R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 46

Forever Young: 2 – Exercise and Touch-ups

Forever Young:  2 – Exercise and Touch-ups

If there’s anything that ages you quicker than chain smoking it’s fat. It seems like more and more Americans – and more and more guys, gay and str8 – don’t give two fucks how they look, and the stats prove me right. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), up until the 1980’s one out of six Americans were consider obese; today, it’s one out of THREE!

In my day, bear used to mean humpy and hairy. Now it’s become a euphemism for obesity. I just love these “bears” prancing around the bars like peacocks with their harnesses as brasseries and look like they’re ready to drop triplets. (Who’s the baby daddy?) I saw one guy at the gym the other day big enough to be his own zip code. Christ! Don’t you ever look in the mirror??

Yea, I hate fat people not because I was fat myself. When I started getting chubby in my thirties, I did something about it. I hit the gym, despite a hectic work schedule, and watched my diet, despite the doughnuts by the office coffee machine, and I never looked back. Result: I’m in better shape now decades later than I was then.

No, I hate fat people because they’re sucking up all our healthcare dollars with avoidable diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and who knows what else. I love those commercials for some new diabetes pill. All the actors are overweight, so what’s the message? Why bother working it off? Just pop a pill and everything’s fine!

Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers and all those other quick loss hustlers are crutches. The only way to lose weight is eat less and exercise more. Period. In fact, once you get into a regular gym regimen, you’ll feel guilty when you miss a session. (Those natural endorphins will make you feel better after the shittiest day at work.)

And when it comes to diet, go to Home Depot and buy a padlock for your refrigerator. Or seriously, start eating quality microwave dinners that control caloric intake. Even if you ate two of them for dinner, you probably wouldn’t come close to the calories in one Big Mac.

Admittedly, one thing you can’t do much about unless you abuse your skin and broil in the sun is the inevitable pull of gravity. So about five or six years ago, now living in Florida, I decided to give non-invasive cosmetic surgery a try. And just to dispel the notion that this is mostly a gay boy thing, one out of five cosmetic procedures are now being done on men, many of whom need to look good to compete in the work-a-day world.

My problem is not so much wrinkles but a jowly look that most of my family suffered from after fifty. That’s why fillers that plump up your face have worked best for me, and after my first try I’ve gone back for annual “touch-up’s (since your body eventually absorbs the natural material used in the filler).

For the forehead, between the eyebrows, and crows feet, botox or disport remain the gold standard but their shelf like is much less – six months at most.

And of course none of this stuff is cheap – fillers run seven hundred a vial, botox or disport six hundred, not any of it covered by insurance, but taking five or even ten years off your face is like losing fifty pounds over night when it comes to feeling better about yourself.

Should you be down here in Lauderdale, Steve, a registered nurse who’s actually taught docs how to do it, will shoot you up for a third less than most CosSurg centers. In fact, he’s done the best job on me yet and I’m somebody who’s used them all. Send me a message and I’ll give you his number.

And for those stubborn love handles no amount of exercise will get rid of – sorry guys, those side crunches on the ab machine won’t do it – there’s cool sculpting which essentially freezes and kills the fat cells that are then excreted from the body naturally over the course of several months. When it comes to price, get ready for sticker shock (mine cost me five grand but the price has gone down with increased competition), and as long as you maintain your weight, the results are permanent!

I did it lying in a lounge chair all day while the nurse tech positioned and secured the arm of the machine on each fat pocket and left it there for an hour at a time. Now I love the way my jeans just hang there – feel like twenty-five again.

Hey, ain’t that the whole idea?

Friday: Forever Young: 3 – Testosterone Therapy

Forever Young: 1

Forever Young: 1

What better way to start a new year which brings us one year closer to the grave (happy guy, ain’t I?),  then talking about delusional approaches for staying young, right?

Even if it doesn’t function as we’d like it to do all of the time (that’s why God created Pfizer and Viagra), about the only part of our anatomy that seems ageless is our dick. Come on, admit it. Isn’t as pretty as it was when you had your first erection?

Ah, but we wish we could say the same for the rest of our body. Right now, with arthritis hitting me everywhere, I’d like to go for a total skeletal transplant. I get shots for my knees (did you know than 90% of all knee replacements are the result of obesity? – my bum knees  are a bad roll of the gene dice), epidural steroid shots for my crumbling spine, and have even gone for ablation where they kill the nerves causing back pain, and for the year or so until they regenerate, you’re almost pain free. Other than that, all the docs have in their magic bag is Ben Gay and dope.

What especially pisses me off is that’s the only fucken health issue I’ve got – no high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure or any of the other shit people get as they grow older. Hell, I’m even HIV negative despite all my sleeping around. (Hey, like I’ve told you before, I got a partner not interested in sex anymore. Well, I am, so …)

When a guy my age at the gym with similar spine issues was told that he could benefit from back surgery but that the fall-out was that he would no longer be able to have sex, you can guess what he chose.

Like my partner who loves to flatter me keeps saying, “It doesn’t matter how good you look on the outside, you’re still old on the inside.” Uplifting, ain’t he? Wonder why I’m such a cynic?

Or as a former colleague from my hospital days put it, “It’s not how many years you got left, it’s how many good years,” and I’m beginning to feel my expiration date is coming up.

In fact, my next work of erotic gay fiction will be about a guy, totally devastated about turning the Big 5-0, who, by pure chance, comes across the secret of eternal youth, only to find it comes with some unexpectedly and not necessarily positive results.

But despite the inevitable toll of time on our bodies, there are measures all of us can take to hang in there, and this week I plan to touch on a few of them: exercise, cosmetic surgery, and testosterone therapy.

Hey, if you’re gonna be a fraud – look younger than your momma says – at least be a good at it, right?

Wednesday: Exercise and Touch-ups

My Annual New Year’s Predictions

My Annual New Year’s Predictions

Now that gay marriage is legal everywhere, manufacturers of wedding favors will go hog wild. Low end weddings can choose condoms and dental dams with the couple’s names and wedding date inscribed, while those with more bucks may go for synthetic diamond studded cock rings, PA’s, or nose rings and his and his or hers and hers personal vibrators – batteries not included.

And where there’s marriage, can divorce be far behind? Enterprising attorneys specializing in gay separations and break-ups will get smart, form a coalition, and host a website where you can learn about the divorce laws in your state and chat with a number of attorneys who’ll take on your case.

And if you both love Fido, they’ll be a cloning center so you can both have him – for $20,000.

The STD rate will drop dramatically as more and more guys get their kicks virtually rather than in the flesh.

They’ll be a new vetting phone app to weed out hook-up site game players. It’ll be called “Jezebel” after a 1930’s film starring Bette Davis as a hypocritical southern belle. Enter the screen name of your suspected cad or anyone who’s shown an interest in you or you in him, and up will come the number of times he’s been blocked and on which sites, for what reasons, if noted, the age of the pics he posts, any fraudulent info that may have been uncovered (i.e., age, cock size, waist size and relationship status), how many times he’s been through drug rehab, and the ratio of total hits he receives vs. the number he responds to, often an indicator he’s all bullshit.

Another app will allow you to silently zap some guy in the gym who’s sitting on a piece of equipment you wanna get on while yapping on his phone so he instantly gets the runs and has to trot off to the men’s room.

Carpal tunnel syndrome will become the leading medical condition among young gays addicted to their smartphones and all those hook-up apps.

There will be an increase in brain tumors and tumors of the ear among gay boys for the same reasons as above. Earplugitis will spread quicker than herpes.

GPS driven apps like Scruff and Growl’r will automatically suggest to prospective couples who click while out a place or places within a half mile radius where they can fuck around – or at least compare cocks – discreetly.

With circumcision out of fashion, and older guys finding more and more younger guys uncut, the sales of foreskin restoration kits will go through the roof.

The Kim Davis voodoo doll will be perfect for venting about pain-in-the-asses in your life. Simply write their name on the cross daggers (after all, she is a good, God-fearing Christian girl), included and spear any part of the Kim Davis doll anatomy you feel like. (Her mouth, breasts, crotch, and butt will have pre-drilled holes for ease at stabbing.) It may not solve your problems but hearing the doll scream bloody murder each time you stab it certainly will give you some calm.

Cait Jenner, who’s worth a hundred million dollars, will be funding the Cait Jenner Transgender Surgery Center where guys who wanna be girls and girls who wanna be guys can donate their penises or vaginas to someone who really wants one. Any excess penises lying around and of potentially marketable size will go to the Cait Jenner Penis Transplant Center where poorly endowed guys with bucks can have a second chance at being a stud.

As younger gays go retro-fem, RuPaul will create an online course on “Swishing It Up” for butch guys afraid they’ll soon be left out. Boundjocks.com will also offer a quick on-line “how to play butch” course should one of these youngins be forced to venture into rednecks territory.

A special division of Isis, in an additional capitalistic scheme for raising revenue for its terrorist pursuits, will provide a home grown radicalized hit man exclusively for freeloading twinks married to rich daddies who want to conveniently and quietly have the “old man” disappear for the price of an RSVP cruise and automatically inherit his dough as the guy’s legal spouse. Rich daddies can also use it to dispose of a twink or long-time partner they’ve become bored with. Fees tied to the old man’s tax bracket.

With bestiality the last true sexual frontier, guys who want to have Fido fuck them can order a “Doggie Dong” (small, medium and wicked) from Fort Troff that they strap on their canines. Includes specially created dog treats to keep your doggie distracted while you use him for your own decadent pleasures. But if we’re talking about my other half’s hound, Sammy, no attachment is needed. Shit is that dog hung!

Hey, we’re all overboard on pampering our pooches. It’s time they paid us back!

Happy 2016 – chat with you Monday.

Bits and Pieces

Bits and Pieces

I apologize for finding humor in what has been a very serious issue, but the Food and Drug Administration has just relaxed its policy regarding gay men giving blood. Back thirty years ago when AIDS reared its ugly head, gay men were banned from giving blood because, after all, HIV was a blood- borne disease.

I remember on 9/11, when I was still working in New York and was at St Vincent’s Manhattan for a meeting that very morning how lines formed around the hospital, the closest facility to Ground Zero, of people wanting to donate blood, and how some gay guys yelled out to me, “Are they taking gay blood, too?”

But what I find absurd in the FDA’s new ruling is that it has decided to replace its lifetime ban with a policy barring donations from men who have had sex with another man in the previous year.

Hell, buddy, if you haven’t had sex in a year, you better turn in your homo license!

 

Whether Sir Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, no doubt Rubio and/or Cruz will be in the picture, and both have come out against gay marriage and would end marriage equality if they got into power.

Juxtapose this with Bernie Sanders now running ahead of HilIary in some polls. If by some stroke of lightning, Sanders, practically an avowed Socialist, gets the Democratic nod and not Clinton, we might well have a Pub in the White House.

Scary, huh?

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, over a quarter of lesbian and gay individuals smoke, compared to just 17% of the str8 population. Like this is some kind of revelation?

I think smoking is the number one worse bad gay habit, and certainly surpasses alcoholism, drug abuse and even over-the-top sex when it comes to addictive behavior.

The CDC and other experts say gays tend to smoke more because of the stress put on them by mainstream society, along with feelings of shame and guilt about their lifestyle. Maybe this was true in the past, but today when things are as open as a seasoned bottom’s butthole, I think smoking is just another way for some of us to feed our addictive tendencies and have something in our mouth.

I’ve also noticed that when a guy smokes, he also drinks too much, digs his meth and coke, and loves piggy, no-holds-barred sex.

Hey, no problem as long as the guy uses breath mints first.

Christmas in the Florida Keys With G

Christmas in the Florida Keys With G

If you read my last blog you know how much l hate the holidays, so what better place to spend Christmas as far away as you can get from the traditional holiday than the Florida Keys where it averaged 80 degrees the entire three days of our stay. (Though it wasn’t much warmer than Long Island where my sister lives who called Christmas Eve and told me it was a freakish 75!)

Now let me ask you something. If you had a partner or even a fuck buddy or, hell, a bar fly acquaintance who offered to take you to the Keys on his dime, wouldn’t you be happy? Even if you both were already in Fort Lauderdale?

Ah, but you haven’t met my George, my 78 year old boy, who l drove down from PA to persecute me for the entire winter in my house in Fort Lauderdale (he has a cardiac condition and l felt guilty about leaving him to deal with Old Man Winter) and who l now masochistically took to Pine Key just seventeen miles from Key West to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. (He’s even a bigger holiday basher than me.) Any of you who have vacationed here know the Keys are no low rent district, not at two hundred bucks a night.

BTW, without even realizing it until after the fact, the resort l chose, Sugar Loaf Lodge which we had first visited a few years ago at mile marker 17 on the Overseas Highway, and the small airstrip next door, are the sites of the climactic last scenes in my just released book, “Buy Guys.” (Out on Wilde City Press.)

Funny, they say you pick the same kind of relationship your parents had, and my folks fought almost every day l knew them till my father took the easy way out by dropping dead one night coming home from a VFW meeting. Well, ditto with me and G. In fact, bickering is our modus operandi. Guess it beats being bored.

Anyway, l offer all this as background because G is the world’s greatest scooch – that’s New Yorkeese for constant complainer – and l have to say l think he was determined on our little 72 hour junket to outdo himself, asking asshole question after asshole question like he had just dropped from Mars (or maybe he’s been an undiagnosed autistic all his life, ya think?):

Why is the room so small?

Why is the frig in the room so small? (Cause it’s a compact frig.)

Why are the towels so short?

Why don’t they have a microwave? (Cause they don’t.)

Why so long a drive? (I did all the driving, because of his macular degeneration, in my car with my gas.)

Why don’t they offer rolls or donuts with the morning coffee? (Cause they don’t.)

Why don’t they have a restaurant? How can they call themselves a resort with no restaurant? (Cause the Italian restaurant on the property was too elegant for the resort’s clientele and morphed into a pizza/sub place run by two Nam vets.)

Why don’t they sell pizza by the slice? (Cause they don’t.)

Why don’t they have a lifeguard at the pool? What if l was here all by myself and l drowned? (Wishful thinking.)

I usually retort with “You’re the Arab. So why is my dick bigger than yours?” But that only gets his usual, one-size-fits-all refrain, “Shut the fuck up.”

Or when we went to Key West Christmas Eve afternoon – we had been there before – less than half an hour away:

Do we really have to go? (And what else do you wanna do, sleep in the two hundred dollars a night room l’m paying for?)

Most of the time l don’t bother responding at all because with at least one of his five thousand dollar hearing aids out of commission, what’s the point? I either have to repeat myself three times (“You’re mumbling”) or he mishears what l said so that an innocuous comment suddenly is morphed into some kind of insult. “I look like shit.” “Whatyamean I look like shit? YOU look like shit!”)

By pure luck l got a metered space just two blocks from Duval, but G, who was wearing floppies designed by a foot fetish sadist, complained, “l hope we don’t have to walk too far.”

His response to the preponderance of foreign tourists, most conspicuously Japanese: “We’re surrounded by heathens, and of all days on Christmas.”

Yea, you might say my George is the gay version of Archie Bunker, one of his folk heroes.

Our brief moment of armistice came at lunch, our Christmas Eve feast you might say, at an outdoor restaurant right on Duval, two blocks from the three gay bars left in town. (The trio of ancient nursing home bunk buddies probably younger than us exiting from one of the bars was not an encouraging sign.)

“Hey,” said G after complaining about his shrimp kabob, “we’re actually getting along without fighting.” That’s because after a while l tune him out like background noise.

Such complacency disappeared a few minutes later when we passed a posh cosmetics boutique and the super groomed gay boy standing outside the entrance tried to push some cologne sample on me.

“Man, l don’t even wear deodorant,” l blurted out, to which l then held up my armpit, sniffed it and said, “Wanna lick?” I blamed my outrageously delicious behavior on the heavily rum-laced southernmost punches we had just slugged down at lunch, but G was positively mortified. “You’re a fucken embarrassment. I’m not talkin,’ to you for the rest of this trip.” I just shrugged my shoulders. “That’s the nicest thing you said to me all day.”

Later l regretted l hadn’t bought that T-shirt hanging up in one of the souvenir novelty shops that had emblazoned on the front my life’s philosophy, “Go fuck yourself, you fucken fuck.”

Or better yet, my favorite, “Ask me if l give a fuck, go ‘head and ask me.” Betya wearing it on a Saturday night at the Ramrod would get me a trick quicker than trolling around bare chested.

Come that night, Christmas Eve, with only my Bud Lite from the Tiki bar to console me, l listened to his non-stop wailings how nobody said “Merry Christmas” anymore or sang the traditional Christmas carols, this from a guy who uses the word fuck with every other breath (I used to talk like the former Sunday school teacher I had been before I met him) and hasn’t walked into a church in the forty odd years l’ve known him while he criticizes my atheistic view of the world. (On that point he’s right.)

Okay, l know, l know, by now you’re saying, why the fuck don’t l just put a pillowcase over his head? Well, there are two good reasons why haven’t performed the ultimate mercy killing:

I don’t want to end up in prison being some inked, built-like-a-brick shithouse motherfucker’s bitch for the rest of my days though I’m beginning to reconsider that prospect, and

I don’t want to be alone in my rapidly declining years though l have the bucks to “adopt” a true daddy’s boy of say 25 or 30, like the tall, ironing board thin, thoroughly tattooed (front and back) young hottie staying in the room next to ours who George fantasized about a life together (G just fantasizes, l just fuck), at least as long as my money kept him in the meth-induced lifestyle to which he was probably accustomed and distracted him long enough from his iphone to blow me.

Funny, but when you do a junket like this on a high holy day like Christmas, you forget just about everything is closed. So on our way home from Key West, we stopped at a Publix supermarket and bought a rotisserie chicken and some cold cuts and rolls for our anticipated Christmas Day feast.

Balmy, sweaty, sunny Christmas Day, lounging at the pool, just the two of us, G kept badgering me to call the Galley Grill, a restaurant about eight miles down the road that the humpy older resort help at the Tiki bar coffee urns that morning said might be open. It wasn’t, but Boondocks Cafe ten miles down the road was. (That’s why God invented Google.)

“It isn’t Cuban is it?” said Judgmental G. Don’t feel slighted you Latin boys out there, one of G’s many phobias is foreign food or cuisine except his own Middle Eastern. “We’re turning right around if it’s Cuban.”

It wasn’t.

Now Boondocks didn’t open till 5 and G, not wanting to be the first in the place, suggested we don’t leave until 5:30. So tell me why at 4:30 while l was working on this blog on my AT&T tablet on our little patio overlooking the Gulf of Mexico did G, acting like some menopausal bitch, yell at me, “lf you’re gonna keep fucken around with that, l ain’t gonna!” Is it me, guys, is it me?

Twenty minutes later, we were out the door.

In the end we both had Porterhouse steak. (The rotisserie chicken and cold cuts came back to Lauderdale.) And with a round of potent hurricanes, a grand old time was had by all. That is after l escorted my stubborn, spoiled 78 year old boy with the incontinence problem to the men’s room. (“I’m not gonna make it. Where the fuck is the bathroom in this place?”) Waiting outside the john, l took a text from one of favorite fuck buddies back in Lauderdale as l quietly lusted after all the young, bearded men in the restaurant, a few of which had even given me more than a passing glance that persuaded me from parking my Honda Element on the railroad tracks for at least another week.

Ah, but back to our hurricanes. Back at the resort, not one dagger was exchanged between me and hubby the entire night. No wonder liquor helped solidify young America’s fledgling economy.

In “The News Barometer,” one of the local papers l had picked up the previous morning while we were having breakfast at Mangrove Mama’s, some guy with an obvious interest in selling booze had taken a full page ad entitled “Courage in Marathon” in which he thanked a trio of bros for apparently voting for the repeal of Marathon’s 1500 foot rule, “a protective law designed to stop the opening of any new liquor stores within 1500 feet of pre-existing liquor stores.”

“Free enterprise,” he declared patriotically, “has now returned to our community.”

Just what the Keys needed. More liquor stores. No wonder part-time writer and fulltime alcoholic Hemingway loved Key West’s Sloppy Joe’s so much, and why everybody, if they can’t start the day with a lay, should, at the very least, begin it with one stiff drink.

 

Pic: G in front of Mangrove Mama’s.

Why I Hate the Holidays

Why I Hate the Holidays

 

Don’t you love all that warm and fuzzy family propaganda we are besieged with on all sides this time of year? You know, the stereotypical family around the table (with a few blacks or Asians or even gay marrieds  – or this year maybe a transgendered aunt, huh? – to be politically correct), carving the turkey or ham or trimming the tree, all to push that stuffing, HD/3D TV’s, or a luxury car with a bow on it. (The ad above is for a wine distributor.)

Why all that warm and fuzzy stuff bothers at least me is because it reminds me of the days when the holidays were exactly that. Sort of. When all the aunts and uncles and grandparents were still alive and around the holiday table, getting drunk on scotch or cheap wine or brandy. For many years, my sister and I were the only kids in the family, so we got special treatment, especially around Christmas.

I did my masters degree at the University of California in L.A. and was perplexed how, around the holidays, all the North Eastern traditions, not Latin American since we were so close to the border immersed in balmy weather, dominated the season. I felt the same way when I came down to South Florida to find Christmas trees under tents so they wouldn’t dry up under the 80 degree sun. But now I realize why – people want to return to the Christamases of their youths and for so many of us the East Coast or Snowbelt was home.

But after some moments of bittersweet nostalgia, the other, less pleasant memories of those idyllic days rush back into my mind, and suddenly my mythical holidays vanish. First, my sister and I were programmed to act like toy soldiers and never speak unless spoken to. And every time we’d go to visit my grandmother on my mother’s side, Mom’s slightly bent younger sister would jokingly coax grandma’s two boxers to “sic ‘em, sic ‘em!” Meaning us.

Worse, living with my psychiatrically unstable mother, who usually hosted the holiday family shindigs, was like constantly walking on egg shells. We’d all be at the dining room table, my sainted father making nice with everyone, when Mom’s sister would suddenly throw out a dagger of a remark intentionally to edge Moms on. Bingo! I’m surprised one year the turkey or ham didn’t end up on the carpet.

Well, everyone’s dead and buried, and my sister’s back in New York with her hubby, grown kids and grandkids.  But I decided to take my other half who I rescued from Pennsylvania earlier this month to the Keys for Christmas  on my dime. I’ll be curious how Chistmasy Key West is when we go for our gazillion calorie holiday dinner at some overpriced eatery.

But that’s why God created gyms, right?

Have a good one.

 

Enablers

Enablers

Enablers can be both good or bad but in this life they’re mostly bad. What am I talking about? (I’m about to offend half of you, but here goes.)

… sex addicts who edge one another on by comparing score cards as to how many men they had the past week, day, or afternoon (hey, sometimes you just get lucky)…

… meth heads who almost exclusively will not have sex unless you get high too. Sometimes you playing the candyman is another pre-req. Even allowing the guy to slam (that’s shooting it up with a needle in your arm) while you defer to just the pipe (smoking it) ain’t good enough. “We have to be on the same page,” says he. What page??

… alcoholics who only hang together in 4-for-1 bars, with look-the-other way bartenders hungry for tips, each vying for who can fall off the stool or collapse in the middle lane of the street first.

… effeminate, over-the-top twinks who live off one another’s immature, girlish, childish, boorish, plain silly, stereotypical behavior.

… today’s bears (in my heyday bear was reserved for a humpy, beefy, usually hairy guy) who are essentially the gay version of America’s overweight middle-aged men. They usually hang around in packs so they can feel good about themselves (“I’m fat but he’s fatter.”) But as a former health exec I can tell you their fat is costing all of us higher health care premiums.

… guys with their boastful “Was I a pig?” story, each trying to top the other: “I got fucked in the parking lot of Target’s by a black guy,” countered with “so what, I fucked a black guy in the ladies room at Target.” Till one guy, trying to top them all, stops the show with his grand revelation: “I suck the balls of my unspayed German Shepherd every night!”

… over-the-top muscle boys with steroids coursing through their veins, edging one another to get bigger, until their neck muscles could balance the Eiffel Tower, and their totally out-of-proportion bodies are no longer sexy but grotesque to everyone but themselves. (Did I ever tell you the story about the twenty something guy I screwed in Chicago who told me he lost his 39 year old bodybuilder dad and steroid junkie to liver failure?)

Yea, enablers can be good or bad. Or maybe it all depends on what side of the fence you’re on.

The Changing of The Guard

The Changing of The Guard

My generation, the Baby Boomers, those of us born right after WWII up to the JFK era, once ruled and certainly changed the American landscape, simply because there were so many of us. In fact, we redefined what it is to be gay, and brought this old wolf that had been hibernating in back alleys and whispered corridors, out of the closet and into the sunshine – and the Supreme Court.

Our cocky, myopic “don’t trust anyone over 30” attitude was infectious and fueled the proliferation of gay bars in every city, an explosion of the once very underground leather scene, and the growth of gay ghettos like NYC’s West Village and Chelsea, San Francisco’s Castro, Chicago’s Boystown, L.A.’s Silver Lake, Hollywood and later West Hollywood, D.C.’s Du Pont Circle, and Fort Lauderdale’s Wilton Manors. Sure, there were many of us, like silly airhead str8’s, who partied the last thirty years away, but those of us who worked and were successful at it woke the rest of America up to the very hard, cold capitalistic realization that we had discretionary income, lots of it, to spend on travel – hence the rise of the gay travel industry – real estate – primary and vacation properties – and all those boy toys.

Why do you think mainstream America “accepts” us so much today?

And while others, like the founders of the Mattachine Society in the fifties, had lay the framework, it was our generation, at least those of us who had the balls, who became vigorous activists and advocates for a single cause we all shared whatever our differences in race and status – that of equal rights. Again, let’s not kid ourselves, a lot of what happened – including the legalization of same sex marriage – had as much to do with our sheer numbers as our persistence and determination.

We were also the generation who endured the Great Scourge that robbed us of some of our most beautiful. But somehow, enough of us survived to carry on. And in our defense, no one sexually active in the decadent seventies had any notion what was just around the corner; a 23 year old who tells me he’s HIV positive did.

But now, times are a-changing, as many of us retire into the shadows, even hang up our jockstraps, and watch the youth, the Millennials, born after 1980, who now outnumber Baby Boomers, take over the gay world we created and they inherited. But it is already a very different gay world from the one of my reckless, lascivious youth when bars were for cruising and bath houses were for fucking, not socializing, and sex, today more second hand than real, was not yet for the taking 24/7 at the touch of a key pad.

Already so many of the ghettos that were our dominions and decaying neighborhoods we revitalized have since been invaded by the enemy – str8’s – some even with baby carriages, yikes! – and I predict in a decade or less, purely gay bars where we, once members of a some secret society, congregated, will become “blended” mishmashes of who knows what, and the property most bath houses and sex clubs stand on today will be bought up by corporate America and condo developers, as precisely what happened in NYC’s West Village in the early 2000’s.

After all, the young gays of the twenty-first century feel, in the world we handed them, they have no need to prove anything to anybody. I sincerely believe the explosion of the leather scene in my day – and I was very much a part of that scene – was because it attracted gay guys who wanted to validate to the world, and to themselves, that they were men first, and gay second. Why would a Millennial gay guy feel he has to prove anything to anybody when everything is out there like dog shit on a sidewalk? Thus the fade-out-to-black of the leather scene, and the rise of what I like to sarcastically label the retro-fems, those young guys who view RuPaul, not Harvey Milk, as their patron saint.

Though I encountered this only once, in Montreal, I hear many young gays look down on us old farts. Some of their distain may be understandably rooted in a veiled resentment that those of us who applied ourselves during our working years enjoyed the “milk and honey” days of the American economy, something many younger guys may never see while they contribute to our Social Security checks. But, they forget, without us, there wouldn’t be the free and breezy gay lifestyle they take for granted. I think this mental set also impacts on their overly complacent view of HIV as an old fag’s disease and something that’s no big deal and can be “cured” simply by taking a pill.

Sure.

Yet, there are still battles to be fought, especially when it comes to discrimination in the workplace, a major issue in more than half the states that have no laws on the books to protect us.

Will there be advocates among the young as there were among us who will carry on the fight? Or will they think it will just happen?

After all, didn’t everything else?

Just In Time for The Holidays – Another Installment of My Gay Advice Column, Go Tell Daddy

Just In Time for The Holidays –

Another Installment of My Gay Advice Column, Go Tell Daddy

Buddy: After knowing one another for two years and living together a third, Donald and I got married earlier this year. My parents, who live in another state, couldn’t be happier for us, but Donald’s mother – his father is dead – who lives just ten miles from us, while accepting of his lifestyle, is none too happy with me and makes no bones hiding it. Now it’s the holidays and Donald feels obligated, since he’s an only child and mom’s alone, to invite her for Christmas dinner at our place. My folks plan to visit us after New Year’s. So what do I do without losing my cool with the bitch?

Daddy: Hasn’t Donald quietly read the riot act to Moms about you, or did you marry a Momma’s boy? Or it may be Mom feels lonely about losing her son and any guy (or gal if he were str8) would be the subject of mom’s wrath. If so, here are your options. Fly them by hubby to see which one the both of you can live with:

Agree to celebrate the holidays by you seeing your folks and him seeing Moms. Kinda empty, though, huh? Why bother having another half? You might as well just spend the gift card your folks sent you on the male escort of your (wet) dreams.

Or (strongly suggested by Daddy):

The two of you take Moms out to a nice, upscale restaurant rather than have her over at your place to reduce the risk of any scenes and the overall time you’ll need to spend with her.

Be super polite and if she dares get bitchy, let it go in one ear and out the other. Or better yet, kill her with kindness. It sounds crazy, but she’s an aging female looking for affirmation, so throw her some compliments, however contrived – “Gee, your fuller figure bra looks great on you, Mrs. Stephens.” Who knows, by the end of dinner, she may actually think you’re a nice guy.

But, however it goes, take a little life lesson from my playbook: I’ve found the best way to get through an awkward situation is to imagine it’s not actually happening but that you’re on a movie set and you’re the star and this is just a scene you’re shooting and you’re playing the nice guy. When you pretend it’s all pretend, you’ll find the reality you’re in is just all bullshit anyway.

Now send me that eggnog Fed Ex. And don’t be stingy on the rum, huh?

My New Novella, “Buy Guys” Out on Wilde City Press Wednesday

My New Novella, “Buy Guys” Out on Wilde City Press Wednesday

“Buy Guys” is my latest piece of serious erotic gay fiction, out on Wilde City Press this Wednesday.

 

“Buy Guys” is the story of Blaze and Pete, two young, handsome drifters with nothing and nothing to lose. Blond surfer boy Blaze convinces his roommate, short, stocky, furry Pete, who is falling in love with him, to leave dreary New Jersey for sunny Fort Lauderdale and lead free and easy lives as 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. Blaze, however, soon pulls Pete into a much larger, more dangerous scheme, a scheme that eventually threatens to destroy them both.

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.

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?

“Buy Guys” available in all ebook formats at WildeCityPress.com.