(tales of man-man sex, some of it in very plain street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
A story from my times at the gay baths, this one not previously reported on. From 1980, at the Club Baths of Toronto, a night out during the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Toronto, at which I gave a paper (“Internal” and “External” Evidence in Linguistics) in a symposium on “The Problem of Data in Linguistics”, now viewable on-line here.
The story has a poignant sequel in my current life as a solitary 85-year-old gay man with a lifelong high sex drive, which I’ll put off for a later posting because this one will be lengthy.
The Club Baths were large, with many areas, including a large, dark orgy room with several distinct areas (which you could make out once your eyes had accommodated to the gloom). A low wall with glory holes in it. A kind of arena in which men jacked their hard cocks competitively. A bunkhouse fuck zone supplied with mattresses. An area of what I’ll call glory spots (see below), in which men crouch, offering their mouths for others to come in.
It must have been a weekend night, because the place was very busy. And then, because this was Toronto, multicultural Toronto, the clientele was stunningly varied racioethnically and linguistically. Just after I checked in, a boisterous group of six or seven athletic young men turned up, all monolingual in a Slavic language I didn’t recognize; they were almost surely straight, and engaging in a male-buddy ritual that was new to me: preparing for success in a venture (especially a sports event for a team they were fans of) by getting laid beforehand, if possible as a group, in view of one another (in the standard version, the guys go together to a whorehouse to fuck women celebratorily and competitively together, but the word has gotten out that getting blow jobs from genuinely enthusiastic cocksuckers at a gay bathhouse is easier, faster, and considerably cheaper, though you need to be respectful of the fags and you should thank them afterwards, which the Slavic Boys were and did, after they had whooped noisily in coming; I found the whole thing surprisingly charming, as well as an excellent way of satisfying the desires of everyone involved).
Now a digression that sets things up for the main story, of a man, on his knees in a glory spot, quietly but desperately angling for a dick to suck.
[Digression; glory holes and glory spots. From NOAD:
compound noun glory hole: … 2 informal a hole in a wall, especially in a public toilet [AZ: customarily, a mensroom, but also in adult bookstores and in bathhouses, but in any case, standardly a vehicle for male-male sex], through which fellatio [AZ: the standard act] or masturbation [AZ: or anal intercourse] is conducted incognito.
A glory hole is configured as an insertor market, an insertor’s offer to a receptive user, in which insertors compete for a recipient (though of course both participants are using it for sexual satisfaction). This is a matter of point of view; a glory hole is for the recipient, typically for a fellator — a cocksucker — though the physical arrangement allows for a prospective cocksucker to solicit dick aggressively (as I did when I enjoyed glory hole sex, long ago).
Meanwhile, like understall sex in mensrooms, glory hole sex is maximally anonymous; not only are names not usually exchanged, but the sexual partners do not usually even see one another face to face.
The great value of this degree of anonymity is that neither partner has to know anything of what the other has in his head; you can achieve rapid sexual satisfaction — 2 minutes to climax is very common — without having to deal with possibly regrettable attitudes, like contempt for faggots. Though my own approach was to look for partners I judged to be trustworthy, exchange sex names with them, and then develop a face-to-face relationship with them. Which led me, over some years, to develop a network of sexual friendships with a number of nice guys, most of whom had reasons for keeping their male-male sexual lives subterranean.
The opposite assignment of roles — the alternative point of view — is also possible: a receptor market, a recipient’s offer to an insertive user, in which recipients compete for an insertor by stationing themselves in a body position appropriate for the act they are offering, in particular on their knees, facing out (for fellating or masturbating a partner). Think of this arrangement as a glory spot; it’s for a man supplying his penis for another man to use. Men making such offers can just be distributed in an open space, or they can be separated by partitions, or located in separate rooms, viewable through a window or an open door.
But in any case the man offering his body is doing so in ways that make full anonymity impossible. If you’re offering your mouth, he’s going to see your face — and your hair and probably what your body is like and how you’re dressed. This is important: a prospective fellatee (a guy offering his cock to be be sucked) can judge your age, your racioethnicity, your physical fitness, even your projected masculinity (on a range from butch to fem); and guys can be surprisingly picky about the desirability of their sexual partners (I had one guy — may he roast in hell — get to the point of sliding his hard dick up my ass when he saw my cock and decided it was too small for me to be an acceptable fuck; after that, when I was offering my (muscular, hairy, eminently fuckable) ass in a room at the baths, I was careful to expose my dick as soon as a guy entered, so that if he thought it was too small, he could politely offer an apology for needing to get some rest and slip out the door).
End of digression.]
Take-aways from this digression. One, many forms of MMS (male-male sex) provide visual information about the sexual partners to one another. Two: men tend to have strong tastes about which potential partners are desirable and which not, tastes that lead them to seek out the one and avoid the other. Three: dick size is one such taste; racioethnicity is another (some guys value Black partners highly, others reject them); age is still another (some guys are uncomfortable with the idea of sex with seniors).
AZ at the Baths for Men. My loose expectations for a visit to a gay bathhouse are that I will get fucked and sucked off. Ideally with the blow job first, because an orgasm has the side virtue of relaxing the anal sphincter and making your ass open for getting fucked. But most guys bent on fucking ass experience their drive as urgent need and so are disinclined to pause to blow you first — and then once he’s come he’s probably lost interest in servicing you (many men are sexually selfish, showing little regard for their partner’s needs or desires)*, so you’ll need to find another guy, someone who’s dick-hungry, to take care of you. So you might as well take it up the ass first, and actually plan on going to a glory spot afterwards. Which is what I did in 1980 Toronto.
[*Brief digression on sexual selfishness. In a very long career of getting my dick sucked, I have repeatedly had the following experience with MSMs (men who have sex with men), most of whom identified as straight and were, on the evidence of wedding bands or indentations where bands had been temporarily removed, married to women: MSM in a glory spot importunes me for my dick, takes it in his mouth with a deep sigh of pleasure, then comes immediately in his pants, in his hand, or on the floor — and stands up and walks away, his needs satisfied while mine are still in mid-flight. I suppress the desire to chase after him, berating him to get back down on his fuckin’ knees and finish his job on me.]
But first things first. I wandered by Catamite Mattress City, taking in the current action before becoming one of the performers. And was rewarded with the union of a haughty extravagant boy (who must gave been older than the 14 he looked) getting pronged by a muscular middle-aged guy who put on a kind of master class in penetrative styles: what I know as rabbit fucking or jackrabbit fucking, many fast shallow strokes; followed by long, slow moderately deep thrusts; followed by grunting pile-driving. Meanwhile, both men were lost in ecstasy, the fucker in the focused intensity of an athlete’s prime performance, the hole boy undone with pleasure, moaning and flopping on the mattress like an unstrung puppet.
And then I became aware that I had been joined by another observer, an older blocky guy with nicely furry forearms and a strong scent of male sex sweat, who gently put a hand on my right hip — from which he could choose to move it forward to jack me off or back to slide a finger into my well-lubricated ass (MMS tip: if you’re aiming to get fucked, go out with a load of lube in your asshole, so you won’t have to negotiate with your fucker over his lubing up).
“Which one are you following?”, he asked, levelly. A polite way of asking whether I’m a top or a bottom, and letting me change the subject if I don’t want to take up his gentle cruise. I took the bait and ran with it: “Oh, the bottom boy; I love to get fucked”. So he slid a finger in me, bent forward and kissed me, told me how hot I was while he walked me to a mattress not in use, bent my body gently over the side and fucked me slowly and sweetly, taking care to get the angles right for me.
And then since we were the kind of people we were, we curled up in each other’s arms on that mattress to enjoy the haze of post-coital intimacy. Chatted about the other men we’d seen at the baths and about Toronto, since we were both out-of-town visitors there for (two different) conferences. Parted to go our different ways; he for more man-watching, me to find a cocksucker.
So back to the glory spots. In the middle of which, on his knees, waiting for his man, was a distinguished-look gray-haired guy I judged to be in his early 70s. In spectacularly good shape. Looking expectant, radiating desire for a cock in his mouth. Around him, dicks were being inhaled with mmms of pleasure, but he was a solitary figure. (Later, I asked him why he didn’t just go to the glory holes, where he could get all the cock he wanted, and he said that, yes, he wanted a cock to suck, to taste it and smell it and feel the beating pulse in it, all of that, but what he really wanted was a cock of a specific whole man, a person he could imagine was his lover.)
In any event, I wanted my cock sucked, and I found him genuinely sexy, so I gave him my dick, and he turned out to be an Olympic-grade fellator. When I shot my load, he held my cum in his mouth for a long time so he could savor its taste and smell. And he wept with pleasure at the gifts of my body.
I got down on my knees so we could embrace, and I could thank him for his services, tell him how desirable he was. And he dissolved in bitter tears, saying he thought no man would ever want someone like him. He had had a male partner of many years, who had died of pneumonia some years before, leaving him alone. He was in fact, a professor like me, but of some branch of engineering, and Canadian; we had a lot in common, except that he was about 35 years older than me. The more he told me of his story, the angrier I got on his behalf.
I know, I know, life is not fair. I still think he deserved better. But then his story is uncomfortably like mine, so of course, in my self-interested way, I would think that.
To come, in a while: poignant remarks on my story. It’s been a long day.
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