Chat Rooms

This post was originally going to be about my problems with casual sex, but I started writing and realized that what I really have problems with are chat rooms.

I just feel like a loser when I’m hanging out in them. I could be doing other things with my time, such as going out and meeting people. And inevitably, when I’m sitting at my computer, logged into a room, someone will open a private window with me and ask, “What are you looking for?” If I’m not there with the express intention of finding a hookup, then the intention is usually at least latent, and it’s easily awakened by the arrival of someone who seems within walking distance and has attractive “stats” and a decent-looking picture. (Therein lies the most well-known problem with chat rooms, of course: what you see isn’t always what you get.)

It’s exciting, the exploration of an unexplored body. And at least half the time, my expectations are met and it winds up being enjoyable. But post-ejaculation, everything changes. Immediately after pleasure is achieved, and I mean as soon as I collapse in sexual fulfillment, I want the experience to end. It’s not just the usual post-sexual androbiological desire to curl up into a ball and sleep; I actually feel embarrassed and ashamed, and I just want to get out of there (or, if I’m hosting, I want the guy to leave). And once I’m alone once more, I sometimes shake my head and tell myself, “Jeez… I did it again.”

And despite those negative feelings, it still winds up happening again.

Why? Why do I do it? Mainly because I have an almost manic desire to make up for lost time. I’m a guy who — except for a couple of quick, furtive experiences — didn’t have sex with anyone until I was 24. On top of that, I was always a good, angelic kid who set all these restrictions and boundaries on myself and my behavior. I never rebelled, except passive-aggressively. The first time I got drunk was at the beginning of my second year of college. I smoked half a cigarette once, when I was 22, and I don’t think I fully inhaled. I’ve never smoked pot or any other drug, and I have no desire to. Yet I enjoy sex, and I’m often conscious of the passage of time, and so I feel like I have a lot of ground to recover and a lot of territory to explore.

But why chat rooms? Well, if you read me regularly, you know that I can be shy around strangers. Also, there’s only one gay bar in Jersey City, and I hear it’s kind of a dump. The next-closest bars are in Manhattan, which means I’d have to hop onto the PATH train, walk over, and spend five bucks on a drink. Which would be okay, except that lately I’m always on the edge of being broke, and the whole experience is a lot to go through on a weeknight if my ultimate goal is just sex that might or might not happen. So when I get the urge, it’s just cheaper, more convenient, and a lot quicker to sit down at the computer and see who’s there.

On the other hand, I feel so lame when I do it. I’m just sitting there at home when I could be doing something else. Is it better to sit on the couch and watch TV, interacting with nobody? Not really, but at least when I’m watching TV, I feel like my dignity is intact. I don’t feel that way when I’m in a chat room; I feel like a coward.

I need places to go and things to do. I need activities. In college I was always busy — classes, three singing groups, a part-time job, an occasional newspaper column, and I lived in a dorm with a bunch of friends. Boredom wasn’t really a problem. Today it is. If I’m sitting in my apartment on a weeknight, and “The West Wing” isn’t on, I get cabin fever, and there’s nothing to do in Jersey City on a weeknight. Nothing.

In posting this entry, I feel like I’m going to lose lots of respect. I feel like there are people who are going to look down on me and cluck their tongues at this behavior and think to themselves how pathetic I am. And you know what? I do feel pathetic. I wish I could please those people; I wish I could be a responsible, respectful person so that all those innocent closeted 18-year-olds would respect me. Sometimes I really and truly wish I were as innocent and clean as, say, Closet Boy.

I do want to say something, though. Anonymous sex does not mean unsafe sex. I’m not stupid. For the record, I’m as clean as a bar of Ivory Soap. It’s not the number of sexual partners that determines what happens to you; it’s what you do with your sexual partners. Which is riskier — to have safe, protected sex with lots of people, or to have one unsafe encounter with a single person?

And I miss the emotional connection that comes from sex that is based in love. But if I wait to fall in love, I’ll be waiting a long time. I don’t know if I’ve been truly in love with someone yet; it doesn’t seem to come easily for me, and I’m picky. In the meantime, I spent too much of my childhood and adolescence repressing everything inside myself to go back to such self-imposed puritannicism.

Tell me: is there something wrong with me? Because part of me thinks there is.

What a Country!

In case you didn’t know, dear readers, Blogger was fucked the entire weekend. We blogging folks could post, but our posts wouldn’t show up on our websites until, well, now. And reading a two-day old post is like eating a piece of stale bread, so there was no point in posting things that you wouldn’t be able to see. So here’s a brand-new post. Wow, Meg was prescient.

Anyway. Let me tell you about my weekend and the breakthrough I had.

On Saturday night I went to a friend’s surprise birthday party at a gay couple’s apartment in the East Village. In attendance were mostly gay UVA alums. Afterward, several of us went to Wonderbar. This included Arch and Carrot, the physically mismatched couple whom I’ve mentioned before; the birthday boy; and a guy whom I’d just met that night, named Ken, who for a short time dated a good gay friend of mine at UVA but whom I’d never actually met.

I was being the usual neurotic variation of myself that appears whenever I’m at a gay bar. There was a healthy dose of attractive men, some of whom I’d make eye contact with for half a second and that’s all. The small group of us was in the back of the bar because Arch and Carrot wanted to sit down. This left me with a bad vantage point, no place to sit, and no wall to lean against, so I decided to take my beer and stand by myself against the wall at the front of the place. I foolishly thought that maybe if I stood there alone, people would come up to me and strike up conversations, or that at the very least I’d look kinda cool standing there alone with a beer bottle in my hand. I was conscious of the way I was holding the bottle — some people grip a beer bottle at the thicker, lower part, while others hold it higher up, wrapping their fingers around the narrow shaft. Either way you hold it, when your arm is down, the beer bottle tilts upward a bit. There’s something sexy about a guy holding a beer bottle.

But nobody came up to me, and my neck kind of froze up so that it was difficult for me to even turn my head and look at anybody next to me.

After a little while I went back to my friends. Time went by. I was talking with Arch and Ken about how difficult it is for me to cruise people. I’m terrified by it. It feels like a clinical phobia. I’m cruisophobic. Anyway, I was telling them all about this. I said to them, “I don’t even really want to talk to people, you know? I just want to get to the sex.” And Arch said, “Everyone is here for sex. But you can only get there by talking to people first.” Ken said to me, “Is there anyone here who you have your eye on?”

There was this black-haired guy with a long-sleeve black t-shirt and blue jeans with whom I’d made eye contact at various points throughout the night. In the dim light of Wonderbar, he looked sort of attractive. He wasn’t stunning, but he was decent-looking. Now he was sitting on a couch near us. I tilted my head in his direction. Ken turned around surreptitiously. “He’s cute!” he said. “You should talk to him.”

“No,” I snapped. “I can’t. I just can’t do it. I’m terrified.” And I was.

The two of them kept pushing me to talk to him. I told them how hard it is for me to start a conversation with someone, how I just could not do it. But I’d look over and I’d make eye contact with him again. At one point I walked to another part of the bar, with my back to him. When I returned to my friends, Ken said, “Jeff, he was looking you up and down.” “But I have no idea what to say!” I said.

They kept trying to push me into it, and I grew more scared and irate and snappish. It reminded me of this time back in summer camp, when I was 10 years old, and this one loud overbearing fat girl with too much makeup wanted me to ask her cute shy petite friend to the end-of-summer dance. Her forcefulness collided with my absolute resoluteness against the notion, and I wound up in a tear-filled panic, not knowing what to do, just wanting everyone to leave me alone. That’s how I felt on Saturday night. I was nervous and embarrassed, made even more so because I could tell that the guy knew what was going on. Arch and Ken would look over at him and then they’d look back at me and talk to me. He had to know.

At one point he got up, and a little while later he was sitting on another seat, with an empty space next to him. Finally I decided what the hell. I sat down next to him. I touched the fabric on the part of the seat next to my back, and it was wet from someone’s spilled drink. “Looks like someone spilled something,” I said. He laughed a little. “Yeah,” he said.

Several long moments of silence. Okay, that was a dead end. What do I say now?

“So, are you from New York?” I said.

“Actually, I’m from Portugal,” he said, in a foreign accent, surprising me.

That got the ball rolling. It turned out he was an NYU grad student getting a degree in finance and he lived on the Upper East Side. We talked for a while. Eventually he said, “Can I buy you a drink?” I said sure, but I just asked for a glass of water — my stomach felt full, and yet I needed to have something to sip. During the time he was gone, I leaned over to Arch, and I told him that this was easier than I’d thought. “Tell him he’s cute,” he said. “He’ll probably tell you you’re cute too, and then ask if you can kiss him.”

The guy came back with a glass of water for me and a Heineken for himself, and we talked some more. Then my friends came by and told me they were leaving. They left.

His left thigh was pressing against my right thigh, and as we were talking, I leaned in closer and closer. I found an appropriate lull in the conversation, and I looked at him and said, “You’re a cute guy.” He had an expression on his face as if he hadn’t understood me, so I said it again. “You’re cute,” I said. “You are too,” he said. Long silence.

“Can I kiss you?” I said. Again he couldn’t understand me, so I said it again. “Can I kiss you.” “Sure,” he said, and we kissed. It lasted about five seconds. I got some tongue. And then he pulled away.

We talked some more. His hand found its way to my inner thigh, where he rested it, and I returned the favor. Each of our hands was achingly close to the other’s prize package, and I had my arm around his shoulders. We sat there like that for a little bit. Then he said, “Excuse me for a moment. I need to use the toilet.” He got up and waited on the bathroom line. When he came back, he sat down and we resumed our manual acrobatics.

And then he said, “You know, I think I am going to go home.”

“Hm?” I said, knowing full well what he’d said.

“I think I’m going to go home.”

Oh.

“Oh. Okay,” I said.

“Maybe I will see you here again,” he said. Then we said goodbye, and he left.

Well. I see. That was interesting. Here it was, after 3:00, and I was alone at Wonderbar. I felt a combination of things — happy and excited and proud of myself for having gotten up the guts to talk to someone, but puzzled as to why he left. But the puzzlement and dashed expectations were overpowered by the pride I was feeling. I’d passed a crucial milestone.

And yet… I resumed looking around, seeing if there were any other attractive guys to talk to. There were a few, but I couldn’t get myself to talk to them, and it was late. There was one hottie in particular who had been talking to one of my friends earlier, but I felt inferior to him, so I didn’t try to talk to him. Instead I decided it was time to leave. I’d accomplished enough for one night. So I left.

When I got back to my apartment it was past four in the morning. I got online and wound up finding a guy whom I’d met up with before. I went over to his place and wound up releasing all the sexual energies that had been building up inside me over the course of the evening. It was pretty great sex.

When I left his place and walked back to my apartment, around six in the morning, it was completely light out. I walked past an empty field surrounded by a fence, and in the distance, I could see the back of the Statue of Liberty, her torch still lit in the morning sky. I stopped walking and I just stood there, staring at her. I thought, holy shit, I’ve been up all night and I finally talked to someone at a bar and he was a foreigner and now I’m walking home from having great unexpected sex and I’m looking at this world-famous icon that people all over the planet would jump fences and dodge bullets and stow away on ships and risk their lives to see. Wow.

God bless America!

Is it just me, or have other people with online journals been seeing an incredible number of sex-related AOL search requests in their referral stats lately? This has been happening to me for the last two weeks. I know Jonno was having a similar problem recently.

Is this happening to anyone else?