Sexual Failures of 2017.
A five-thousand word think piece promising a bold new take on the 2016 Democratic Primary race. I think that's the only thing I can think of that any of you would like to read less than some verbose exploration of my various successes and failures in 2017. The successes were all shared across platforms and you've already done your due diligence by liking and sharing (or not you stupid fucking bitch). I had a good year, professionally. To itemize all my failures against every accomplishment I've curated for you right here would be tantamount to telling you all how hard it is for me to gain weight (it is, and it's a problem, but I can read a room).
With all that in mind, I won't linger too long in this next part: I wasn't happy in 2017. In contrast, I can't say that I was terribly unhappy either, but trying to detail a mostly pleasant grey murk, punctuated by a handful of brief intermissions both low and manic (usually manifest as early morning text messages sent to various friends and sex partners), doesn't make for a compelling end-of-the-year post, I don't think.
Last year, I thanked all the gay men who saved my life (there were many, a handful even who don't strictly speaking identify as either gay or men, but that's part of the joke, you see). Many gay men both literal and honorary did their part to keep me afloat this year, and I do thank them, but as social media performances go, I wanted to go for something equally as sentimental and reflective but less exclusionary. Something the whole family could enjoy.
Let me walk you through all my sexual failures this year.
Now a quick disclaimer, I want to make this very clear up top: I happened to many of these men, not the other way around. To cast myself as the wide-eyed straight man next to a gallery of freaks seems very, well, 2015. I'm pretty sure I wrote that piece in 2015. I was the villain, sexually, in as many encounters as I was the hero (if you can call eating out a mean drummer in the waning moments of a molly high heroic).
Secondly there were plenty of failures this year that involved people I generally like or who otherwise might read this. I'm not including them, so if you're a friend who made the disastrous decision to roll around with me (a professional at making an exhibition of the personal) and it ended poorly, you won't find it below. I want to keep it all as broadly anonymous as possible, so that I can look back on it and convince myself, "this was okay, right?" Writing this paragraph has already halfway convinced me to that I'm a huge asshole and this is in fact not okay.
This list won't be chronologically correct but I would like to start at the beginning of the year. Almost 365 days ago exactly, I ended up at the home of a bobo Vincent Gallo character. A straight, married father of two in an open hetero relationship with his wife (though not an openly bisexual one, so the moral optics of the whole thing are still a little suspect). He's a music producer who looks like Mark Ruffalo and he won't kiss me on the mouth, but he does want me to spend an hour with my mouth on his asshole. He tells me he's never bottomed but would like to and it's all an embarrassing lie, so we do it and he comes alarmingly fast. We hadn't deleted Uber yet (#resist) and the surge that night to get home cost me nearly $70.
He hit on me on the water taxi on Fire Island. It's the night of the underwear party and we're both heading home alone. I enjoy the underwear party but I lost my phone beyond the veil (I'll offer no further explanation on that— you either know or you don't), and fingered and gotten fingered so much I lost faith that fingering was for the pleasure of anyone involved at all. Sexually, I’m not for Fire Island and that's all fine and well by me (it’s about so much more, etc.) . He is the hottest person that will have spoken to me in three years of visits and aggressively so. He walks me home and we dry hump on the beach. I was deeply attracted to the story we would get to tell if things worked out, but he was high on molly and I was the person you regret the morning after molly (I've been on both sides of this equation, we all have, so don't read this as entirely self deprecating). He ignores my texts for a while and is forced to acknowledge me once as our respective houses walk by one another on the boardwalk. I text him on the Fourth of July asking if he has plans. I don't hear from him again until September, a Saturday at 3AM. A victory.
Every sexual experience I had with a college student this year was in its own special way a failure. I know how that sentence reads, but straight comedians on the college circuit have been fucking their audiences since way back when a JFL set meant you were getting a television show, so I like to look at this as my way of queering yet another perilously heterosexual institution. Plus, I always ID, because I saw a character on How to Get Away With Murder do it. I'm sure there are three twenty-year-olds in the country who know how to fuck. You are probably twenty and reading this and think you are one of the three, but you are also probably wrong. You see, all three went to high school abroad, currently live in Manhattan and it's actually really sad that they're this good at sex by now. If you're twenty and you think the sex you're having is great, I'll take you at your word but privately I'll write you off as either a precious lil' thing or a liar.
There was of course the self-styled dom in the midwest. I love touring especially for the hotels. Every time I walk into my hotel room I immediately wonder if this is the place where I'll finally be strangled to death in the nude. I wondered if the dom would be the one to do it, until he arrived at my door and I almost considered not going through with it. I'm not an especially kinky person naturally, but by god am I an actor, and I love the costumes. He suggested we try and I was staying at a Hilton in a mid-sized midwestern city so why the hell not. Unfortunately he is not hot, nor very, um, authoritative and as it turns out I'm not a very good actor. He spits in my mouth and I gingerly remove the loogey intact and wipe it on the hotel bed, killing the mood. He jerks off sullenly next to me and then blocks me on Scruff.
In Nevada, one of the comedy agents gave me an adderall so I could stay up long enough after my shows to have sex. We were in old Vegas, and I wasn't testing well on the apps. But just about the time I became truly ridiculous, a parody of self-destructive horniness, I set off for a stranger's hotel to have a threesome with a nice looking couple who had driven in from Utah. By the time I arrive, the hot one has fallen asleep and the lucky one sheepishly meets me outside the hotel to inform me that, if I still wanted to hook-up, we'll have to do it in the car. I am twenty-nine and yet I follow him to his Toyota Corolla where I can't get hard so instead we watch the sun rise with our shirts on and our pants pulled down just below the ass, our soft, shrunken genitalia observing an adderall-fueled conversation about the the LDS.
There was the Korean who was staying on a friend’s couch but assured me no one would notice. I could hear the bright, jaunty theme song of Parks and Recreation through her bedroom door, and I wonder the whole time if she voluntarily sequestered herself or we are in danger at any moment of being interrupted by a rabid Amy Poehler fan. He refuses to bottom and is not a good top, so the long term prospects aren't great. A few weeks ago I saw that he is dating a self-identified rice queen I went on a few dates with back in 2014. I didn’t want to learn about my culture from a rich, white hobbyist and he only ever wanted to bottom. Seeing them together felt like reading the end of some distorted version of The Gift of the Magi.
I engaged in sex with only two people more than once and I'm perfectly content with that number. I made it through without collecting any STI's (yet). I didn't have my heart truly broken (yet). I haven't fallen in love.
I think I might get a dog when I turn thirty, or possibly a therapist.
