Hookups

It is midnight on Sunday, 21st March, 2010. I walk down the street from my apartment, pulling my leather jacket tight around me to guard against the cold. Streetlights are mirrored in the wet pavement, and my feet make a squishing sound as I walk. There are no cars on the street, and the traffic lights flash red, too tired to bother with their cycle through green and yellow.


I, however, am not tired. I’m one part terrified, three parts jazzed, six parts horny. Some part of my mind is issuing warnings: “You don’t know this guy! This is crazy! Anything could happen!” The new part of me I’ve just unleashed runs roughshod over those concerns, and I stride onward.

When I reach his street, I become very nervous indeed, my whole body shaking, but I forge through the fear. I approach the back door of his house which, appropriately, he has left unlocked. I walk through this strange man’s kitchen, into his candlelit living room, where he is sitting on the couch, facing away from me. I round the couch and stand in front of him, saying nothing. He reaches toward my crotch, unbuttons my jeans, and silently pulls down my pants. I’m wearing briefs.

*

In the seven days since coming out, I have slept with two men who I had never met before, except online. I used to be one of those people who “only did relationships”. I thought one-night-stands were tawdry – I wanted a deeper, more emotional connection, I said, not “just sex”.

Now I just want sex.

I tell myself that I am making up for ten years lost time, a decade of denial in which I couldn’t even accept that I wanted to make love to other men. Others tell me I am going through what is colloquially known in the gay community as the “slut phase”, trying out all those things I always wanted to do but never could bring myself to admit that I wanted.

The most surprising thing about these experiences? I feel no shame whatsoever. It feels great. I love it. Far from the seamy, empty experience I had imagined, anonymous sex with no emotional connection, I am finding these fleeting encounters immensely fulfilling, almost, dare I say it, spiritual. There is something boundlessly exciting about sharing your body with someone else - someone with whom you have no other connection but the carnal act. I find it sensuous and titillating, and not at all sleazy.

Of course, I take precautions - I'm careful to be safe, I don't drink or do drugs (and never have), so I am in complete control of my faculties, and I always let someone know where I'm going. But the more I do this the more the fear drops away, and excitement and anticipation becomes the default mode. I wonder who I am going to meet next, what their body will be like (and men's bodies are so various and fascinating!), what parts of their life we will share with each other during our brief encounter.

It's magnificent.