R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 22

For This Mother’s Day: Memories of My Own “Mommie Dearest”

For This Mother’s Day: Memories of My Own “Mommie Dearest”

Mary,  my mother, a life time nicotine addict, died peacefully and painlessly in her apartment down here in South Florida at 84 of a brain tumor in 2006, hard to believe over a decade ago.  (This year my father, a Word War II vet and hero who died at 76 of a stroke, would have been one hundred years old.) And while I still think of her bitter sweetly at times, my fondest recollection of her was that she was a bitch.

Buying all that Freudian mumbo jumbo when I was in my teens about how a domineering mother and submissive father made you gay (today I’m convinced it’s in our genes), I blamed her for my atypical life. I never quite reconciled that, though, with the reality that my father was my first sex object and gave me some of the best hard-ons of my youth.

My mother’s family came from a little town in the Ukraine, and my sister and I often referred to Mom as the “mad Russian,” as she was constantly ranting and raving about something with a terribly negative view of people – including her husband – while my father, always the diplomat, stood quietly by. Once when I was grown and long out of the house, I boldly confronted him as she was off on one of her temper tantrums with this demand: “Why don’t you rap her already?” He just shrugged his shoulders.

In hindsight, I think my mother had real clinical psychiatric issues. She may have been dipolar, with a heavy dose of a Napoleonic Complex. Perhaps, deep down, standing at just four eleven, and growing up in Depression poverty of immigrant parents, she felt insecure and inferior and never outgrew her tomboy scrappiness and aggressive often “in your face” character for, in her mind, it was the only way she would be heard. Though she was forced to drop out of high school a month before graduation because she needed to help her family, Mary was intelligent and savvy, and everything I know about handling money I learned from her. Yet she was obsessed with being the center of attention wherever she went, and had the emotional maturity of an eight year old. But if it’s true opposites attract, it was these very qualities I think that, besides her beauty, drew my father to her.

All this made living with Mom hell. You never knew what would set her off and when, which made holiday family gatherings or just simple Saturday afternoons sheer stomach wrenching experiences. And when my father, who never smoked, rarely drank, and seemed to be in terrific shape for someone who was not an athlete, dropped dead in the bathroom after coming home one night from a VFW meeting, I blamed cohabitating with this crazy woman for forty years as the cause of his early demise. After all, she was the one who smoked like she owned stocks in R. J. Reynolds – shouldn’t she have been the first to go? Overly critical of him while he was alive, my mother was totally lost when he left her, demonstrating the best performance by a widow in a leading role, though her grief did not stop her from trying to sell his three month old Cadillac to friends and co-workers  – including my boss – at his wake.

My sister dropped out of the family theatrics early in the game, marrying at 22 and moving to Long Island, leaving me, the single son (my closet homosexuality, interestingly enough, never became a subject of family discussion) to watch over Mom. One Thanksgiving long after my father had taken the easy way out, and in my feeble attempt to keep the family together, I drove all the way to extreme northwest New Jersey where my mother, without consulting either my sister or I, had moved to after my father’s death, and brought her to spend the night with me on Staten Island which, in holiday traffic, seemed half a world away. The plan was for us to drive over the following morning – Thanksgiving Day – to my sister’s on Long Island, another marathon on the LIE.

But when my mother saw some light snow falling that holiday morning, she refused to budge, and my frustration in seeing my carefully orchestrated holiday plans go down the sewer reached the point of no return, and in a sudden fit of rage, I knocked this then seventy something woman to the floor. She pretended in typical Mary style to be injured – she wasn’t – and all I thought was how I, a senior health care executive, was going to be charged with elder abuse of his own mother. We later buried the hatchets and spent Thanksgiving as the old lady and her fag son in a local diner.

When guys later on in my life would tell me they knew they were gay when they were practically still in diapers, I would look at them with a jaded eye. Then one night I was watching an old western on TCM and realized that I had had a crush on one of the handsome cowboys when I first saw the flick with my mother at the Central Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. I checked the listing for the year the film was released and saw I was five years old.

But I think my greatest life lesson if not directly imparted by Mom certainly was of her making came a few years later when I was 8 and my sister 3. At the time, my mother worked in a cookie factory, and one of her co-workers offered to pick the three of us up for a Saturday romp to Seaside Heights on the Jersey Shore. How I, even more than my sister, looked forward to that day. (My love of “the shore” was one of the motivating reasons I retired in Fort Lauderdale.) So that morning, with sand pails and shovels and blankets and beach chairs in tow, we trotted down to the pre-designated spot where Mom’s friend would swing by and pick us up.

Only she never came.

After an hour of our futilely waiting and me counting cars whizzing by, Mom forced us to face reality and turned us right around for home.

What I learned that day I never forgot and has, rightly or wrongly, guided me throughout my life: never put your faith in other people; always rely first and foremost on yourself; and always, always have a Plan B.

Mom and I probably fought hundreds of times during the years we shared this earth together, but even when she told me never to come back, I did like a bad penny and played the good son to the end, and, when I moved from NYC to Fort Lauderdale in 2002, I brought her down with me. (Mind you, she had her own place – you can only carry that loving son shit so far.) That’s why, given our roller coaster relationship, I found it strange, even alien, that in her last days as the tumor was eating away at her brain, the boisterous, cranky bitch I had known all my life had become a serene, even pleasant little old lady.

The last time I saw her in her apartment – she was by then on hospice care – I was dressed up for a staff meeting at the college where I taught rather than in my usual jeans and a T. Her final words to me as she gazed with a silly ass smile were, “You look nice.” The following morning, just as the hospice nurses predicted, she was gone.

So when the funeral director allowed me to view her one last time in her coffin before shipping her body up to the cemetery in Jersey to be with my father, I made sure to place a pack of Winston Salems by her side.

But no  lighter.

After all, that was the least a son could do.

Deja Vu All Over Again: Trump and Nixon

Deja Vu All Over Again: Trump and Nixon

A while back, l posted a blog detailing the resemblances between Hitler and Trump, both megalomaniacs, both using scapegoats to further their agenda, both using censorship to solidify their power, and the like.

But now we have a disquieting comparison much closer to home: Nixon, the first and to today the only President to resign the office in disgrace, and our current President, Sir Donald.

Nixon was forced out of office because audiotapes he himself ordered of all White House conversations revealed he knew and may have even ordered the break in of the Democratic Election Headquarters located in the Watergate office/residential complex in D.C. The plot to somehow sabotage the Democrats was plain stupid since Nixon was considered the frontrunner and indeed took the election in 1972 by a landslide.

When Special Counsel Archibald Cox seemed to getting to close to the truth, Nixon fired him only to be done in by a special prosecutor named by Congress which was then dominated by the Dems.

Sound familiar? FBI Chief Comey was in the middle of an investigation into the possible collusion by the White House and perhaps even Trump himself with Russia in sabotaging Hillary’s bid for the White House and perhaps much worse. So what did Trump do? Fire Comey who like Cox may have been getting to close to the truth, not one of Trump’s alternate truths but the real deal.

Now Nixon resigned because he knew or may have even orchestrated that break in into the headquarters of his opposition party; years later Clinton was accused (that’s all the word impeach means) for lying about having his dick sucked by a minor White House staffer.

But both those transgressions seem like child’s play when compared to  being in bed with our long standing adversary Russia. While Trump may think he can play Teflon Man since the Pubs dominate Congress, once he becomes a liability with senators and representatives who have to keep their constituents back home happy if they want to be reelected to their cushy jobs,  they will desert him quicker than the phone company pulled out coin phone booths.

Supposedly a letter signed by Nixon while he was President and sent to Trump is prominently displayed in the Oval Office. In the letter Nixon praised the then young Trump for his corporate achievements and predicted that he might one day be President.

Prophetic?

Wishful thinking?

Or a backhanded curse?

Stayed tuned.

Hanging Up Your Jockstrap: Part II

Hanging Up Your Jockstrap: Part II

So when do you know it’s time to hang up YOUR jockstrap, to stop pimping yourself  while you still have some self dignity, when, while porn may still hold its joys, aggressively searching for a man no longer holds its allure.

When you’ve met a guy who’s the one and the two of you plan to be monogamous?

Can happen, but in my dealings and conversations with guys it sounds like truly mono relationships are pretty rare. Sooner or later one or the other or both begin to stray, with or without the other’s permission, even if the relationship continues infinitum because of other reasons – emotional, financial, etc. After all, men are men, and hormones are hormones.

When you find your libido isn’t what it used to be, and even the magic blue pill doesn’t do it any more?

I’m on testosterone therapy but I still find I often have to kick myself in the ass to go out to a whorehouse on a Saturday night only because it is Saturday night, when I’d rather stay home with my dogs. Often the blue pill IS my libido.

When, in your gay career, you’ve had your share of men – good, bad and indifferent – and agree with Quentin Crisp who, in his last years, admitted, refuting his life philosophy, “there is no dark, handsome man.” Or if there is, you’ve had him a dozen times over or he’s lying beside you right now?

When you feel you’ve “been there, done that” when you encounter and are attracted to and by guys and like a déjà vu moment, you can practically predict what will happen next?

The biggest killers of lust are predictability – and boredom.

When even when you still have your shit together – you work out, watch your diet, are blessed with a good body and good genes, look younger than your datebook – even with all that going for you, you feel it increasingly more difficult to score because of the forever younger and better competition that guys you want and should get would rather bed down with? Or worst, you look around and there’s almost no one you want? Forty plus is your preference but most guys your age are either looking for twenty something hotties who just want a mouth or an ass; or, more often, are train wrecks.

When you’ve given up trying to win the attention and heart of your kind of man who you objectively feel should be attainable.

One night at Slammers, I went after a guy who was my type and I thought would want me but who shied away from my advances (grabbing a guy’s crotch is how you say “How do you do” in Slammer lingo), only for him to be rejected by another younger guy he apparently wanted ten minutes later. One humpy, hairy little guy we both wanted just stood there holding up the same wall all night, I guess waiting for something that didn’t exist.

I’m a masculine, hairy, humpy top;  do you know how many masculine hairy, humpy tops look at my profile on the hook-up sites but never go the next step even when I reach out to them, trying to convince them there’s  a hell of a lot two other guys can do than just fuck. (Luckily, I have a few – a very few – over the years who came around to my way of thinking.)

Or maybe, just maybe that moment of reckoning comes when we realize that a lot of our subculture is driven by purely capitalistic motives – selling liquor, overpriced clothes, vaporous potentials at getting sex – and that the return on our money is no longer there.

Or when going after men is just not fun any more.

 

Hanging Up Your Jockstrap

Hanging Up Your Jockstrap

Bored one Friday night with going to my local sex club Slammers, I made the executive decision to visit one of the bath houses in town that I had gone to religiously in my pre-Slammer days, that is until it got too old, not just older, OLD. Well, after a hiatus of over a year, I found to my amazement virtually the same universe of guys I left behind still there, still roaming the halls in dingy jockstraps or leather harnesses that supported their sagging tits like a bra, like dementia patients in a nursing home aging in place, with little new meat to savor. In fact, there was absolutely nothing going on, nothing to even voyeur over, and after two hours of supreme frustration as the 50 mg. of Viagra I had taken evaporated from my body, I shifted gears, and in a double-dip night, left for Slammers where in the space of 55 minutes, I fucked one guy, got my dick sucked by three other guys, and got blown by a fifth.

So why, I kept asking myself, would the Denture Cream Generation I had encountered at the other place that night, why would they keep plunking down twenty dollars or more week after week after month after year after decade to have absolutely nothing but stare at one another’s aging, sagging flesh.

Why?

Because they knew that had less or no chance of scoring at Slammers with its somewhat humpier crowd, but that here in the whorehouse some had known for decades and should have bought timeshares in, they had a comfort level, while still feeling they were part of The Scene. For if they stopped coming and traded their seventies vintage cockrings for the TV remote, they would have finally reconciled with themselves that they were no longer sexually active or desirable, that, however pathetic they looked as they wandered the whorehouse halls, their lives as  active gay men were over.

That they had finally hung up their jockstrap.

Even staring at the younger (read 30+, 40+) humpier guys – grown, mature men – on a Saturday night at the Ramrod, our local butch leather bar, shaking their butts like twenty year old circuit bois and probably just as high as they would be on E or Tina, I often ask the question silently of them and myself – when are we all gonna grow up? Do we really think this merry-go-round will never stop?

So when do you know it’s time to hang up YOUR jockstrap, to stop pimping yourself  while you still have some self dignity, when, while porn may still hold its joys, aggressively searching for a man no longer holds its allure.  Some reasons Wednesday.

How To Look Sexy (Even If You Think You’re Not)

How To Look Sexy (Even If You Think You’re Not)

Okay, the Gay God wasn’t kind to you when it came to your gene pool, but does that mean you have to look like you were going to Walmart to buy moth balls? There are ways, short of resorting to thousands in plastic surgery, to make yourself look “with it:”

Don’t keep wearing your hair like you did in high school especially if there ain’t much left. Tear out an ad or download a pic off the web of a guy your age whose clip looks hot and bring it to your local barber. Frankly nothing ages you quicker than a do that’s decades out of fashion.
Lose a couple of pounds, or if you’ve got the body of an ironing board, hit the gym. Even if you don’t become another Marie Osmond testimonial or a gym bunny you’ll feel better about yourself and if you feel better, you’ll look better.
And when it comes to clothes, be age appropriate – nothing’s worse than a mature gay guy trying look like somebody’s boi. But that doesn’t mean you have to look like you shop at thrift stores either though ironically they may be a great place to start thinking outside the box and experiment with looser or tighter pullovers or looser or tighter jeans without a heavy outlay.
Give up smoking and cut back on the booze. Besides both being expensive habits, nothing ages you quicker. And kissing someone with Marlboro breath is never romantic.
For about seven hundred bucks, you can get collagen fillers to pump up your face, and diminish wrinkles and jowls and even the bags under your eyes. Shelf life: a year to eighteen months. Or try the poor man’s version like Plexiderm, an invisible wrinkle concealer which takes five minutes to put on and an easy ten years off your face and lasts about six hours – long enough to keep a trick or partner happy. You can order it online.
Most importantly, THINK YOUNG. Whenever somebody tells me l look good for my age – whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean – l tell them l attribute it to lots of booze, lots of drugs, and lots of sex. What l mean by that sarcastic comment is not to write yourself off at 50. Have interests in something – beyond sex, booze and drugs.

Otherwise, you might as well just dig the hole, put your lawn chair out and wait.

 

The Gay Man’s Guide to Just for Men

The Gay Man’s Guide to Just for Men

I started using Just for Men in my early forties when it first came on the market and cost just four bucks (now you’re lucky if you can get it for seven bucks on sale). My objective was to cover up the gray in my beard which l had grown twenty years before to look older – l know, go figure. Anyway, l’ve had enough experience in using the stuff l should have bought stocks in the company, so for those of you new to the trying to stay young game or who have been disappointed in your results, here are a few tips l’ve learned over the years:

Use the Just for Men product designed for mustache and beards for facial hair; The Just for Men designed for head hair will not work on short hair. I avoid using products like A Touch of Gray or the Just for Men that comes in an applicator since you’re forced to use the whole box in one application.


Always start with a shade lighter than you own. Better to have a poor covering than come out looking like you dipped your beard in an ink well – do you young guys know what an ink well was – or can of paint.


Sometimes l find a more natural look is to dye your beard before you trim it, then do your trim. Some gray will show but again as an older guy you’re trying to achieve a natural look, not try to resemble a twenty two year old.


Unless you’re doing it in a place that’s easy to clean up, throw an old towel or newspaper over your sink.  It’s even a good idea to tape the newspaper to the walls immediately surrounding your sink since no matter how careful you think you are there will always be splatter. Should that occur on your sink, line your sink with paper towels, soak the towels with hydrogen peroxide and let it sit overnight, re-soaking the towels periodically. The HP does a good job in removing dye stains, much better and easier than cleanser.


The gloves that come with the stuff are usually loose and can lead to a sloppy job. I find one time use latex gloves available in any drugstore like Walgreen’s or CVS fit better and prevent what l call “nail dyeitus.”


If the shade you’re looking for is somewhere between the two available, buy a box of both and do a half and half. For example, l normally use light medium brown. If l want it slightly darker l might mix part of the product l’m using for an application with a bit of medium brown. Or if they have a sale going and there’s no light medium brown left, buy a box of the light brown and the medium brown and do the mix.


For a freshly trimmed or grown out beard where there’s lots of gray, l recommend two lines, (not the kind you snort silly), using the raised line in the application dish as your guide. For a mid week touch up a line should suffice. And don’t believe the bullshit about it lasting six weeks unless you’re a eunuch. I have fast growing hair and l often need a mid week touch-up between major dunkings.


Just for Men designed for head hair will not do a good job on short beard or facial hair but can be used for you hairy gorillas like me who want to deaden the gray in your chest hair. But all you’ll need is a tablespoon of each ingredient for a single application mixed together in a nonporous dish. I use an old glass ashtray. Using the whole box is overkill and a waste.


Whatever the application, beard, head or body, apply the product evenly over the desired area, rub it in with your gloves, then use an old comb – not the shitty little brush they give you – to insure thorough coverage to the roots by combing in the product in a circular fashion. After that, re-rub in using your gloved hand. It’s okay to go over the beardline without worrying about dyeing your skin. You’ll see why in a second.


After letting it “set” for about three minutes or so, go back and remove any excess dye on surrounding skin. How? Throw a few hits of Comet cleanser – l found Comet works the best – in your sink or separate receptacle  – and with a two inch strip cut from an old abrasive sponge gently but briskly rub the cleanser into the “dyed” skin, leaving the wet cleanser on a few more minutes before showering.

In the shower, this is a good time to use dandruff shampoo and conditioner.  I always follow this with a liberal smear of Noxzema on the dyed area that l leave on while finishing up my shower. It helps lessen any skin irritation caused by the dye.


If the results are too dark, trim your dry beard on the low setting; if there’s a spot or two where the dye didn’t take or you missed, take a smear of the mixed product, apply and comb in and wait another 3 to 5 minutes before rinsing in the sink. Do the same if there are edges of skin still darkened by the dye by following the “cleanser” instructions.

Whether in the end to dye or not to dye or continue to dye is a personal decision. I find letting some gray showing helps me in my new career as a daddy, but if you’re a fifty-something competing in today’s workforce you may feel differently.

Whatever works for you.

They’re As Guilty As lf They Pulled The Trigger

They’re As Guilty As lf They Pulled The Trigger

I’m talking about Noor Salman, wife of Pulse shooter Omar Mateen, and his employer G4S, surprisingly the largest security company in the world where he worked as a security guard, both of whom have been sued by victims’ families and survivors of the Pulse massacre for having known he was unstable but for taking no action to stop him. Forty nine people were killed, a third of them right on the dance floor, and 68 were injured, the majority of them gay, in the largest mass shooting in American history.

Matten’s wife knew of his plans, even accompanied him casing potential targets. One of them was Disney World, but the park’s strong though not infallible security made him go after a much softer target and certainly one that fed into his closet case homophobic psychosis:  a gay dance club. Given the fact he lived in Florida, how much more high profile places like the touristy Alibi and Hunters dance club here in Fort Lauderdale were spared is anybody’s guess.

Noor, like Mateen’s previous wife, was physically abused and was already planning to leave him with their young son. So how could anyone with a conscience who saw what he was planning not go to the authorities?

G4S’ compliancy lies even deeper. Not only did it ignore other employees’ reports of threats made against them by Mateen, and his boasts of connections with al-Qaeda and the Boston Marathon shooters, which according to the company’s own internal protocol should have led to his weapon being seized, G4S falsified his and hundreds of other employees’ mental health validations using the name of a psychologist who no longer practiced.

Not mentioned in the lawsuit is the questionable actions of law enforcement which waited three hours before storming the club, allowing Mateen to pick off additional victims like little duckies at a carnival side show cowering in the club’s bathrooms.

What l have found most appalling in this entire episode is that not much has changed in attempting to catch nut jobs like Mateen before they act. Case in point: there has been no visible increase in security at any of the Fort Lauderdale clubs which are frequented by millions of tourists annually. I’m a barfly so I should know.

When the fuck are we all going to wake up?

 

 

Sex on a Steamy, Rainy South Florida Sunday Afternoon

Sex on a Steamy, Rainy South Florida Sunday Afternoon

I had had an especially bad week. I was scheduled to see a second vet to find out if my fourteen year old doxie, Bebe, might be suffering from a neurological disorder. l was gearing up that following week to receive a plasma injection, about the only option l had left to relieve the pain and loss of strength in my right shoulder stemming from an old, inoperable rotator cuff tear.

And l was plain fagged out from having three of my fuck buddies in one week.

Uncharacteristic for south Florida where rain showers give way to sun twenty minutes later, it had been raining all day since the night before with no indication of stopping. A perfect Sunday to catch up on my sleep with which my three dogs, still half comatose in bed,   totally agreed.

So when Jim, who l had played with the beginning of the week, texted me in the middle of my coma nap around two in the afternoon  what l was up to, I knew exactly what he had in mind but my response was almost automated.

“Sleep,” l replied.

Jim’s “LOL,” woke me up and made me realize what a jerk l was. There would be time enough to sleep when l was in the grave.

“Get that manly butt of yours over here now fucker,” l texted like a corrected Trump tweet.

“Fifteen minutes,” was his reply.

I thought it might be fun to play around beneath the overhang on my enclosed patio while the rain came down.

I was right.

Greeting him in my kaki green “Nasty Pig” tank top and nothing else, my dick saluted my buddy like a five star general as he stripped, leaving only his tight baby blue T shirt and blue jockstrap on. I could see from his rising bulge he – or l should say that beautiful eight inch piece of man meat l knew so well – was happy to see me.

We started, like we usually did, with our nips, both hardwired to downstairs, and as he sprawled his lean manly frame on the  old sofa that faced my heated pool, steam rising in a surreal way in the rain, l began to make love to every inch of my favorite fuck buddy. Kissing his hairy chest as he stroked mine, l worked my lips down his abs, then returned to his lips. He had grown a tight goatee just a few weeks before that perfectly matched his shock of sexy George Clooney gray hair, and l instinctively began to kiss, then suck it like it was some new erogenous zone we were discovering together.

But the most surprising “go with the flow” moment of the afternoon came when, on my knees, making love to his junk, l asked very romantically, mesmerized by his perfect butt below, “You clean?” He hesitated for a second – for dramatic effect or just to be a prick – then nodded in the affirmative to which l slowly dove my tongue into his lightly furry manhole like a World War ll Japanese Kamikaze pilot aimed for a U.S. Navy carrier. I delved deep for about twenty minutes in what turned out to be hottest rimming session in our respective checkered gay existences.

We played until 5 when the sun came out, took a dip in the pool, then decided to call it a day. I watched the very depressing finale of “Feud,” where Joan Crawford, one of the icons of old Hollywood, dies alone and broke, then went to bed. Later that week Jim would learn his beloved cocker spaniel had a brain tumor, while l would be relieved to hear that my doxie’s neurological condition was only a bad ear infection. But l was hit in the balls by a second orthopedic specialist who stood to gain thousands from me but told me flat out that my anticipated plasma injection would probably do nothing. I thanked him for his honesty but decided l would go through with the injection, six hundred bucks out of pocket, if nothing more than to cross it off my bucket list.

But for a few hours fantasy and reality merged as two naked men who knew one another’s bodies better than a mapmaker knew the continents made love under my patio overhang on a steamy rainy south Florida Sunday afternoon.

 

 

Ten Minutes Left In the Candy Store: II

Ten Minutes Left In the Candy Store: II

If you are one of those late bloomers,  a guy who comes out late in life, what should you do next?

First, move to a place where gays are welcomed – and plentiful. And when it comes to places where older gay guys don’t feel like dinosaurs, nothing beats balmy Fort Lauderdale which boasts not only one of the largest concentration of gay men in the country but, as a retirement mecca, also men over 50. Check out our leather bar, the Ramrod,  the country western bar, Scandals, or Lauderdale’s iconic Alibi. That doesn’t mean if you like younger guys, you need to settle. Far from it – Lauderdale’s got ‘em all, from twenty somethings on up.

Secondly, if you’re planning not just to take in the eye candy but swallow some of it, get yourself some Big V, (Viagra, silly boy) available cheap and without a script online. Or Cialis if that’s what works for you. O.K., I know, I know, you don’t really need it, but it’s a great insurance policy just in case you got a hottie but Mr. Peter thinks it’s nap time.

Now, if you’re already partnered, that’s a plus because so much of the social scene operates around the dinner party/house party circuit where pair-offs are just, well, less threatening. A pair of over 40 guys move into a nice middle middle or upper middle class neighborhood and within days of their arrival, invites to stop over for drinks flood their mailbox. It doesn’t matter if you run into these same guys looking for younger meat on the web or the local whorehouse like Slammers, or even hitting you and your partner up for a foursome. Everything is quite prime and proper over cocktails and crepes.

But if you’re alone, there’s no doubt, things can be more difficult. After all, let’s face it; you no longer have youth on your side or work where you may meet other gay guys on the job. And because Lauderdale is such a transitory town, making friends, even fuck buddies, is an uphill challenge. That’s why unless you can still fool Father Time (good genes or good luck, I’ll take either), it’s essential to make the most of what you have. If you’re not in shape, get in shape and join a gay gym or one of the gay sports teams where the potential exists that you might meet other men, at least, socially. If you got the bucks, turn back the clock and take advantage of the wonders of modern medicine which abound in South Florida’s countless rejuvenation and cosmetic surgery centers.

And if you can’t make him on your looks or bod or personality, well, there’s always your 401 K (you have one, don’t you, dude?). Hell, I don’t think there’s anything wrong about paying for sex or a live-in bf if you know that’s what you’re doing. You want it quick and dirty and on the Q.T.? Line Him up on rentmen.com. Looking for something more like a handsome well built thirty or forty something “escort” to be your paramour? Then places such as the piano-bar-restaurant Tropics where May-December marriages are made over drinks is your destination.

A lot of late bloomers go through what us jaded “been there, done that” call their “whore” phase when some guy who’s had three men his whole life suddenly sleeps indiscriminately with every anatomically correct male who says “hi” and is willing to bed down with him even if Mr. Friendly is a dwarf.

Fine – sow your oats – but with all this gayety comes one huge cautionary note. The Achilles heel of any just-out over 50 gay guy is his lack of experience, indeed, naïveté in The Life and I don’t mean in bed. Just like society at large, gay men can be cruel and devious even when they have a smile on their face and tell you that you’re wonderful. Particularly those who partied the last twenty years away. Unlike us career faggots who been through the Gay School of Hard Knocks, many older fresh-to-The Life guys don’t have a knowledge base to work from and are unable to read between the lines with these gay boys, particularly those old enough to be their sons. The result: they end up being cockteased, heartbroken, exploited.

Or worse.

If you use Just for Men and your gray still shows, and you don’t have a blue belt in karate, never take an under 40 guy back to your place – you go to his or it just doesn’t happen.

Remember, having ten minutes left in the candy store doesn’t mean you can’t feast – just do it with your eyes open and your brain in the on position.

 

 

 

 

 

Ten Minutes Left in the Candy Store: Coming Out Late in Life: Part I

Ten Minutes Left in the Candy Store: Coming Out Late in Life: Part I

I was 21 when I had my first sex with a man, an older guy, probably all of 25 or 30. But talking to guys over the intervening decades of my gay existence, I realized I had come out rather late in contrast to so many of them who boasted about having their first man-to-man blow-out at 15 or even 12. That’s why I’m amazed when I encounter men on the other end of the age spectrum who waited until their fifties, even sixties before they decided to kick open their own private closet door and lead an openly gay existence.

As you may expect, many of them were married marrieds who tied the knot with a woman in their twenties and married for all the reasons guys who should know better do: family obligations, family or peer pressures, professional reasons, the desire to have children, etc.  I even know one guy who married a second time simply to have a woman help him raise his four year old son after his first wife (who knew nothing of his gay side) died in a car accident.

This is not to say these guys didn’t fuck around with guys all those years of suburban wedded bliss; but it was usually on the sly: on out-of-town business trips or solo visits to out-of-state family; or when they used bowling night with the guys as a cover. Wonder why those peepshow bookstores with the pay booths and cheap neon signs have survived  the gyrations of our changing gay landscape?

Then there are the truly closeted men living all their lives with a parent who they care for until the end while they faithfully play the organ at church every Sunday morning; or living solo lives letting the demands of a 50 or 60 hour a week job absorb their entire existence.

But finally comes the day when the married guy meets Mr. Right or realizes he is getting nothing out of his relationship with a member of the opposite sex; or the parent dies; or the time for retirement arrives; or the man experiences a life-changing event like a near-fatal car crash; when, at 55 or 58 or 63, he asks himself the rhetorical question of the ages:

What am I waiting for?

More Wednesday