Trevor and Dana, August 2003

The parties I threw in college were debauched. Ask anyone. I strove for an atmosphere of carnality, of savage lust softened by a tacky porno glaze like those hazy, 80s Vaseline-blurred photos in Playboy. People got laid at other parties. But at mine you got naked and ran around licking people and getting licked back for no reason. You tested your boundaries, not in a gross orgy kinda way, but in a playful, light-hearted way, like it all was a big joke. As if nothing you did could actually hurt you or change who you were in any way. You put your clothes back on when it was over and went home unscathed, unchanged and with a smile on your face.

That’s the way I remember it anyway.

The theme of my 21st birthday party was “porno glam.” The invitation bore a the logo from my college sex column—livid red lips curled back over white teeth in a playful sneer—and encouraged everyone to dress like a porn star going to the Academy Awards. Most people didn’t really follow through on the dress code, but it set a tone. There are photos of me getting spanked by each and every one of my friend; of straight guys having their dicks painted with edible body paint in my kitchen; of my friend Dana holding my arms behinds me with my pants down for some reason.

Of all my friends, Dana and her boyfriend Trevor were always the most willing to get naked and do ridiculous things. They were the kinkiest people I knew at the time. They were swingers, they were hedonists, sadists, masochists, all that. I was constantly amazed by the lengths to which they pushed each other, sexually. And I was constantly jealous.

Dana and I were close, and Trevor and I had a playfully antagonistic relationship. But there was nothing flirty about it. I knew he was bisexual. I’d actually had a brief, non-sexual…thing with his ex-boyfriend. But as far as I knew, there was no sexual tension between us. I loved Dana too much, and he, more often than not, was too cruel to her to be anything more than my friend’s bad boyfriend, the guy we all knew she’d be better off without.

Knowing this, however, didn’t stop most of our circle of friends from ending up in bed with the two of them—or just with him, as we found out years later. He was the devil none of us could resist, a cruel little man whose sexuality dwarfed all logic, tricking us into ignoring his softening belly, his obvious misogyny, his utter lack of style or taste.

It was a sort of sisterhood, the girls that did it with Trevor and Dana. Occasionally a boyfriend would be invited to watch or they’d do the whole wife swap thing. But I wasn’t aware of any guys getting involved with them. It seemed to me that Trevor’s bisexual phase had run its course, and he just dredged the fact of it up every now and then to sort of reaffirm his shameless pervery.

* * * *

I’d always imagined sex with Trevor as a sort of act of self-degradation. I’d imagined him lording over us with his cock, using it as a weapon, his love feeling a little bit like spite, like punishment for something his mom or some dude in high school did to him. I’d imagined him dominating, humiliating, owning. But in my bed he lay on his back and whimpered.

The three of us—Dana, Trevor and I—had snuck away to my bedroom as the party died down. People were leaving, buttoning up their flies and stumbling home, while we plunged a little deeper into whatever wickedness my 21st birthday party had loosed on the air.

Dana lay at her boyfriend’s side, stroking his cock while I slipped on a pair of black rubber gloves. She was gorgeous, naked and confident in a way I’d never seen before, bathed in the warm glow of this tacky red light bulb I’d put in my bedside lamp for the party. We’d played with her first. I’d wanted to feel her clitoris and her G spot, the urethral sponge that mirrors a man’s prostate. Trevor had shown me, guiding my hand with his, our fingers inside her, and then I’d watched him eat her out.

Now he lay naked at the foot of my bed, his legs spread, his cock hard, while I knelt on the floor in front of him.

During the Inquisition, they said that the devil demanded that witches kiss his asshole. So that’s what I did. I pushed Trevor’s thighs back, and licked his hole while Dana dripped lube into my outstretched, gloved hand. She took his glasses off his face.

There was no discussion about what we were about to do. It simply happened, because no one said, Stop. It was where we were being lead.

I slid my index finger inside Trevor, pressing gently again the tight pucker of his ass with the flat of my fingertip and slipping it in. I inserted a second finger and a third, and his breath caught and he asked me to slow down. By the time I had four fingers in him, he was moaning and arching back slightly. My hand was in up to the knuckles, the widest part, and I slid my thump in and out of him.

It’s his moaning I remember most vividly. The soft, helpless little cries that sort of crept out of him, involuntarily. The way this feeling almost infantilized him, this man who had seemed so formidable, who, I realized, I’d always been a little bit afraid of. He suckled at Dana’s breast, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him suck his own thumb.

When it became clear that we couldn’t go any further, we all crawled up to the head of the bed, nearer the pillows, and Trevor surprised me by sucking my cock. After a few moments he sat up, stroking himself and said he wanted to cum all over Dana and I. But he couldn’t. None of us came that night.

* * * *

The years have changed the way I think of that night.

A few months after I moved to New York, Dana sent me a text message in the middle of the night saying that Trevor had beaten her and that she was scared. It was something we all should have seen coming. She’s left him now, after four years of back-and-forth. But the memory of that night still chafes. I wonder if the others, our friends who slept with Trevor and Dana, feel the same way: as if somehow we were complicit in what happened to her. As if by sleeping with them, we were a part of their destructive relationship. We allowed her to stay with him. We let him abuse her, emotionally, psychologically, and in the end physically. I wonder if they carry that guilt as well.

The Slutty Dance Major, Spring 2003

Jason is a dance major. He’s tall and he has a goatee and he’s in my bed. And he has a reputation.

Dan, Spring 2002

One thing I cannot seem to forget about the night Dan and I finally fooled around is that earlier in the evening I’d been wearing a black Kangol cap and several jeweled horseshoe necklaces à la Carrie Bradshaw. Seriously. Small town gay chic—or something. But honestly, if that’s the most embarrassing detail in a sex story, well, I won’t lose much sleep tonight

Random Internet Guy, December 2001

It’s 10pm and I’m driving around the back roads of my hometown listening to Patti Smith and trying to decide whether or not to meet this guy I’ve been chatting with on Gay.com.

Darren, Spring 2002

Darren is bigger than me, older than me probably by at least 15 years. I guess you could even call him a daddy-type, or, like, a hot uncle-type, except for the fact that he’s running around at a gay club with his shirt off, wearing a sailor’s cap. Watching him, clearly high on X and dancing to gay house anthems, I should be wondering why someone doesn’t sit him down and tell him to act his age. But I’m not. I’m rapt with lust.

Glenn, Spring 2001

New York, 2005
“Ok, if life was a Wal-Mart, what item would best describe your relationship?”

Glenn and I look at each other. Similes, analogies, expressing a point elegantly, expressing himself at all, words in general; these are not his strong points. I’m gonna have to take this one.

“Uh. Gum. A pack of gum. Or, like, anything you pick up in the checkout line. You know, an impulse purchase. Something you don’t really need or want but it’s there and you just buy it.”

Trent, Fall 1999

Summer Cruz has been trying to fix me up with a Marine she knows. Summer’s in my psychology class. She’s a senior as well, but she’s a couple years older than me. I think maybe she flunked a few grades or dropped out for a year or something. She’s dating a Marine and one of his buddies is gay, apparently. She showed Trent a photo of me that she took in class one day and now he’s dying to meet me.

I’ve never seen a photo of Trent and I’m not particularly interested in meeting him.

Marco, June 1999

The summer before my senior year of high school, I went to Europe for three weeks with a group from a different school in our county. The woman organizing the trip, that school’s art teacher, went to our church, and since my school was smaller and poorer and generally less organized—the teachers less than enthusiastic about anything other than our soccer team—she worked it out so that I could go with their group.

This was June 1999. Ten years ago. I was 16.

The List

I can’t exactly remember when I started keeping a list of all the people I’ve had sex with. I know in high school I kept a list of all the guys I’d kissed in the marble composition book I used as a journal. But I don’t think it was until college that the concept of my “number” occurred to me and I started keeping track. Honestly, I didn’t really have much of a number until my junior year, so there really wasn’t much to keep track of.

Now, almost exactly ten years since my very first sexual experience, those names fill up an entire page of another marble composition book. It’s a particularly roughed-up, dog-eared page with three columns of names, plus a few scribbled in the margins. It’s marked with a battered purple post-it, for easy access whenever a new name needs to be added to the roster. Many of the names are out of sequence, since I don’t exactly update The List as often as I acquire new sexual partners, jotting down the last couple months’ worth of conquests in no particular order whenever it occurs to me. But The List is accurate, and of the roughly 74 names—I say “roughly” because there are instances that I’ve included that some might not consider sex in the strictest terms, and others that I’ve omitted for the same reason—there is not one that I cannot account for.

I’ve often thought about upgrading the list to a less destructible medium—like I said, that page is pathetically weathered. Maybe a spreadsheet. Put the whole thing in some semblance of chronological order. And it’s from that impulse to reorganize, and in a sense reevaluate, that this blog was born.

Each week I’ll be posting the harrowing tale behind one of the names on the list. I’m going to try, to the best of my ability, to tell these stories chronologically, but I’m not making any promises. Many of the names—those that I remember anyway—will be changed insofar as the parties concerned are identifiable. I’m certainly not looking to get sued, but I’m also not out to get back at any of these boys. I’m just telling my stories. And if any of you do find your way to this blog I guarantee anything I’ve written about you pales in comparison to the wealth of potentially embarrassing personal revelations I’m making about myself. Having said that, something tells me I won’t be hearing from “Random Internet Guy” or “Sugarland Hobbit’s” lawyers.

And, of course, The List is bound to get longer.