R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 63

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 black or Asian or even gay friends 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.

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, while everyone’s dead and buried and my sister’s back in New York with her hubby, grown kids and grandkids, I count myself fortunate to have my partner around for the winter. He’s a great cook and his mission every year is to fatten me up. Oh, yea, we argue like cats and dogs, but at least we agree on one thing that makes the holidays palatable for me.

None of that Perry Como-Bing Crosby holiday music on the radio.

Have a good one guys.

Fucken End this Soap Opera, Supreme Court!

Fucken End this Soap Opera, Supreme Court!

I think the gay marriage legal business, whatever side of the fence you’re on, has become something of a cottage industry and the attorneys and courts are laughing all the way to the bank. In fact, and I don’t care if the NSA is eavesdropping, I’m beginning to get the feeling that the Supreme Court justices may even be getting a kick-back or cut of the action to prolong the inevitable – the ban on SSM is unconstitutional, right? – for as long as they can.

Even Ohio which was forced to legalize gay marriage but believes it doesn’t have to recognize same sex marriages performed in other states, point blank said, “The country deserves a nationwide answer to the question – one way or the other.”

Another factor that may cloud an already fucked-up issue is the fact a few liberal or middle-of-the road justices are up there in age or having health problems. If one of them pulls out, you know damn well the Congress will only confirm a conservative candidate and should this happen in the next few months, gay marriage may still be hanging out there like a cock in the glory hole aisle at a sex club that nobody wants.

So, why do we have to wait until the current session’s end next June for the Court to come out and just say it? Fucken do it already and end this judicial circus.

P.S. Here in Florida, an appeal to the Supreme Court by our State Attorney General Blonde Bimbo Bondi to hold up the legalization of gay marriage went nowhere, so come January 6, you’ll be able to get hitched and work on your tan line at the same time.

Drugs and Sex: Inseparable?

Drugs and Sex: Inseparable?

For info on my gay erotic fiction, visit rpandrewsgayfiction.com on your laptop or gay-erotic-fiction.com for a mobile-friendly format.

I used to think using drugs – mostly pot and poppers – was a nice enhancement to man-to-man sex, like half and half instead of fat free milk in your coffee. But lately, I’ve had a rash of PNP high guys on line disappear in a mili-second when I told them I didn’t party. And at least here in south Florida, there’s a hell of a lot of them. While the problem is particularly bad among the under 35 crowd, there’s plenty of older guys – some in their 50’s – who when you answer “no” to their question, “PNP?” drop you quicker than some twink dropping a 50 pound barbell in the gym.

Now I’ve succumbed to the party game a few times – the drug scenes in my latest erotic novel, , “The Czar of Wilton Drive,’ are all too real. But I find it endlessly bizarre that these guys – so many of them bottoms who want my cock rock hard – will even bring up the subject knowing, for many of us, Tina, Ecstasy, crack, meth and erections are diametrically opposed. But I’ve also been around the block a few times to realize the real reason is they’re looking for someone to “contribute” to their drug high without having to lay out the dough.

In our local Lauderdale daily, there was a story about the growing number of Baby Boomers crowding the rehab centers here in South Florida, overage hippies who got hooked in the ‘60s and ‘70’s as young, hip and high, and now on Social Security (that is if they ever worked a real job to earn it) needing to dry out for survival. Bet a significant percentage are fellow gay boys.

A former meth head trick of mine told me that a rather popular hook up site was known in its early days as “Methhunt” since it was frequented, some say even established by meth heads searching out stuff and fellow partymates.

So what’s happened to just getting it on au naturale? Hell, do you have be a meth head or supplier to even get a man? Are drugs and sex not mutually exclusive?

Worse, are these guys somebody you can expect any kind of commitment from?

Fort Lauderdale’s Wilton Manors a Top “Gay Welcoming” City

Fort Lauderdale’s Wilton Manors A Top “Gay Welcoming” City

Wilton Manors, Fort Lauderdale’s gay ghetto and international vacation mecca for millions of tourists every year about this time earned a perfect score of 100 on the Municipal Equality Index just released by the Human Rights Campaign.

Wilton Manors was among 38 cities nation-wide to top the list which ranks cities based on the number of openly gay elected officials, partnership benefits, anti-discrimination laws, law enforcement actions toward hate crimes and other factors. But those of us who live in the area and those of you who have visited know the real reasons are the diversified nightlife, casual lifestyle where you don’t really need a car if you live there, and nearby beaches where it’s always summer.

To be fair, I should also mention that Miami Beach, St. Petersburg, and Orlando also achieved 100 scores.

But I’d like to put a personal plug in for the town I live in, Oakland Park, less than ten minutes away from Wilton Manors glamour, which scored a very respectable 87 in the same Municipal Equality Index. Near to just about everything a gay boy would desire, it’s also quietly residential with many highly affordable one family ranch style homes including pools,some even on a canal. That way, once you’ve had your fun, you can get in your car and go back to boring solitude.

Living in Wilton Manors, on the other hand, and according to the demographers it’s the most gay populated city per capita in the U.S, housing is a lot more expensive – some would say even overpriced – and you run the risk of getting cruised in the ten items or less aisle of the local supermarket when all you wanted was some cat litter for Daisy.

Well, Here Are The Results of My “Cut or Uncut” Poll

Well, Here Are The Results of My “Cut or Uncut” Poll



A week ago, I reported that the federal Centers for Disease Control had just come out with a preliminary report advocating circumcision as a way to reduce the incidence of STD infections, including HIV. This, at a time when the circumcision rate is continuing to drop, the American Academy of Pediatrics takes a totally opposite view that getting circed is unnecessary, even dangerous, and foreskin advocates label the procedure barbaric.

As part of my posting, I decided to poll you guys, and although I admit my poll is hardly statistically scientific, my results were, to say the least, interesting, even surprising.

Guys age 40 and over corresponded percentage wise to guys who were cut mostly at birth. Yet, while many guys who responded liked their men both ways, a slight majority (58%) preferred uncut men to cut, and about 1 out of 4 cut guys would have preferred to have some droopy skin left.

Me? I’m cut, enjoy being cut, and prefer ‘em cut, but find the occasional uncut guy I play with fun, and there are plenty of them down here with our large Latin population.

Viva la difference!

Florida? Gay Marriage? OMG!

Florida? Gay Marriage? OMG!

It all started when a lesbian couple married in Vermont where same sex marriage is legal wanted to divorce in Florida where one of them still resides and where SMS isn’t legal. In a bizarre ruling, the judge ruled that if he were to grant them a divorce in Florida, Florida would need to recognize gay marriage and since there was nothing in the Constitution to prevent it, that’s exactly what he did. The judge, mistakenly thinking the State would jump in and appeal it – only it didn’t – revoked his own decision, but that was overturned by another judge. Since the State saw the handwriting on the wall with what had happened in other states and saw no point in fighting the case, well …come January 6, gay marriage becomes law in the Sunshine State.

Now, remember, we’re talking about the Deep South here. Red Neck Territory, despite all the liberal former New Yorkers on the East Coast, and a predominantly Republican State where the Pubs won big time in the mid-term elections.

So, New York, L.A., D.C.: Get ready for some competition in the marriage business game. Yea, NYC may have that phallic symbol, the Empire State Building, LA its gayer-than-a-three-dollar-bill Hollyweird, and D.C., another size queen’s wet dream, the Washington Monument. But South Florida is the only place in the lower Forty Eight that two newlyweds can lay on the beach buck naked on their honeymoon – in February.

My Take on the Senate CIA Report

My Take on the Senate CIA Report

Some folks seem to be up in arms on how inhumane the CIA may have been in torturing terrorists in our custody post 9/11 to gain intelligence, including info that led to the eventual killing of Bin Laden.

So we tortured them? So what? As far as I’m concerned, they should have hung ‘em up by their balls.

Do all these bleeding hearts both in and out of Congress forget we lost over three thousand totally innocent people in the World Trade Center attack? And that no one in New York or the country or the government knew what was coming down next?

I can say that because I just didn’t watch it all happen on TV – I was there. I personally witnessed that whole fucken incredible nightmare from its first moments through all the heart wrenching months that followed.

At the time I was the Public Relations VP for the Staten Island Division of NYC’s now defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital System, and we had a corporate meeting scheduled that Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. at the Motherhouse as we jokingly referred to St Vincent’s in lower Manhattan. Living – and working – on Staten Island, New York’s forgotten borough, I drove my car over the Bayonne Bridge which connected S.I. to New Jersey and took the PATH subway system which had recently opened a station in Bayonne. It left me off right on Seventh Avenue and 14th Street, a few blocks from the hospital, with a cinematic view of the Towers just moments after that first plane hit.

St. Vincent’s was the closest heath care facility to Ground Zero and immediately mobilized to handle thousands of casualties that never really materialized. You see, you either walked out of the WTC or you were dust. As you can imagine, the day was a media circus for us PR people, drafted to handle the legion of reporters who suddenly converged on the hospital. And when I was finally released for home that night, I managed to grab the last Staten Island Ferry that wouldn’t run again for a week.

Living in New York City, there was no way to escape the ongoing gloom which descended on its residents for months. It was especially dismal on Staten Island, home to many of the Wall Streeters, cops and firefighters who never walked away from the rubble, where every day our local paper announced dozens of funerals and memorial services, a few of which I attended. And for our hospital, the busiest unit those months was our psych ER.

9/11 was one of one hundred and one reasons I left NYC for So Flo a year later.

So please, don’t ask me to share in the remorse and guilt so many apparently feel for what our government may have done to these cold, calculating and heartless fucks.

You’re talking to the wrong guy.

Is “Peter Pan” An Allegory to Today’s American Male?

Is “Peter Pan” An Allegory to Today’s American Male?

I watched NBC’s “Peter Pan Live” the other night, half out of nostalgia (Mary Martin’s iconic performance in the fifties’ TV performance that I saw as a kid left a lifelong impression on me), half to relish the freshness and spontaneity of live television. Plus I thought Allison Williams did a terrific job (Christopher Walken who played Hook looked like he was constantly reading the cue cards). Frankly, I found Allison the most boyish looking of any of the females who had played Peter since the first theatrical production of the Barrie story in 1905. (BTW, Barrie’s story was inspired by his brother who died at 14 in a bike accident and was forever frozen in time in his family’s memory as a young boy.)

But as I watched Neverland and the Lost Boys come to life again, and heard their rallying song, “I’ll Never Grow Up,” I wondered if the tale of Peter Pan isn’t a parable of the modern American male and how immature and perpetually adolescent American men have become.

How do I define perpetually adolescent? A guy who’s ego-centric and myopic (“it’s all about me”), fantasizing fondly about his teenage years and twenties while taking little responsibility for the rest of his life, acting 25 when he’s 55, always looking for the easy way out, not really concerned about other people and how his actions might affect them, and acting stupid and brattish way beyond the occasional lapses in civility we’re all allowed as humans.

I’m talking in generalities now, since there are a lot of bimbo girls out there too, but when I was still teaching college, I found my female students to be far more emotionally and intellectually mature than their male counterparts, many of whom were jocks whose career choice was to be a “sports manager.” (How many fucken sports managers does this society need?) My smartest male students were mostly foreign born from the Middle East, India and Asia, and when I did have an All-American boy with smarts, he often sought to hide his brain power for fear in he would be judged nerdy or even effeminate in the eyes of his bros.

Fast forward to Adulthood. How many guys have you met who work at shlock jobs looking for an easy buck because they have no ambition, like one str8 thirty something I know who bartends with two degrees because all he has to think about is what goes into a martini? Or my partner’s well educated 29 year old great-nephew, a husband and dad, who walked out of a six figure job in finance because his boss pissed him off and now is a stock boy in Pottery Barn while his wife, a physical therapist, is the family breadwinner?

Or even if they are working professionally and making good money, so many guys act like absolute assholes when they morph into over-the-top sports fanatics dressed like jerks or drunker or higher than a loon in the stadium. Or sitting in their man caves with a beer in one hand and their fourth slice of pizza in the other, yelling on top of their lungs for their team in what they think is manly behavior, as they relive their high school or college days as a jock? Or endless playing video games with a bud (one of my female students did a paper on her husband’s addiction to video games) instead of fixing that leaky toilet. Okay, I admit everybody needs to let his hair down sometimes, but all too often, a lot of American men use these moments to delude themselves into thinking they’re still virile and with it, when in reality they’re double-chinned, beer-bellied, hen-pecked, and up to their ass crack in debt.

One letter to my favorite syndicated advice columnist, “Ask Amy” from a frustrated gal complained about her boyfriend spending most nights alone smoking pot. She wondered if he was marriage material and might change after they hitched – wanna give a guess what Amy told her? (This reminded me of my meth head buddies whose only goal is getting and staying high.)

Or what about the twenty-something, thirty something, even forty and fifth something “Men Fitness” cover wannabe’s at the gym who eat, sleep and shit working out (maybe to get away from their boring or nagging girlfriend, wife, boyfriend or partner), but perish the thought if you attempt to have a conversation with them about anything else but the latest supplement or med out there guaranteed to make them “bigger.” (What, you mean the President is black?!”)

Wonder why then more females are graduating college today than males and how more and more women are assuming positions of leadership and power in both the non-profit and corporate sectors? Many are ambitious, but many are also doing it by default since the American male has largely usurped his role as the guy in charge.

Maybe all those commercials that make the guy look like a jerk versus his all-knowing wife and brainy kids aren’t too off the mark after all.

So what’s responsible for this Peter Pan “twinkization” of America?

Is it the feminist movement that emasculated today’s man?

The shift from manly blue collar “real work” to asexual, sitting-on-your-ass-all-day office work?

The lack of a male figure in so many households (either dad is constantly obsessed with his career or there’s no dad at all)? Could this be why so many young guys I see on the web are looking for a “Daddy” not for sex or dollars, but as mentors, or why many str8 guys are wussies?

I also believe that a lot of the social unrest we’ve been experiencing that has been kindled by the Ferguson affair and related shootings is actually symptomatic of a larger societal problem. Particularly since the Great Recession, many young people, mostly males, even with college degrees, feel disconnected from and disenfranchised by “The Establishment” and are looking for some cause, any cause to feel important and valued. Unemployed (the unemployment rate is two to three times the national average for guys under 30) or virtually unemployable if they dropped out of high school, they’re using these civil rights issues to express their much deeper anger with “The Man” which is manifested in immature, reckless, destructive and in the end self-destructive behavior. Frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen some large scale mass uprising here or in other countries where the jobless rate is even higher (like Spain where over 50% of young men are out of work).

Or maybe it’s just around the corner.

Are all these guys who grew up without a father or doomed to minimum wage jobs the true “Lost Boys” of our society?

Finally, I could go on and fill three Wikipedias with the immature, even childish behavior I’ve witnessed with guys – str8 and gay – but what really irks me are the gay guys I deal with on the web or in person who act like they’re coyish girls at a prom or self-centered egotistical brats instead of behaving like the adult men – mature adult men in most cases – the calendar says they should be.

And from where I sit, I don’t see things getting any better.

P.S.: You think Wendy was a faghag?

The Feds Have Spoken: Cut is In!

The Feds Have Spoken: Cut is In!

“The scientific evidence is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks,” says the Federal Centers of Disease Control or CDC about circumcision which, according to its just released research study, can lower risk of STD’s, including possibly HIV (based on studies of African males), urinary tract infections, and cancer of the penis.(ugh!) This study is at odds with many foreskin devotees and guidelines released last year by the American Academy of Pediatrics which stressed circumcision was not necessary and in a small number of cases could even prove dangerous.

Practiced by certain religious groups for centuries, circumcision did not come into vogue in the U..S. till the mid twentieth century which is why so many of us Baby Boomers (like me) are cut. The practice began to fall out of favor in the seventies as other ethnic groups like Latinos whose culture did not practice circumcision grew in greater numbers. Then came the onslaught of anti-circ advocates who opposed what they viewed as mutilation without the individual’s permission, and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ before mentioned guidelines. Medicaid programs in 18 states even stopped paying for the procedure.

In the fifties and sixties the circ rate was 80%; today it stands at just 58%.

But now the CDC’s views on the subject may change all that – maybe. For the next month or so, the CDC is looking for public comment before finalizing these guidelines next year. Even so, no one can force parents to have their boy circed so who knows how effective the CDC’s pronouncements will be. Neither physicians nor parents are the blindly obedient sheep they were thirty years ago when it comes to following directives delivered from on high.

Here’s another one of my little polls to get your views on the subject; I’ll publish the results in a future posting.




Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll

HIV Has Been Around Almost A Century – Or Longer

HIV Has Been Around Almost A Century – Or Longer

Most of us think that the HIV virus has been around since the early 1980’s when it hit the gay population like a genocide-size tsunami. But an international team of archeological researchers who go back in time to discover origins of epidemics have recently uncovered that the HIV virus may have been around since the 1920’s or even as far back as the 1890’s. The origination point has been traced to what was then the Belgium Congo, a colony of Belgium, and its capital city, then known as Leopoldville, named after the King of Belgium at the time.

A huge sex trade to satisfy a mostly male population of laborers, rapid population growth and unsterilized needles used in health clinics probably spread the virus among locales. It then went viral beyond the confines of the Congo to cities throughout Africa and elsewhere as a result of the rather sophisticated Belgium-financed railways which brought in a million people a year, again mainly men, to work in and exploit the mineral rich and agriculturally abundant region.

HIV is an actually mutated version of a chimpanzee virus, called simian immunodeficiency virus, which could have made the species-jump through contact with infected blood by native handlers who ate the chimpanzees as food. It was one of the mutations of this original virus, HIV-1, that became the epidemic killer the world, including the U.S., became painfully aware of decades later.

To this I’ll add my totally unsubstantiated two cents: remember the polio vaccine many of us got as a kid? Well, early forms of the vaccine were made from viruses cultured in – you guessed it – monkey brains.

Maybe another connection, ya think?