It was only a complete lack of interest in my own asshole that kept me from AIDS.

Had I liked the idea of getting fucked, or the reality of it on the rare occasions I tried it when I was in love, I would have been dead long ago.

I had enormous interest though, in exploring my Swingin Dick Nixon, and so I went ahead with that. It started in junior high, I’d often go to the library with my mom, and I would tell her I had books to find, then make a beeline for whatever material I believed would have the best, clearest photos of attractive shirtless men. This was circa 1970, so the pickins were slim. We were not living in the wildly homoerotic America of 2010, where straight men relish portraying us in television comedy sketches to show the holdouts for The Flag, White presidents, and Marriage Between a Man and a Woman how ridiculous they are, and how foolish is their bigotry and fear. It was not the America of today where every inch of the male landscape has been recorded and used to sell or promote almost anything.

Exploitation of the male body for sexual titillation has reached the same level as that of women. Thank god the old 70’s feminists (who did the best they could against staggering odds) can no longer bitch about that. EQUAL PAY, ladies. That’s it. Christ, get on it already! Are you not clear enough that in America, when you have that, you have it all.

Anyway, there I was, alone in the back stacks, looking through old college yearbooks or instruction manuals for pictures of the swim team or how to play water polo. I couldn’t check the books out of course, so I would head to the john, and pull two or three good ones off in easily less than 10 minutes. Then I’d put the book back, go get some real books, find my mom, we’d check out, and drive home after a lovely, relaxing trip to this place of learning, truly an oasis of relief in the middle of Ohio, USA.

When I entered my high school girlfriend for the first time, I remember being disappointed at the sensations, but I was hard, so it was easy to fake. I gave up sex with women at the end of college after a thorough but certainly not extensive exploration, and just concentrated on satisfying myself with pictures of men because the orgasms were SO much better.

Actually I had sex with one woman since, that was about 10 years ago, with Megan Mullally, and we’d been pals since college, with a go at it back then too. The first time we did it, she blew me, and put an end forever to the popular fiction that men give better head than women. A few days later we got together again, and this time it was my turn to explore her Fandango with my mouth and fingers, as she was not yet ready for intercourse. Before we got going, she asked me who I had told about our previous encounter.

Nobody.

Megan: Why not?

I don’t know, it would feel too weird, like I was bragging about getting head from Karen Walker or something…

Megan: Well I told several girlfriends and I think you should tell anyone you want.

I laughed hard, that’s vintage Megan, said OK, and we went at it. I ended up with my smiling face between her legs, and I must attest I was a bit scared, it had been 20 years since I’d had an intimate conversation with the Lips that Never Speak. But my fears were soon dispelled by the responsiveness of her flesh and the appeal of her scent. Ok Megan, I have no one left to tell.

A man can’t fall in love with a woman (or a man) who doesn’t hold the promise of giving him explosive orgasms. Plural is crucial. What makes it explosive? Depends on where your own triggers are, but mechanically, the deciding factor is how excited (hard) you are, and then, how long you remain on the edge. I’m talking about men of course. I wouldn’t attempt a guess at the complexities of female orgasm. Especially not in the framework of our culture which destroys so many of the possibilities for women to explore themselves as pleasure receptors.

When a man is having an explosive orgasm he is absolutely aligned to the deepest part of himself and also to the universe.

For closeted gay men, even those that are closeted from themselves, which is the deepest and blackest level of the closet, there is an awareness, however fleeting: This is who I am. For a split second, when he’s shooting off, the guy is in touch with himself. It’s quite common for men in the closet not to masturbate at all, and then to have fits of uncontrolled sexuality in dangerous or at least unknown locations and circumstances. The ones that marry stay stuck where I was in high school. It doesn’t feel very good, but now, hey, there’s Viagra, so fooling a woman who wants to believe in the tooth fairy anyway (as so many do) is not all that tough if you’re clever enough. You can keep your box of magazines up in the attic where she never goes, or if she’s a home fix-it kind of gal, then perhaps rent a small storage locker at a nearby facility, and use it as I used the library washroom at age 13.

I was talking with an old friend who is a doctor the other day, who has many AIDS patients, and has talked with many men as their bodies were shutting down. I was telling him that my orgasms have become almost unbearably intense. For that little (or longer) time I spend each day wrestling with the bald Champ, the sensations are beyond staggering. He then told me of stories he has been told many times, some in first person, and some by surviving lovers, about the shocking force and intensity of the release under the body’s natural deadline.

And I thought of Scott, my sweetie, in the last ravages of AIDS, and the unbelievable (safe) sex we had as he faced his deadline. He was only capable of being sexual at that point once every two weeks or so, but when he was ready he would wave his throbber at me and I knew what was coming. There were a few times I thought my head might blow off, but I lived to tell the tale, and remained HIV negative.

The explosions weren’t as much the result of my particular, amazing, 100% all-beef thermometer as they were the result of how sexually aroused I was by the courage of his fight against the disease he told me he had on our second date. I loved him. That was the match that lit the fuse every time. And he wasn’t the last man I loved. I met Bob, under very unique circumstances, and we had an ongoing relationship that started in Chicago around 1996 and continued after I moved to LA, and after I returned to Ohio for 4 years to care for my dad. Bob died in 2003 from causes unrelated to AIDS. More about him to come.

The body knows itself.

I remember my sisters telling me that my Aunt Louise, in the last stages of stomach cancer, her tiny body drying up like a raindrop on a griddle, when they visited her in the nursing home near the end, was constantly fiddling with her privates. They were embarrassed and delighted at the same time, and fascinated by the body’s willingness to go for what it wants, brain be damned, no matter who happens to be watching.

In my case, you’re reading.