gay pride, not LGBT pride.)

With the gay magazines and their naked photoshoots, the prevalence of porn on the internet, the way gay culture centralizes on sex (like with this music video, or this one), and with my local pride organization idolizing porn stars as leaders in the community, I’m left with one very clear message.  I need to be bigger, harder, longer, and I have to fuck every hot piece of ass I can find.  And I need to do it every day, though twice a day is better.

All of this culminates in one word: sex.  Not love.  Sex.  We are encouraged to seek out sex, not seek out love.  And if we need to cheat to get some good sex, well, it’s apparently worth it.  Because sex is awesome.  To believe otherwise is to not be a part of the gay male culture.

With the prevalence of Grindr and the ease with which men hook up, it’s become ingrained in us that a quick, anonymous fuck is fine — even if it’s not with our boyfriend.  After all, it’s just sex.  It’s not like we’re in love with the guy we’re hooking up with.  (And I don’t mean to diss hook ups and anonymous sex — they certainly have their place and I’m no stranger to them.)

Disengaging love from sex is something that certainly happens naturally in some relationships, and can be a healthy way for other relationships to survive and thrive — but gay culture paints this very clear picture that we all should have this separation between love and sex, so that we can fuck with abandon and come home to our love at night.

But the truth is that if there isn’t a pre-arranged agreement that infidelity is acceptable for both partners, someone will end up getting hurt.  And even in situations where there is an agreement, one partner may find that over time they grow uncomfortable or upset with their partner’s sexual adventures.  Some people can handle open relationships and other people can’t.  Gay men shouldn’t be told that open relationships are the gold standard; instead, open relationships should be presented as an option.  Every couple works differently and every type of couple should be portrayed in gay media — from swingers and polyamorous relationships to committed and faithful couples.

So where does this leave me as a writer of gay erotica?

I often write about hook ups — whether they’re anonymous or they know a little bit about each other.  However, I always acknowledge that the heart has its place.  Hook ups can spawn feelings of attachment, feelings of shame, or sometimes no emotional reaction at all.  While I don’t always depict infidelity, I’m careful to keep it in line with the character’s view of infidelity, and to not put too much of my own opinion in there.  In my latest release, Go-Go Boys of Club 21, Ryan cheats on his partner Liam — Ryan absolutely feels no regret, for him, infidelity is part of how he operates in a relationship.  For Liam, though, it’s devastating since he believed that Ryan was faithful to him.  And in my short story, Bathhouse Nights, Daniel hooks up with Justin, a supposedly straight jock with a girlfriend.  Justin doesn’t care that he’s being unfaithful, but Daniel is put in a (brief) moral dilemma knowing that the man of his dreams wants to fuck, and in doing so, he’d be helping that man cheat on his girlfriend.




Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Go-Go Boys of Club 21: The Complete Series.  He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats.  To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Monogamy Blues

By Lisabet Sarai

We both know what’s going to happen. It’s understood, the inevitable consequence of the delicious tension crackling between us. Desire hangs around us like a perfumed fog. Reveling in the knowledge that you want me, I broadcast back the silent message that I feel the same.

Perhaps we kiss. I melt into your body, drunk on cheerful lust and the sense of rightness. We fit—but of course we do, this sort of natural magnetism doesn’t lie, but points us in the direction of blissful satisfaction. We’re not in any hurry. Languid yet buzzing with need, we explore one another.

Sometimes you’re a stranger. Sometimes you’re someone from my waking life, a startling revelation from my unconscious. Either way, I cherish these dreams for the sweet arousal they kindle, the traces of secret excitement that remain after the lascivious details have faded.

These nighttime visions always end the same way, though. Before we consummate our mutual desire, I remember. I’m married. I can’t go through with this, much as I want to. It would cause too much hurt to the man I love. This precious attraction is difficult to relinquish, but I have a responsibility to remain faithful.

The thrill dissipates. Reality bites, even if I’m still asleep. My dream reshapes itself. Sometimes I cry, or you do. Most of the time, the chimera of our perfect fucking simply vanishes, replaced by new images and emotions.

I’ve never told my husband about these dreams. What’s the point? In real life, I’m almost never tempted by anyone else—especially not now, post sixty years old. My wild times are behind me. My commitment is crystal clear.

I don’t regret anything. Still, those dreams evoke a bittersweet longing, a nostalgia for the woman I used to be.

I don’t think I’m fundamentally monogamous. I am perfectly capable of loving—in the erotic sense—multiple people concurrently. In fact when I met my husband more than three decades ago, I tried to get rid of him because I already had three serious lovers, and felt my life was sufficiently complicated without adding another, long distance relationship to the mix.

He was stubborn, and charming, however, not to mention a really good fit for me along almost every dimension. I didn’t really even choose him, not explicitly. It was just obvious that we should build a life together.

He’d had lots of lovers, too, before we met. Our marriage contract specifically states that we are both free have other sexual partners as long as we are honest with one another, and continue to give our relationship top priority. That was the principle. We never really put that clause into practice, not as individuals, though we explored swinging and polyamory together. As far as I know, since we married, neither of us has had sex without the other one being present.

It wouldn’t bother me if he had a girlfriend, I don’t think. However, the older we’ve become, the more I’ve understood that he’s a lot higher on the monogamy scale than I am. If I were to take another lover (which sounds ludicrous to me now—just goes to show how much I’ve changed), I’d wound him deeply. I don’t believe that the abstract notion of fidelity means much to him, but he’s lonely when I am not around. Plus I suspect that he’d worry about losing me to someone younger (since he’s a decade older than I am).

In my dreams, though, I’m still the lusty, experimental, open woman I was in my mid-twenties. And sometimes I wish that my sense of commitment wouldn’t intrude on my fantasies so reliably.

The only place I allow myself to be unfaithful is in my stories. There, anything goes.

Will You Kiss Me?

by Annabeth Leong

“K wants to know what it’s like to kiss a girl,” G tells me. We’re standing out back of a club where we all hang out a lot. K is a girl I know slightly, a little younger than me, in the midst of a phase that seems to involve sending every rebellious signal she can copy or invent. She’s wearing a white shirt that reads “Sweaty Ball Licker,” and her hair is dyed a Kool-Aid color. She’s breathless and excited.

“Will you kiss me?” she asks.

G watches eagerly.

I sort of want to. In the past, I always would have. When I was in college the first time, before dropping out for a few years, I used to stand in the quad on Friday and Saturday nights and ask people to kiss me. While people whispered about how I was slutty, I was experiencing something else, some sort of desire to be generous with everyone, to share some sort of formless love and appreciation for all people—and to satisfy a curiosity that seemed giant and unquenchable. My attitude toward kissing back then was, “Sure, why not?” I liked doing it, and I liked finding out how different people did it. I either didn’t mind exhibitionism or I enjoyed it. I tried to kiss everyone, regardless of gender or appearance, assuming they gave permission, and only rejected those who assumed it meant they could take any liberties they wanted.

So it makes sense for me to kiss this girl K. G knows me well enough to have seen me involved in many anonymous makeout sessions over the years. Besides, she’s pretty. On top of that, I have always deeply loved initiations. It excites me to do things I haven’t done before, or to help other people do things they haven’t done before.

I surprise everyone by saying no. I just feel weird about this moment. I don’t really want G panting over us.

(G has been grossing me out recently. He’s told me casually that he’d love to bend me over a table and fuck me, and this doesn’t strike me as honest as much as it strikes me as entitled. We were at a funeral a few weeks before, and when a beautiful friend walked toward us in the parking lot, he greeted her by saying, “Look at that. Nothing but tits.” It seemed like the wrong time and place for a comment like that, and I’ve been figuring out lately that I don’t like comments like that in general.)

I also feel worried about K. I’m not sure if she actually wants to kiss me. Did G put her up to this? Does she actually want to kiss a girl, or is she just trying to be “bad”? Does she have any actual desire to kiss me? I didn’t expect to care about that, but I do.

***

I didn’t know it at the time, but that was my last chance to kiss a girl for more than a decade. I’ve thought back to that moment a lot. When I was younger, the main way I was out as not being straight was by being loud and a bit obnoxious about it, flirting aggressively with anyone in my path. Because I was so public about it, I was the person people came to when they were curious, and when guys wanted to watch, I let them stick around.

Sometimes, I felt sorry that I didn’t kiss K. It’s a moment I think of as my “conservative turn.” For many years after that, I turned away from many of my sexual impulses, partly because I thought they were morally wrong. I watched K after that encounter with a curiosity of my own. What would it have been like to kiss her? If she had actually wanted to kiss me, would she do it some other time, when G wasn’t watching? It seemed for a while like I’d forgotten how to be the person I used to be. How did I flirt with girls in the first place? Who was it who stood so boldly in public spaces and begged near-strangers for kisses?

On the other hand, I’m not sorry. I don’t like the conservative turn, but I think it was important to notice my impulse for privacy. I think it was okay in that moment to feel tired of being everyone’s experiment, to want a girl to want to kiss me for myself, not as a symbol of “badness.” I think it was wise to worry about G, both how his presence would affect me and how it might be affecting her.

We’re talking about forks in the road, and this was one of them for me. By not kissing K, I chose to close off a part of myself for years. However, roads are mapped in funny ways, and recently I find myself driving through similar hills and valleys.

I’ve got a better sense of the lay of the land now, and I know more about where I do and don’t want to go. If this happened to me today, I’d tell the curious lady I’d be happy to give her a kiss—as long as she was okay with ditching G. I still get the impulse to kiss or play with interesting strangers, and I’m okay with that as long as my sense of privacy and safety is respected. I am an exhibitionist, but I’ve learned about what things will make me feel sorry and what things won’t. I love getting naked at kink events, and I don’t mind being looked at by whoever is around. For making out, though, I need any dudes around to take several big steps back. I don’t want to feel their breath on the back of my neck while I’m kissing Curious Lady. And I do want people to want to kiss me. Even if they don’t know me all that well, I want them to like something about me besides that it will impress some nearby male person.

I’m also a little more relaxed about driving around this country. It no longer feels like every opportunity might be the last, that I have to say yes to everything or I will never get the chance to say yes again.

I haven’t done my usual thing leaving comments, but if I took time to do that now, I’d be even later posting than I already am. I will read and comment soon, though! I love reading the posts of my fellow Grippers! :)

Down the Road A Piece

by Daddy X

Our day-to-day lives are filled with forks in the road. Choices we make from minute to minute, second to second. Trick is to learn to distinguish the minor forks—rather frontage roads, turnouts or loops that take us back to the main drag—from those forks that wander far afield to change our lives in metamorphic fashion. How nice it would be to see into the future, ‘down the road a piece’ so to speak.

Ideally, experience figures into the game of predicting the effects of causes. We should get better at the game as we evaluate how we’ve lived our earlier years and use that wisdom to set a course for the future. I’m going to try and equate the microcosm of tiny adjustments to our lives with a larger concept I’ve explored in previous posts. Bear with me, again, please.

Where this country embarked on a disastrous alternate path. 1980.

Conservative America saw the inevitable coming. It recognized that we were progressing quite well as a left/center country, after socialist policies put in place by FDR and succeeding administrations effectively built a strong and growing middle class. There was the GI bill. There were powerful unions that represented over a third of our workforce and gave employees a voice. Union standards raised working conditions for everyone. A truly progressive income tax was in effect, a vast and growing middle class (for many people, at least. I don’t discount the embedded racism of the times.) There was enough discretionary income so a family could afford not only a house and car, but also be able to put their kids through school. All on one income. Sounds like a perfect system, right?

Then some real progress was made on the racial elements. Why then, did we take that fork in 1980? Why the lurch to the right?

My theory:

Conservatives, then in such a minority, decided that if they wanted to continue to exist without getting with the times, they needed to assemble a coalition of one-issue voters, no matter how whacked the cause. Voters are voters, after all. In the democratic system, a stupid or gullible vote carries as much weight as an informed one. So they recruited the racists, the gun nuts, the anti-abortion fear mongers. They, in turn brought aboard the religious fanatic vote. Climate deniers, evolution deniers, flat-earthers and science deniers in general followed. Immigrant deniers and gay-haters found a home as well.

 Hatred for a black President caused the doubling-down we’ve seen over the last seven years, as elements of these so-called conservatives will absolutely not allow anything positive to get by on a black president’s watch. That’s not conservative. That’s radical. Simple throwback racism. Willing to jeopardize the progress and wellbeing of this country for eight years.

But recently the Republican tactic seems to be preying upon itself. Not surprising when you try and corral such a diverse group of zealots. In their desire to out-asshole each other, Republican candidates have nothing but their so-called conservative “qualifications” (obstruction) as a platform. Have you seen the Republican debates as opposed to the Dems? 

Self-implosion of the Republicans is the result of the extremes the right wing has courted. None of the right-wing hopefuls (rather prayerfuls) has a cogent policy plank, apart from lowering taxes for the rich. Add to that a snake pit of special interest issues, usually faith (read fairy tale) based. Now they’re eating their own.

(Yes, I’m hard on religion when the measure of a zealot’s religious belief is so closely tied to the danger he/she represents.)

Next year’s general election presents another fork in the road for American voters. It offers us another opportunity to end this foolishness. Hopefully, attrition has finally caught up with the right wing. And the youngsters who may be voting for the first time? Do they really think it’s important to kill gay marriage? Are they going to vote to defeat their own health care? Are they afraid of immigrants? Do they want an education?

If everyone actually voted, we could see a landslide.

Let’s not miss next year's opportunity to force the Republican Party to abandon their one-plank platform and instead include all of us. Maybe at last the chaos they’ve unleashed upon us (and themselves) will convince them. Take the obvious fork. Vote for common sense and past performance.

Remember the last Republican administration. Bush II. And the one before that, Bush I. And before that, Reagan. Remember before Reagan? When “Homeless” wasn’t a household word?  

Huh! We’re pre-1980 again.

And BTW- The one before that was Nixon. May as well forget Ford. Everybody else has.

Regrets by Suz deMello

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference...

(Robert Frost)

     Our theme for these couple of weeks are roads not taken, which to me translates as regrets. Often we make choices based on fear. Often we're influenced by others--that's often called peer pressure, but in my regard, those influences are usually from authority figures. Less so now, more so when I was a floundering teen or twenty-something.

     Early in college, I was influenced by an authority figure to reject a career in architecture for a major in art. This was not a disastrous choice but a bad one--fact is, I can't draw a straight line without a ruler or a circle without a compass. I sincerely do regret that decision. I still love old buildings and while I am fond of art, find myself drawn to decorative arts rather than fine arts. Paintings and sculptures are nice, but don't suck away my breath like a magnificent cathedral or well-made desk.

Diego Delso, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-BY-SA 3.0

public domain

       Later, I went to law school. Why? Sheer fear. I had graduated with an art major but without the slightest idea what to do with myself, and because I was interested in politics, had earned a master's in political science. Again, no idea what to do with it. Had my head been screwed on straight, and had there been a friendlier atmosphere in DC (the president was Reagan, I believe) I would have gone to DC and taken a job--any job--in the State Department and worked my way up. Who knows--by now I may have become an ambassador or even Secretary of State, though I doubt that based on my big mouth (excuse me, outspokenness). That my parents offered me an all-expenses-paid trip through law school made my decision easier.

     I hated law school and loathed practicing law even more. But when I was about 46, a friend persuaded me to take a class called "Writing for Publication," which was about writing professionally for magazines and periodicals. I learned a lot, but the most surprising revelation was that every publisher promulgates submission guidelines. Until then, I had thought that writers just wrote whatever struck their creative fancy, and then found a publisher to buy the work. Now, with so many publication options available, that's more true than it was in the 1990s. Then, one wrote to a set of requirements.

     This was a total eye-opener to me. Also enlightening was the information that over a thousand romance novels were published annually (Again, that's no longer the case. The market has exploded, mostly with indie-published works). But at the time, I said to myself, "Hey, I bet I could do that too." At At age 46, I was no longer the prisoner of fear.  

public domain

  

     Youth indeed is wasted on the young.

     

Forever – is composed of Nows

Sacchi Green

Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

Emily Dickinson is, as always, right. Each moment of Now is a component of Forever. Forever is built of Nows, each affecting the next, each happening in just one of all the potential ways. In cases of things like chemical reactions resulting in explosions or physical effects of gravity there may not actually be much in the way of alternatives on a moment to moment basis, but in the case of humans, we tend to think that choices come into play, however conscious or subconscious they may be. I’m inclined to broaden the concept and assume that all living things make choices, however random. In another mood I might argue that even the choices of living things are determined by chemistry and physics on levels we may never understand, but in general I figure that we might as well believe in free will, because we have to behave as though it exists in order to function at all.

So, onward to the choices we make, the major ones, involving clear alternatives, metaphorical “forks in the road.” More precisely, however much I’ve been procrastinating, the choices that I’ve made. Anybody who’s lived as long as I have must have made a whole lot of crucial, life-changing choices, right?

Right, but…as I look back, trying to remember, it’s hard to find times when there really seemed to be a choice. In petty, everyday ways, noodling around on Facebook, etc. instead of doing anything constructive like writing, sure. I make bad choices like that many times a day. But at the the times in the past when a different choice might have made for a better outcome, it wasn’t clear, and often didn’t even seem possible. I came to dread choices when it came to dealing with the difficulties of my younger son (who has since, many years later, been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and a few extras) because I was being pressured on many sides but no options seemed right or even possible.

Those Nows are Thens, though, all components of Forever, but no longer requiring decisions in the same way. What’s done, or not done, is, well, done. Lately, when I’ve been spending time in places that have long been familiar—the home where I grew up, the college I went to, the place I love to retreat to in the mountains of NH, the house I’ve lived in now for almost forty years—I’ve been imagining that I see ghosts of myself at different ages, and remembering how life felt when the future seemed more extensive than the past. I envy those ghosts, just a bit, but I don’t second-guess their choices, and don’t think of times when I wish they’d done things differently, except on the few occasions when I might have been kinder or more helpful. There’s always the regret that I didn’t get started writing much sooner than I did, but that doesn’t feel as much like a wrong choice as just the way things worked out.

When it comes to forks in the road, I’d rather think about roads taken than those unexplored. I’ve just come back from a short trip to Cape Cod, where I’m always reminded that my parents got engaged on Nauset Beach, at the beginning of WWII. They knew that my father would soon be drafted into military service, and knew that it might be wiser to wait until after the war, but the British movie Mrs. Miniver tipped the scales and persuaded them (and many other couples, I’m sure) to go for all the joy they could, while they could. Without that choice, I would not exist. I’ve always been grateful to Mrs. Miniver and Nauset Beach.

I don’t like to speculate on what would have happened if my parents had made a different choice, but I do feel a certain fascination with choices made under the pressure of dramatic events like WWII. Which leads, wouldn’t you know, to excerpts from a story, or rather a couple of stories, that I’ve mentioned here before all too often. That’s the way it goes with fascination. In the first story an American army nurse stationed in England and an American pilot ferrying war planes for the RAF have a brief, intense fling, and then have to part, the nurse being transferred to the Pacific and the pilot returning to the US to fly with the women’s air corps there who have been promised official military status soon (a promise that isn’t kept.) The pilot can’t afford the scandal of a lesbian relationship, but she wavers in her intention.
____

     I thought, when I could think anything again, that she had fallen asleep, she was so still. Gently, gently I touched my lips to the nearly-healed tattoo above her breast. Tiny wings matching mine. Something to remember her by.
     Without opening her eyes she said, in a lost, small voice, "What are we going to do, Kay?"
     I knew what she was going to do. "You're going to claim the sky, to make history. And anyway," I said, falling back on dark humor since I had no comfort to offer, "a cozy menage in Paris seems out of the question with the Nazis in control." 
     Then, because I knew if I touched her again we would both cry, and hate ourselves for it, I stood, put my clothes in as much order as I could, and walked away.
_____

Thirty-five years later they meet again, in Alaska. Kay has married a soldier whose life she saved in the Pacific war, raised a family, become a physical therapist, and recently discovered how to contact Cleo, the pilot. Cleo has made a career in flying and has a partner, Yelena, who had flown bombers in Russia during the war, one of what the Germans called “Night Witches.” Later, after her husband and child had died as the result of a Siberian earthquake that Stalin refused to acknowledge with medical help, she defected to the US, crashed on an Alaskan ice shelf, and was rescued by Cleo. Yelena is wise, and big-hearted, and welcoming, and understands that she and Kay are, in a sense, living each other’s alternate lives. Near the end, she urges them to spend some time alone together.
_____

At last we lay peacefully, cocooned in blankets, Cleo's head on my breast, my mind drifting. Surely we had been like this always, through the lingering violet twilight of summer, and the long, white nights of winter.
"Kay," she said suddenly, "I did try to find you. But it was too late."
"Yes," I said, stroking her vibrant silver hair. "And if it hadn't been too late..." What of Jack, I thought, and my children? But all I said was, "Yelena would have been alone on the ice."
"Yes," Cleo said. We clung together a little longer, in perfect understanding of how much, after all, we had.
_____

Now, when I think in terms of “what-would-have-happened-if,” I think of it as a “Yelena on the ice” situation—which is also, incidentally, a story I intend to write one of these days. Or years.

Enough of speculation on forks in the road. Today, and often lately, I’ve been concentrating on the Nows of these lovely autumn days. I’ve stood in the yellow (and orange and scarlet and green) woods of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken and not worried about which of two diverging paths to take, but just absorbed the beauty, the glory, the infinite gift of being there, in the moment, in the Now.

Telling or selling?

As writers, where would we be without the dramatic ultimatum that is the fork in the road? The damned if you do/damned if you don’t conundrum. I don’t simply mean for our characters and the development of their stories, but actually for us as writers, too.

My third published story was one I’ve mentioned here earlier,“The Three-Day Hump”. I wrote it more along the lines of literary erotica than with any awareness of capital-R Romance and its rules and restrictions. That was fine, and had been my intention from the moment of conception. I wrote the story with the development and ending I felt was truly justified for those characters. It was not a happy book, and though it was romantic in its own way, it was a long way from being a Romance. It could be argued the ending was happy, too, even though the characters went their separate ways.

It’s a decision a lot of us have to make between the “damn, that would make a great story” moment and the final pushing of the launch button, whether that be by the author’s finger or the publisher’s. Are we intent on telling a story, or selling a story? Ideally, we’d do both. Every single time. Reality is, of course, a much harsher mistress. (And I know, we should really be showing a story, not telling it! Heh.)

My book sank, as these things do far more often than we’d like. There are many reasons for that, not least of which is I’m still vastly unknown right now, let alone back in 2009, before I was even officially a cover artist. My marketing and promo skills are as near as anything to non-existent.

I still feel there is a lot of good writing in that story (not that we can trust the neutrality of my judgement, of course). I still intend to spruce it up and get it back out there.

My particular fork in the road involves how to treat the story when I rejig it. Do I keep the blend of antagonism and obsession between the heroine and hero, which really was the engine of the story as it was? Do I bow to economic ambition and make the characters soul mates who get their HEA?

To be clear, I have unashamedly been chasing success as a writer for nigh on ten years. I don’t necessarily mean NYT Bestseller status and squillions of dollars. I don’t pretend I’d hate it if those things came my way, either. I’d like to look at every story I publish and feel as though I’ve done it justice. That would be a lovely feeling of success.

So far, my methods and discipline have been poor, including (but not limited to) procrastination of a near Douglas Adams-esque scale. Distractions abound, and a great deal of them are actually quite important. Every one of those distractions is indeed its own little fork in its own little road. Writing is not heavy lifting but by golly it’s hard to do.

So I suppose my road-fork with “The Three-Day Hump” is a metaphor for my writing as a whole. Which road shall I take from here? And the most important question… is there a way to bring those two paths together?