R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 5

Family Albums

Family Albums

I’ll just spit it out: why the fuck are guys running pics on their hook-up website profiles that are decades old? As if misrepresentation and deceit weren’t enough, some draw attention to the fact that years have gone by posting one pic when they were a hot 25 or 35 and then a pic as they are today, 10 or even 20 years later. Who gives a fuck what you looked like then?

When I questioned a guy on this (he posted one pic he himself captioned “2000,” another, gray haired and wrinkled, which he admitted was already three years old), he called me a “rude fuck.”

Or when all a guy’s got is a face shot wearing a cowboy hat or baseball cap and you ask for some shirtless body shots ( I don’t need to see your dick or ass), he pleads the fifth: “I don’t have any other pictures?” I took all my pics – which are a few months old at most and updated every month or so – with my smartphone which he has to be on in order to have hit you up to begin with.

Jesus!

 

 

A Reprise of One of My “Go Ask Daddy” Advice Columns

A Reprise of One of My “Go Ask Daddy” Advice Columns

Buddy: After being solo for years, I’ve found a guy who’s on my wave length emotionally, sexually, the whole package. One problem: he’s still with his current partner of fifteen years but tells me they’re breaking up, though he also says they’re giving counseling one last shot. Should I hang in there or move on?

Daddy: Current partners can mess up the love waters, can’t they? Remember, what counts is what guys do, not what they tell you they’re gonna do. If you feel this guy is “The One,” tread cautiously but don’t start searching for those matching diamond studded cockrings just yet.

It’s up to you, NOT HIM, whether you want to continue fucking him, which can be fun, or whether that will only put you on some emotional roller coaster ride. If you haven’t been there yet, let me tell you, it ain’t pretty. So if a fuck ain’t worth the potential heartbreak, quietly distance yourself and wait to see what happens. Who knows, they may have been talking break-up for the last ten years and you’re just the latest in a line of jilted hopefuls. Guys together for more than a few years frequently have a lot of shared experiences (health issues, family dying, pets) and excess baggage (shared real estate, drug rehab relapses) that may actually get in the way of them ever really breaking up.

And how well do you know your beau? Maybe the other guy has been trying to wean him off a drug or alcohol habit and your beau wants to continue his merry ways. Or the other guy may be your beau’s “Sugar Daddy.” When to comes to a choice between love and money, money usually wins.

So tell your beau you’ll be happy to stay in touch but (a) you’re not going to be the sounding board for every little twist and turn in his current relationship angst, and (b) when he’s really ready to consider you in a serious way, well, that’s why God created smartphones.

Just remember, once a guy is out of a long term link-up, he frequently wants to go back on the market and sow his proverbial oats for the fifteenth time, not instantly get locked into another “marriage.” Maybe he’ll wake up and realize what you mean to him, or maybe not.

In the meantime, don’t pine like some prom girl and wait for that fateful text. Indiscriminate sex is good for the soul, and, who knows, you just might run into somebody who’s as free as a bird as you are, and like you is tired of all that excess data usage bills for those cockteasing apps.

Medical Marijuana Anyone?

Medical Marijuana Anyone?

Like I said in my blog a few weeks ago about my shoulder surgery, my major skeletal problem is not my shoulder but my collapsing spine which has left me with chronic lower back and neck pain and means floating from bed to recliner to sofa through the night and spending my first waking hours lying on a heating pad or ice pack (cold often works quicker and more effectively for me than heat) and waiting for my Advils to kick in. (A friend of mine, a healthcare professional, tells me taking Advil and Tylenol together is the equivalent of taking opiates without the druggie side effects. and he’s right.)

This past week I had two appointments. The first was with an arthritis specialist, who was two heads shorter than me with horn rimmed glasses and looked like a sophomore in high school. He ruled out rheumatoid arthritis though he still ordered blood work to make sure, and since an earlier bone density test had ruled out osteoarthritis, all he had in his magic bag when I told him no more drugs that knock you out, made you fall over, or leave your dick limp, were – you got it – the over the counters.

The other appointment was with a clinical psychologist who picked up the phone when l called the number in an ad in our local bar rag that shouted, “Medical Marijuana Now!” There are only eight diagnoses that allow you to get a script for MM, most of them disease-oriented like glaucoma, Lou Gehrig’s Disease or HIV,  and the slot most people – including me – end up in was Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. (I’m crazy so it’s not too far off from the truth.)

With this letter in tow, I will be visiting another office later this month to register for my state medical marijuana card that I need to actually buy the stuff. Despite the fact Broward County, Florida, where Fort Lauderdale is located, is one of the fastest growing counties in the fastest growing state in the country, the only two dispensaries currently around are south in Miami and north in Palm Beach County. You supposedly can buy it in various forms, pill, oil, vapor, even eatables (“Want a grass cookie, little boy?”), but contrary to what I had been told by others, some of these DO contain THC, the ingredient that gives you the high. So to paraphrase that old Leslie Gore song:

“It’s my party, and I’ll get high if I want to, high if  want to, high if I want to….  you would  be too if you had pain too.”

I remember once when I played with my Pennsylvania buddy Vinnie who had been left paralyzed from the waist down by a virus, we smoked some of his medical marijuana which gave us the same high as meth without killing your erection. (Ironically his paralysis has left him with occasional painful cramps in his otherwise useless legs.) He told me at the time he could order some from his doc in – where else –  California – and have it mailed right to my house.

Just last week, with my back pain driving me to suicide, I tested the waters again when a buddy who used medical marijuana for pain relief  let me take some puffs off his vapor cigarette which contained a marijuana oil cartridge. First you have to get over burning your throat, but once I got the hang of it I did feel significant relief. Placebo effect maybe, but my giggly persona was for real.

Now meth, better known by its street name Tina, will relieve my pain but it’s got a shitload of side effects including being illegal and costly, so I don’t envision getting scripts for medicinal meth anytime soon. And when I asked the physician’s assistant who works for my shoulder surgeon about medical marijuana, she looked at me as if I wanted to find where nearest shooting den for heroin junkies was. Moralizing I don’t need, thank you.

Of course, I’ll let you know how I make out once I get my legal status as an official MM user. But I’d also like hear from you.

Have you used medical marijuana to relieve pain?

Did it work?

Good For The Fucks!

Good For the Fucks!

Four men who brutally attacked a gay couple at last month’s Miami Gay Pride Festival were charged this weekend with a hate crime which is a first degree felony and carries a possible thirty year prison sentence. Hope the fuck their young butts – they’re all in their early twenties – are handed from one cell to the next while they’re doing time. It’s going to be pretty hard to escape conviction when the prosecution has surveillance camera video showing them in the act.

I’ve always said anybody who is so homophobic that he has to lash out in such an ugly manner has a problem with his own sexiality.

So boys, now you’ll have a chance at a some gay sex by default. Try it – who knows,  you just might like it!

Mindfuckers Supremo

 

There should be a special place in Gay Hell, where you’re surrounded by Bible Belt Conservative Trumpees spouting Leviticus and Sir Donald tweets unto eternity, for the Website Mindfuckers Supremo. Those that show up on schedule for your destined web-arranged rendezvous, then feign disinterest.

Like the one nerd who promised me the blow job of my life. It was a Tuesday night so, what the fuck, why not. The red flag should have gone up in my head when he asked to meet him in the parking lot of a local mall. But I was horny by now. Even as I drove over, I had visions he’d pull away just as pulled up. But no, I got out of my SUV, he got of his, and we walked in one another’s direction. He was nerdier than his pic, but a mouth is a mouth, and after all, it WAS a Tuesday. I outstretched my hand to shake his and introduce myself when he said, “Gee, I’m sorry. I don’t think this is going to work out.”

NOT WORK OUT? HUH?

Now, my pics are pretty explicit. And while I may not be God’s gift to Gaydom and officially a senior citizen, (70 is the new 50 just like my 43 year old “boy” is the new 20) I still turn some heads. Woody Allen’s younger brother I ain’t. If he wasn’t interested, shouldn’t my pics have been enough to make a judgment call long before this?

There were some elderly shoppers nearby wheeling their cart of food to their car but I didn’t give a shit. I still went off like a lunatic.

“You hauled me over here and now you’re the one not interested, you nerdy little queen?”

With that, he ran into his car, locked the door, and swept away. Lucky for me, since in another millisecond I would have bashed his head against the door, then regretted it. And by the time I got home, he had blocked me so I couldn’t even tirade into cyberspace.

Then there was the gym-bod hottie who set up a time, called to say he was on his way, and an hour later was still online where I left him. My knee jerk reaction was to block him, but I didn’t and, believe it or not, a week later, the same fuck E’s me. “Got some time later today?” (Yes, this is all true folks!) He had to be methed up, had to be.

Ah, bestowed with one of those golden opportunities you often don’t get in life, I seized the moment.

“Listen, last week when you said you were on your way, then never showed, I found you were still online when you were supposed to be at my place. So, after giving you an extra half hour, I left for the local sex club where I met a hot, humpy couple from Toronto, and we fucked the night away. (I actually did meet such a dynamic duo, only not that night.)  So, I guess I have you to thank for that. But please, I don’t need people who waste my time. Your credibility with me is in the sewer. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s even your pic or are you really some 4’6” horn-rimmed glasses geek.”

His response to me was just two words. I’m sure you can guess what they were; but those two words spoke volumes. I had caught him at his own game, Then, I blocked the fuck.

The bigger question is what motivates people to play these games. Are they insecure with their own sexuality? Or are they so shit on in their real lives and no-nothing jobs (I can see that buxom boss towering over them at the jewelry counter at Macy’s), that this is their only way to exert power over others?  Or are they just perpetually stoned?

Well, playing amateur psychiatrist ain’t going to help my sex life. From now on, if someone says they’re on their way, they’re not getting my exact street address until I see their car parked in front of my neighbor’s house. Then let ’em call me on their cell and I’ll give ’em the right address.

After all, 50 mg. of Viagra is a terrible thing to waste.

Flickers

Flickers

flicker (noun): a gay man residing in one of America’s major gay urban ghettos who’s seemingly got it all, the looks, the bod, the persona, the stable of friends and roving lovers, who projects a visage of contentment but, in reality, just isn’t quite happy where he’s at, and thinks by moving to some other gay urban hotbed, – hence the phrase, to flick around – his life would be so much better.

Recently a handsome muscle bear from L.A. hit me up on one of the hook-up websites. “You’re my type to a T,” he glowed. We traded a bit of E chitchat and I found out that he had lived in Lauderdale about the same time I’ve been here and left a year ago because he wanted a LTR and was tired of “guys not willing to commit.” But he conceded he was getting a bit bored with L.A. (he had lived there before) and was now considering another move to Palm Springs.

Then it hit me. As I dwelled on his handsome face and bod I realized I had seen him many times in one of the local bear bars. He had always been surrounded by his little coterie of fellow steroid clones, but never once in all those Friday nights had he ever even given me the eye or said, “Hey.” Ah, but moving to L.A., that would change everything. If not, there’s always ….

Then, there is a sometime fuck buddy of mine who says he’s had it with Lauderdale and wants to return to the romance of his youth by moving back to either NYC where he came out and still has plenty of gay friends, or San Francisco where he blossomed as a muscleman bartender when Castro was just coming into its own. Now, my buddy is highly intelligent but did little with his brains and frankly doesn’t have a pot to plant flowers in as they politely put it in ‘50’s movies. But still he fanaticizes about living in two of the most expensive places in the country, with no dossier, no real professional job experience, and certainly, while still a hot man, no longer Sugar Daddy fodder. Like returning to a  past that no longer exists would make his future.  As they say, you can’t go home again.

We’ve all known or met or heard of guys like this. Guys still hot into their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s whose perpetual sex appeal is both a blessing and a curse since it allows them to continue playing the game long after they even really want to or should. Or deludes them into thinking there’s still time to find Mr. Right. They may work for a company where transfers are easy, or have a business of their own that’s movable like online sales, landscaping, power-washing or deep tissue massaging, since they never really lay down roots in one place all that long.  Actually not being chained to professional obligations or pension plans or the corporate ladder makes flicking around easy.  And so they do, from one gay ghetto to the next, a few years in one place, a decade in another, two months in the third, going through lovers and relationships like handi-wipes, all the time searching, waiting, hoping. For what? For whom?

These guys may think they’re sincere when they insist they want a LTR  or, if not that, some deliriously happy existence. Whatever the hell that is. But are they for real? Are they willing to give as much as they expect to get? For most of them, commitment is sharing a fresh bottle of poppers with the new guy they’re screwing.

Just one question: do they ever tell someone on which gay ghetto catwalk they want their ashes scattered?

 

They Love Us, They Really Love Us! (Maybe)

They Love Us, They Really Love Us! (Maybe)

While l really believe most gay men don’t give two hoots about gay marriage, it’s refreshing as a member of a minority in a mainstream society filled with faghaters to hear that a recent survey by a respected nonprofit research organization found 62% of Americans across all ethic and racial  and religious lines support same-sex marriage and LGBT rights as a whole. This compares to 52%, barely a majority, just five years ago.

This comes as the Supreme Court this spring will announce its decision regarding the infamous case where a bakery refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on the grounds its religious beliefs would be compromised. The Trump Administration has supported religious liberty as a legit reason for businesses to discriminate against us and is looking to the Court to allow such an exclusion to “expressive” enterprises like bakers, photographers and musicians. Where would it end?

What is going largely unnoticed is that Trump and the Conservative Majority in Congress are quietly filling open federal judicial seats with their tight assed cohorts which means the liberal movement may be pushed back or stalled for decades. On the other hand, everyone expected Gorsuch, the newest Supreme Court justice, to vote the party line but he didn’t when he sided with the liberal justices in a recent case. It reminds me of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, a super Conservative for his time appointed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the one man, more than any other, responsible for the desegregation of public schools in the early fifties, This not only fed the whole civil rights movement but fueled the women’s movement, today stronger than ever, and the gay liberation movement, now almost a half century old.

This upcoming decision by the Supreme Court is a big one, arguably even bigger than its decision on same-sex marriage. If the Court sides with Trump it could be the beginning of the end for winning equal rights for us.

Maybe forever.

Lust: How To Get It Back

On Wednesday I discussed the loss of lust in contemporary gay life. Today here’s one recipe for bringing it back and I described it best in my latest work of erotic fiction, “For The Love of Samuel.” My protagonist Billy encounters a pair of fraternal twin brothers Buck and Jer, who also happen to be lovers …

“But let me just ask you guys something,” I ask,  “and it’s not if your dicks are identical, too.”

“They are,” replies Buck laughing.

“Okay, if you guys are so alike in so many ways, Christ,  you practically read one another’s minds, how do you keep things fresh, l mean, l mean in the bedroom?”

“Easy,” says Jer, “we play a game called ‘changing the set.’”

“Okay…”

“Sometimes we’re two truckers, caps, jocks and boots.”

“Other nights we put on jumpsuits,” says Buck, “and we unzip ‘em real slow.”

“Then you’ve got the after work meetings,” says Jer, “where we wear dress shirts, ties, slacks, and slowly undress one another button by button…”

Fuck.

“Or there’s blind man’s bluff,” says Buck, “where we stand in front of each other naked with our eyes shut and explore one another’s bodies with just our fingers and tongues.”

“The whole trick is the foreplay,” adds Jer. “Once you get that going, everything else comes naturally.”

Got it?

Lust: What Happened and How To Get It Back

Lust: What Happened and How To Get It Back

There used to be lust in this life where the chase and the anticipation was half the cum.

The luring grins and gropes in the bar or the bath house steam room where your respective imaginations ran wild of what the two of you were about to do next to each other. Since AIDS reared its ugly head and made many guys understandably gun shy, and the web replaced eye-to-eye cruising and flesh-to-flesh sex, fucking around has become more like work than play where you’re ready to shove a time card in the guy’s ass instead of your dick, like you were punching in on a job rather than abandoning yourself to a world of sweat, spit and sperm.

Why? Because lust by its nature is of the moment, spontaneous, earthy, hormonal, and whenever something comes in the way of that, then that initial twitch in the dick is muffled, compromised, sidetracked and the fun factor goes out the window and often with it a hard-on you shouldn’t have to think about.

Walk into the typical gay bar on a Saturday night. Yea, there’s a lot of hot sweaty guys and a lot of nasty conversation, but how many people are pairing off and hitting the mattress? Where’s the cruising? We wait all week to hit the bar, then don’t look at or talk to any one except the same buds we talked to the week before. Or we’re  staring at our i-phones GPSing or texting someone on Grind’r. How many of those clandestine connections we envy in the shadows or backrooms, guys kissing or groping one another’s asses or crotches, are pure theater, as if the guys were saying to one another, “we’re in a gay bar, we’re supposed to be doing this,” or “let’s put on a show so people think we’re hot,” rather than, “yea, man, I fucken want you!” Five minutes later, those two guys who you thought were going to do it right there on the bar have separated and are strutting the circuit all over again.

Or take underwear night at the Ramrod, Florida’s premier leather bar. You got some luscious fucken guys walking around practically naked and what are the guys on either side of Mr. Perfect Body doing? Fixating on his new bulge undies courtesy of International Male? Hell no – they’re looking down at their cellphones! (Maybe they’re discreetly snapping a pic of that bulge with their phone to j-o over later.)

At times, the lack of animal magnetism I’ve seen in the sex clubs and baths makes me wonder if guys go to these places to do laps rather than connect. Are they waiting for the Impossible Wet Dream? Afraid of rejection? In this life, you need the ego of an elastic band – nothing ventured, nothing gained. But whatever it is, the energy level, the edge is often missing, and you end up by 1 a.m., desperate to do it with anything that moves just to get your rocks off and out of there.

The web is even worse. You want him, you’re convinced he wants you, you’re getting all edged up just setting up the day and time, getting hard in the shower the day of, and then either he doesn’t show, doesn’t E or call you back, or comes up with one lame excuse after another, until the lust has evaporated and with it whatever animal magnetism attracted you to him or him to you. Instead of making it easier to connect, the web has actually given assholes the perfect medium to hide behind.

Again, as I’ve said before, is it because it’s all too out there – the skin and the sex  – that we’ve become jaded and even a little bored by it all? Or are there too many of us who are social misfits that those of us who have had the misfortune of encountering them just can’t take being burned again? The result: anticipation is replaced by trepidation.

One thing I know for sure: this loss of lust in gay life has made many of us, even young guys, impotent. When you have to take a Viagra, or watch porn, or force your mind into some imaginary brothel while a hot guy is lying right next to you, all just to get and keep it hard, what’s the point?

My recipe for bring Lust back on Friday …

A Few Good Friends

A Few Good Friends

There was no “ah hah” moment when it came to the rotator cuffs in both my shoulders going bye-bye. My doctors and l agree they were probably old injuries that got progressively worse over the decades.  Now with my ability to reach severely diminished, especially with my left shoulder (l can’t reach the console light in my car), and surgical outcomes for reattaching rotator cuffs poor in older people like me, l have no choice but to undergo Bionic Man reverse shoulder replacement major surgery. (The rotator cuffs are like elastic bands and if an injury is too old, the tissue has atrophied and it is difficult to reattach. Take a bag of rubber bands, throw them in a drawer for five years, pull them out, and all you got is dust.)

For someone who was never seriously sick or injured all his life and who at seventy has none of the conditions typical of old age, no cholesterol, no diabetes, no high blood pressure or heart disease – hell, for all my sleeping around in NYC at the height of the AIDS crisis, l’m HIV negative  –  coming down with knee issues and back issues and now shoulder issues hit me like a tsunami.

I had scoliosis as a teenager, and in those days the treatment was sleeping on a board. My posture all my life was never the greatest and l believe what l’m suffering from today may be rooted in these past problems, and perhaps may even be hereditary since l remember my mother complaining about arthritis-like pain when she was only in her forties.

To my credit, l was neither some super jock or weightlifter, nor a couch potato, and began deliberate moderate exercise in my thirties when l saw the donuts at the office coffee machine were ending up around my waist.  Once l retired to Florida, that regimen got execrated to gym proportions. I didn’t smoke or take drugs or drink except for a few rum and cokes on the weekend, though l sometimes wonder now with all the shit that began hitting me in my late sixties whether l should have partied like it was 1999.

For the past three or four years I’ve been getting Ortho Visc shots in my knees, a lubricating anti inflammatory to hold back bone erosion, though last fall x-rays showed the med was not working as effectively as it had in the past

Senoisis of the spine hit me two years ago, where pressure is put on the spinal cord, creating painful Charlie horse like symptoms in both legs. The surgery was happily uneventful mainly because l shopped around for a back surgeon who would perform less invasive surgery. I had to do my own research to discover conventional back surgery where they replace connective tissue with an erector set can lead to incontinence and impotence. Happily Mr. Peter is still with me and l don’t need Depends yet, but with the back surgery all l had to deal with was an incision healing. It’s hardly that simple with the more painful shoulder surgery where l will be in a brace and sleeping in a recliner for six weeks.

Coupled with all this is the fact l am shrinking just like “The Incredible Shrinking Man” sci-fi classic of the fifties. Bad enough l was 5’6” all my life, but in just the last two years l have lost five inches in height. X-rays by a spine specialist showed my vertebrae and discs are collapsing and the cause l realize now of my chronic morning neck and back pain.

For even after my shoulder surgery was scheduled, to be performed by one of the guys who developed the procedure so you can’t get much better than that,  l questioned whether it is all worth it. If l will still be facing the neck and back pain everyday for the rest of my life, what’s the point? Yes, l thought of suicide, not tomorrow or next week or next month but sometime in the indeterminate future when it all becomes too much. I even have a plan: park my car in my carport, run a hose from the exhaust pipe of my Honda Element into the house and it will be arrivederci for me and my three aging doggies.

But l also love to fuck with doctors, body mechanics with egos of children or sometimes God, who l dealt with everyday in my thirty some years as a hospital marketing exec.  When l told my primary care doc about my suicidal thoughts, he quickly got a psychiatrist to see me in his office.  He was afraid l’d do myself in before the surgery and screw the system of all those tens of thousands of dollars of insurance money. So the shrink gives me a script for some pills which l’m testing right now.  Having been mild bipolar most of my life, l have always subscribed to the hard core philosophy that you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, kick yourself in the ass, smell the coffee and realize no one gives a shit about you but you.  And move on.

Which l did.

I jokingly say what l need is a total skeletal transplant. I’d cut a deal with a homeless guy at one of the bus shelters, and in exchange for his skeleton, l’d name the bus shelter he and his cronies congregate each morning in his memory and buy them coffee every morning for as long as l lived.

And if he were six feet, four, I’d throw in donuts.

After boasting about his surgical skills, I was ready to tell my boyishly handsome surgeon who resembles Houdini, the legendary magician, the only way l’d know for sure the operation is a success is if l can reach up and twist my boyfriend’s nips while l suck his cock.

Otherwise l’ll sue him for malpractice.

Now one would think my ex who lives in PA would be down to help me out, but pushing eighty with his own sort of health issues though he’s still pretty mobile, G plead the Fifth.

Thankfully l have a few good friends, my neighbor Hope the first girlfriend in my forty-nine year career as a professional faggot; my forty something lover who is married to another older man younger than me and who twenty years his senior ironically is no longer interested in him sexually – go figure –  and a nurse buddy who has generously offered to be with me for the first few days following my surgery, though l’m wondering whether he’s planning to re-enact that s and m flick, Misery, with all the enemas, Foley catheters, and other assorted medical procedures he’s promising.

Oh, there were others but as the date of my surgery loomed closer, their enthusiasm about taking care of me waned and our so-called friendships evaporated faster than a spilt bottle of poppers.

Next stop the OR: I’ll let you know how I made out as soon as I’m nimble enough to do it. In the meantime I’ll be reprising some of my Pulitzer Prize winning blogs from the Past …