R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 45

The Results of Last Week’s “Kiss or Not To Kiss” Survey: We’re Gay and We’re Proud and We’ll Kiss Wherever The Hell We Want!

The Results of Last Week’s “Kiss or Not To Kiss” Survey: We’re Gay and We’re Proud and We’ll Kiss Wherever The Hell We Want!

One hundred percent of those of you responding to my survey said they had no problem kissing a partner or boyfriend in public in a mainstream place and 85% had already done so.

As one of my Facebook buddies commented, “Straight folks don’t think twice about it. They just live their lives naturally, and that’s exactly what the LGBT community should do too.”

Or as another put it: “The times we had to hide in the shadows are over. The more straight people see gay people expressing affection the less novel it will be until we reach a point no one pays much attention. And that will be a nice day indeed.”

Yes sir!

How I Came Up With The Characters in My Latest Book, “Buy Guys”

How I Came Up With The Characters in My Latest Book, “Buy Guys”

Buy Guys

A tale of redemption, published by Wilde City Press.

Buy Guys is the story of Blaze and Pete, two young, handsome drifters with nothing and nothing to lose. Blaze convinces Pete, who is falling in love with him, to leave dreary New Jersey and lead free and easy lives as male prostitutes in sunny Fort Lauderdale, posting their profile on the male escort site, Buy Guys. Blaze, however, soon pulls Pete into a much larger, more dangerous scheme, a scheme that eventually threatens to destroy them both.

“Well written … I naturally assumed by the title that the story would be about two guys in the sex trade but I had no idea that this would also become a kind of mystery… the sex scenes are quite graphic … (and) Blaze and Pete use sex as a way to bolster their finances and get out of debt. More importantly, they try to deal with their pasts and it is with this theme that they find themselves involved in kidnapping, murder and drug use … RP Andrews gives us two characters that represent what can happen when the wrong choices are made and he does so in a way that they hold a fascination for us.”

Amos Lassen Reviews

A preferred locale for the moneyed retired, a vacation mecca for millions, and a prime international gay destination for both partying and living, sunny balmy Fort Lauderdale also attracts many young gay guys from Little Town, Nowhere, with no ambition or credentials, searching for a breezy lifestyle at some other guy’s expense.

So the protagonists of my new novella, “Buy Guys,” Blaze and Pete, two young, handsome drifters with nothing and nothing to lose, who leave dreary New Jersey to lead what they think will be easy lives as male prostitutes in sunny Fort Lauderdale, posting their profile on the fictitious male escort site, Buy Guys, are actually composites of many guys I met or bedded down with over the years. Pretty, often with a chip on their shoulder, but vapid, with no thought of the future, working at nowhere minimum wage jobs in between hustling some lonely gay man for a buck or drugs or both, or just “fucking around.” In fact, most of the sex my two guys experience as dicks for hire is based on experiences l had as a private citizen, shall we say, and as a Rentboy, which l played a month, to research my book. The retired dentist from Palm Springs, the naive Scottish tourist, and the Born Again gay boy who Blaze and Pete have as clients are guys I actually played with.

There are a number of other characters in “Buy Guys,” who play a more pivotal role in my story that are likewise drawn from real life, undiluted.

The Bimbo Boys, the two pall bearers Blaze knows from his funeral home job back in Jersey and who mysteriously reappear when my guys are down in Fort Lauderdale, are modeled after a pair of big, burly, furry partners who I met in Lauderdale while they were on vacation from Chicago. And like the Bimbo Boys, they were heavy fist fucking bottoms.

Then there’s Harry, the maître d’ at La Bella’s, a restaurant/bar on Lauderdale’s gay strip (modeled after an actual place, Tropics) frequented by retired, often wealthy old men and their potential younger paramours. An effeminate version of the rotund comedian, Jackie Gleason, Harry was modeled after Charlie, my old boss at the department store I worked at part time while going to college. It was Charlie who, on my twenty first birthday, took this then naive kid from the burbs to the seedy (now gone) West Village and my first gay bar, the Stonewall, yes, the Stonewall, a year before it was it raided and the whole Gay Revolution was put into motion. I learned that night that Charlie had been a drag queen headliner at clubs in the City and Jersey back in the fifties.

It’s while at La Bella’s one night solo that Pete meets Mitch, the rugged, stocky, furry methhead paramour of Randall, a kingpin in the South Florida funeral home game, who pays Pete a thousand dollars to watch the two of them having sex. Mitch was actually a rugged, stocky, methhead buddy I met and bedded down with in Fort Lauderdale, who, though he held a CPA license, never practiced but instead led a checkered life as a sometime male escort, while cuddled by his wealthy West Palm Beach Jewish parents. A Tina addict/compulsive gambler, Mitch died when he fell asleep at the wheel of the compact car his parents had leased for him coming back from a drugfest weekend in the Keys.

John The Cop, a retired NYC detective now living the Good Life in Key West as a meth dealer and who has a brief but torrid affair with Pete is based on a cop named – yes, named John – who I knew from Pennsylvania’s Poconos where we both owned vacation homes. Tall, blond, handsome, affable John retired to Miami a few years after I left NYC for Fort Lauderdale, and we stayed in touch. Sadly, John died a few years after that when he was thrown off his motorcycle, his favorite mode of transportation, by a van making an illegal U turn, and his beloved bike was thrown up in the air and landed on him.

One of the clients Pete makes is wheelchair-bound Vinnie who is paralyzed in an auto accident in which his partner is killed and who is testing the waters with an impartial party like Pete to see if he can still have sex. Vinnie is a mirror image of a buddy, Danny, I befriended, again in PA, one summer who was paralyzed not due to an accident but the result of a rare spinal infection.

P.S.: Yea, a paralyzed guy can still have sex. Trust me.

I did say my characters are real, didn’t I?

“Buy Guys” is published by Wilde City Press.

To Kiss or Not To Kiss (In Public): That Is the Question

To Kiss or Not To Kiss (In Public): That Is the Question

Recently the gay media made a big deal about two commercials, one by Hillary, the other by the elitist store chain, Nordstrom, that depicted same sex couples kissing. One advertising guru described it as a “natural transition to equality in advertising,” while the liberal gay left (if there’s a conservative gay right, it’s me) praise the ad for forcing viewers “to confront images that might make them feel slightly uneasy, then encourages them to view such affection as a normal, healthy manifestation of adult intimacy.”

Now, while a poll conducted by YouGov and Huffington Post says 55% of those under 30 have no issue with gay couples kissing on TV, that same poll had 47% of Americans calling kissing on TV by gay couples “inappropriate.”

Okay, they said the same thing about gay marriage not too long ago too. But right now, we’re still in TV Land. Let’s get back to reality for a moment, huh?

Outside of the three city blocks of a gay ghetto or that one big gay ghetto called Manhattan, would you kiss a boyfriend or spouse in public? Like in a mall? Or McDonald’s? Or your local car wash?

Huh, would you?

Take my little totally unscientific poll (I’ll report on my results in a future blog):

Take Our Poll



Take Our Poll

If you answered no, skip to question 5.

Take Our Poll



Take Our Poll



Take Our Poll



Take Our Poll

 

More About My Latest Book, “Buy Guys”

More About My Latest Book, “Buy Guys”

“Buy Guys” is my latest piece of serious erotic gay fiction, published by Wilde City Press.

So l got these two handsome gay young guys from Jersey, short, stocky, furry Pete, and tall surfer boy Blaze, with nowhere jobs and nowhere futures who decide to drive down to sunny Fort Lauderdale to play male hustlers to frustrated locals, partying vacationers and wealthy retirees. The title, “Buy Guys,” comes from the name of the fictional escort site they use to advertise their talents, a rip-off of the now defunct Renboy.com. But they soon see their dream of a breezy lifestyle turn into their own private existential nightmare.

Hey, l’m a Jersey boy, born and bred in Bergen County, in the extreme northeast sector of the state, a fart and a few heavy tolls from Manhattan. So it’s only natural l’d use the working class neighborhoods l grew up as locales for some of my fiction. “Buy Guys” begins in Garfield, New Jersey, where my lead characters, renting a flat in a two family house modeled after my grandparents’ where l spent my childhood, decide to try out a new life as paid escorts in the land of the moneyed gay retired, Fort Lauderdale. I’ve used contemporary Fort Lauderdale, my adopted home since 2002, as a setting for a good portion of my fiction as much for its breezy, “Forever Summer” environment as for its “throw caution to the wind” decadent gay lifestyle which offers a writer of erotic fiction endless possibilities.

The storyline, with its series of sexual escapades, was perfect for replicating the style of the book that has probably influenced me the most, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” Considered America’s first true novel, it uses a rite of passage and episodic approach that enriches the plot with stories within the story, and explodes the opportunity for introducing new, fresh characters that help change the dimensions of your protagonist.

In my very first draft, l had one of my protagonists, methodical Pete, with a girlfriend who he doesn’t know he got pregnant until the end when he and cocky Blaze return from their adventures down South. But l soon dropped that storyline since l felt it was a distraction from the budding romance l wanted to develop between my two guys.

Now l can already predict your immediate knee jerk reaction to all this: pretty standard fare for male gay erotic fiction, huh?

But ripping off a technique from Alfred Hitchcock, famed movie director of such terror classics as “The Birds” and Psycho,” l came up with what Hitch called a “MacGuffin,” a plot device or hook. So what could have been a ho-hum boring fuckfest turned into a male version of “Thelma and Louise,” with my protagonists, who thought things would be easy, breezy, instead finding themselves running for their lives.

In the beginning when Blaze, who is trying to convince Pete to join him on this adventure, asks “What have we got to lose?” the answer should be “Everything.”

But if l told you more about my “MacGuffin” you wouldn’t buy my book now, would you?

One hint: it revolves around a Jersey funeral home where Blaze works at the beginning of my book as an all-around guy, and who discovers, quite by accident, the home isn’t just in the business of handling corpses. My first time experience with a funeral home was not when a family member died but came when I was twelve helping my mother clean a local home not far from us on Saturday mornings after the grieving families had departed with their loved one for the cemetery. My job was to vacuum up all those damn flower petals in the viewing rooms, and when Mom needed some more Windex or Ajax, I trotted down to the basement to the supply closet which happened to be in the embalming room with all those caskets lining the walls. No wonder to this day I have a somewhat warped view of death.

BTW, most of the sex my two guys experience as dicks for hire is based on experiences l had as a private citizen, shall we say, and as a Rentboy which l played a month to research my book.

Hey, anything for my art, right?

Wednesday: More on “Buy Guys”: My One Month Career as a “Rentboy.”

Holy Shit! Everybody’s Falling Apart ‘Cept Me! (At Least Not Yet)

Holy Shit! Everybody’s Falling Apart ‘Cept Me! (At Least Not Yet)

Bad enough a trio of celebs died since the turn of this young year – Natalie Cole, David Bowe and Alan Rickman – all just in their sixties. But I’ve also recently had my share of guys much closer to home either falling apart or going bye-bye.

In December, it was Steve, a poz, 6 foot four, burly, furry, built-like-a-wrestler methhead/cokehead who traded a promising career as a farm animal vet out in his native Iowa for the minimum wage jobs and party times of Fort Lauderdale thirty years ago. A week before Christmas, he never woke up. Age: 54.

Then there was Jay, a millionaire entrepreneur I met through buddies on the beach who lost it all, he claims to early dementia, and now lived on Social Security disability, but in reality traded the heroin addiction of his youth for booze. He either accidentally OD’d on his brain meds – he’d often forget if he had taken them or not – or did it intentionally, realizing the only future he had left was drooling in some nursing home once his mind was gone. Maybe it’s a good thing we’ll never know which. Age: 59.

Phil, a fellow college prof from my days teaching down here, and a half of a bed hopping duo with his partner, Ted, ended up in the hospital for New Years with hepatitis C. Was that toy boy from Guatemala they kept as clean as they thought? Age 48.

And then there’s Shaw, the body shop wizard who I modeled my super handsome, super leather man Gil after for my novel, “The Czar of Wilton Drive,” Shaw, a methhead’s methhead, casting couch material, poz and a toy boy more than once in his life, who was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He turned the Big Four-0 on Thanksgiving Day.

Were drugs or sex or being poz and taking all those powerful, almost toxic anti-viral meds, or a mix of all of them responsible for their health problems or early demise? Hey, I ain’t no doctor.

All I know is that I’m older than all of them and outside of this stenosis of the spine I probably inherited, I haven’t got a fucken thing wrong with me.

At least not yet, that is.

Why I’m Beginning To Hate Tourists

Why I’m Beginning to Hate Tourists

Hey, I was a tourist myself once. It’s what lured me to move here to South Florida from NYC in 2002 and I never looked back. And no doubt, the Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce is happy that 2015 may have set a record, when all the stats are in, of one hundred million tourists to our balmy hideaway. Str8 and gay, the hotels are happy, the guesthouses are happy, the restaurants are happy, the bars are happy, hell, even our sex shops and sex clubs are happy, and certainly all those additional tax dollars help keep my real estate taxes manageable.

So why have I had it with tourists? Beside the fact they clog everything up – our bars, our restaurants, our beaches and highways and byways? Because when they’re here they act like they’re visiting royalty and treat us townies like outsiders in our own land.

Case in point: Saturday, January 2, the last weekend of the holiday sprawl between Christmas and New Year’s was the monthly Pig Dance at the Ramrod, our local leather bar. A popular night for us who live here, it seemed like this time the entire leather community from coast to coast and across the seas had converged on this seedy little bar on the shitty, un-glitzy end of Wilton Drive where drug runners fly by on bikes at one in the morning and guys young enough to be my grandson panhandle us entering and exiting bar boys for a buck. (That’s why God created locks for our cars, even with Ramrod’s attentive security.)

I arrived at 10, early for any guy bar, to make sure I didn’t end up parking seven blocks away. I killed time in my car for about half an hour, seeing who “loved” me on my tablet, then adjusted my harness and strutted inside. By 11, the place was festive, but by midnight – three hours before closing – the Grand Central Station congestion, spiked by loads of out-of-towners, got to my agoraphobia and I left. By then, the security guys and bouncers at the entrance were counting bodies and there was a line of half-naked men out to the street. With its tight quarters and limited egress, RR is a disaster waiting to happen. One night, the fire department came in and ordered the crowd to thin out or it’d close the place down.

As if this weren’t bad enough, 5 foot six me seems to be a magnet for the tallest gay guys in America who surround me like the giant trees in California’s Sequoia National Park. And when you ask one of them to move as you snail through the crowd it’s a lost cause. Sure there was a lot of shit I wouldn’t have my dogs piss on, but there were some truly gorgeous hotties, like the trio on the dance floor with only jockstraps adorning their bodies by God. But these out-of-town beauties tend to stick together like glue in their own little clans, not mixing with anyone else unless they’re a number 14 on the hot-o-meter. I wasn’t the only solo guy holding up the wall that night.

Hits on the hook-up sites and apps from visitors for this extended holiday were likewise lean, to the point you get the feeling these guys from New York or Chicago or Sydney are just here to use our town for their own private party, re-acquaint themselves with some tricks they fucked at IML (I love these “family reunions” when I’m trying to get through) or grab sex on the run at our sex club, two baths, or at the “clothing optional” pool at the gay guesthouse they’re staying.

And if, by luck, you find one who’s interested, and like me, you’re one of the many, many Lauderdale philandering gays with partners who can’t host, well, they can’t host either. “Sorry, staying with friends.” Then who’s supporting all these gay guesthouses, huh? I offered to pay for the motel with a hottie but he declined. “I find motels, well, gross.” That from a guy who bragged proudly he had been gangbanged at Slammers the night before. My response: “So getting fucked up the ass in the dark by nameless dicks isn’t gross?” By then, I realized he was a pig’s pig and that a few hours with one guy would never satisfy him.

So I’ll just spit it out. Mr. Tourist, if you ain’t available for play, who the fuck needs you?

You think living in one of the top gay tourist capitals of the world is hot?

Well, think again.

Are Some of the Hook-up Sites Holding Us Hostage?

Are Some of the Hook-up Sites Holding Us Hostage?

Lately, to grab more money – is there any other reason – a few of the tried and true hook-up sites have changed their access rules, forcing you to buy memberships whether they’re worth it to you or not.

Manhunt, the grand-daddy of all gay hook-up sites, recently switched its traditional messages format to folksy “Conversations,” attempting – I think too late – to mimic smartphone sites like Growl’r and Scruff that laptop driven MH is losing members to, especially among the Millennials who are crazy glued to their little mobile device phallic substitutes. (Some enterprising cellphone maker should make one the shape of a dildo so you can carry it up your ass. You’ll know you’re getting a hit when it vibrates. Hey, even if the hit doesn’t work out, the feeling will be, oh, so nice.)

Rumor has it Old School guys hate the new format (I sure do) and are leaving MH in droves. Worse, unless you are a paying member, you can’t see those tiny profile pics big enough to make a judgment call, and if you have a stalker or just plain pain in the ass who doesn’t give up even when you tell him to fuck off, you can’t block him. (It used to be non-paying members were restricted to five messages a day and that was about all.) Now, my hits on Manhunt were dwindling anyway as more guys use their phones rather than their laptops to window shop, (I know MH has a mobile version but it’s cumbersome in contrast to the new boys in town) but with these new restrictions, unless you pay, being on MH is virtually worthless. Will advertisers begin to complain about their rates should their membership rosters take a nosedive, forcing them to rethink their strategy?

Then there’s Bear411, on which I’ve been a member for a decade, though my definition of bear (humpy and hairy) and today’s definition (fat and sloppy) apparently are not in sync. But at least maybe one out of fifty hits comes from a guy who looks interesting. Because Bear’s webmaster failed to establish a commercial advertising base like most of the other sites touting sex toys and porn, he decided to force paid memberships on us by disallowing even getting messages for periods of time, and like MH, only permitting paid members to see all those auxiliary profile pics full size. Plus if you wanna pull up any of the guys on your “Pal” list who looked at your profile and who you may be able to cultivate into a roll in the hay, you guessed it, you have to pay to play.

So, did I capitulate to lust? You’ll have to hack my credit card account to find out, buddy.

“Buy Guys” is my latest work of fiction, published b...

 

 

“Buy Guys” is my latest work of fiction, published by Wilde City Press. It’s the story of Blaze and Pete, two young, handsome drifters with nothing and nothing to lose. Blaze convinces Pete, who is falling in love with him, to leave dreary New Jersey and lead free and easy lives as male prostitutes in sunny Fort Lauderdale, posting their profile on the male escort site, Buy Guys. Blaze, however, soon pulls Pete into a much larger, more dangerous scheme, a scheme that eventually threatens to destroy them both.

If you like to know more how I came up with “Buy Guys,” check out my guest blogs appearing this week on the following literary blogsites:

1/11        Unrandom Randomness    http://bronwynheeley.blogspot.com.au/

Books and Warpaint    http://www.booksandwarpaint.com/

1/12         Bayou Book Junkie    http://bayoubookjunkie.blogspot.com/

1/13         JJ’s Kinky Books   http://jjskinkybooks.blogspot.co.uk/

GGR    http://www.ggr-review.com/

1/14         MM Good Book Reviews   https://mmgoodbookreviews.wordpress.com/

1/15         Cameron James    http://www.camerondjames.wordpress.com

JB’s Book Obsession    http://jbsbookobsession.blogspot.com/

Overheard in the Supermarket the Other Day …

… a young, tall good looker on his smartphone: “Hey I’m a real man, no piercings and no tattoos.”

Don’ know if the guy was str8 or gay, but is that comment an indictment of a growing number of gay men I see out and about, in the bars or gym or whorehouses who have OD’d on the tats and the nose rings to look “butch” only to become clone-ish caricatures?

Just askin’.

Forever Young: 3 – Testosterone Therapy

Forever Young: 3 – Testosterone Therapy

If you read my blog that appeared on December 9th about that transgendered gym out in Missouri and how testosterone alone can transform what was once a female physique  into beefy, even hairy men, you’ll never take for granted what’s churning in that sac between your legs again.

But I think most of you also realize that a guy’s testosterone levels begin taking a nose dive once he reaches 30. Well, it’s been five years since I started doing something about it, at a rather advanced age, first with a cream that predated Androgel that I got from one of those health jock centers in Palm Beach that subsequently got shuttered for selling steroids. When my gay doc here in Fort Lauderdale told me that my hirsute nature was actually working against me and converting Mr. T to Mz. E (estrogen), I switched to pellets implanted about twice a year in my butt. One of my buddies shoots himself up every week but I just can’t do it (I guess that kills my chances of becoming a heroin addict or a slamming meth head) and I find the pellets, which keep you Mr. T high for 5 to 6 months, convenient and something you don’t have to worry about.

The problem is the jury is out just what your levels should be. Some, not all experts, say a typical 25 year old male should be around 800, but my doc, who I trust, likes to keep me at 1200. (My buddy is at 2000 – no wonder he’s ready to hump some homeless woman at the bus stop.)

The major negative about pellets is that while Androgel and T shots are covered by insurance, pellets are not.

But, okay, bottom line, does all this do any good? When it comes to my libido and energy levels, I think it’s been a draw (maybe I was just an oversexed Type A to begin with, ya think?), though I do notice a bit of a drop-off in my interest in men and sex about the time I’m due for another implant. (Hey, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.) I’ve gotten over my sudden spikes in anger like the time I nearly came to blows with a guy in the twenty items or less aisle in Wal-Mart because he had 22. But I have definitely seen the difference two ways: I’ve gotten hairier – like I need more hair – anybody need a transplant? – and I’ve gotten leaner and meaner in the muscle tone department.

I recently went to my Testosterone Wizard for my semi-annual pre-pellets blood work figuring I was due for a boost when – surprise! surprise! – my numbers came back higher than ever! 1740! Doc explained some guys get a residual effect from the pellets and I guess I’m one of them.

Hell, saving seven hundred bucks right now is enough to get me hard, so fellas stay outta my way!