Three Nine One: Housewives

 I've mentioned erotic art before-- specifically, the graphic novels of Michael Manning, which began to appear in the 1990s. Manning's stories (e.g., Tranceptor, The Spider Garden, Hydrophidian, Cathexis) are...gender-fluid cyberpunk goth erotica. Something like that, in any case. The artwork itself is excellent, and it does remind me a bit of Matt Howarth's sci-fi work. 

Manning's work is hard to get these days. There aren't very many publishers of erotic graphic novels left, and credit card processors are refusing to process payments these days for erotica of any kind. The new century is a place where Gen Z "influencers" look with puritanical disdain on erotica, a place where sex scenes in novels (especially in "romantasy") are (non-ironically) called "smut" and dismissed as politically suspect. 

It's really very hard to find good erotica these days. I've been told that there's at least some new trans and queer erotica being written or drawn, but those are alien genres for me. And even in those genres, visual erotica seems to be suspect-- if only because beauty itself is now suspect, and no one wants to be accused of "fetishizing" bodies or preferences. 

Having said that, I'll note that I found a series of rather good erotic graphic novels from the early Noughts. The series is called "Housewives at Play", and it seems to have appeared from c.2000 through c. 2008. I've found a website (joinforjoy.com) that has several issues posted, and they're worth looking at. As best I can tell, the issues form a more or less ongoing story. The posted issues begin with Nr. 4 in the series, and form a (largely) connected story up through Nr. 18. I haven't been able to find the first three issues, and the story wasn't complete by Nr. 18. The website has most, but not all, of the issues between Nr. 4 and Nr. 18. I can infer how the storyline began, but I have no idea how (or if) it ended. I do wish it was still around.

The artist and creator of "Housewives at Play" is supposed to be "Rebecca". I have zero idea if "Rebecca" was actually female, and I know nothing at all about the person behind the name. The series was published by Eros Comix in Seattle, and I don't know whether the publisher is still in business. If anyone out there over the aether knows anything about the publisher, please do pass it along.

What is there to say about "Housewives at Play"? Well, the art is much better than usual. "Rebecca" did have an eye for lovely women, and her "My Girls" special issue does some excellent pen-and-ink portraits of her main characters. The body types are very much to my taste-- tall, toned, slender, and leggy. The characters don't wax, but they do neatly trim their pubic hair, so we're not stuck with a 1970s Land of Bush O'Plenty look.  The stories began in black and white, but seem to have transitioned to colour at some point. Rebecca's art is at least as good as anything in mainstream comics art.

The stories? Well, semi-comic suburban/pop culture lesbian BDSM is probably the best description. (I couldn't bring myself to use "tongue-in-cheek" here. I just couldn't.) The main character is a bored, 40-year old suburban housewife named Catherine Mitchell. One day, out of nowhere, Catherine is violated by her best friend Patty and turned into a lesbian sex slave for Patty and Patty's newlywed neighbor Beth. Catherine then acquires her teen daughter's best friend Jennifer as her own sex slave, although Jennifer and Catherine's beautiful daughter Melissa (both carefully and repeatedly described as eighteen) are themselves secretly a couple. Hilarity ensues, as does lots of transgressive sex. 

At some point, Catherine, Melissa, and Catherine's incestuous younger sister Lynn are kidnapped by the staff at a local Victoria's (errr..."Veronica's") Secret and sold to teen pop princess Bratty Sneers (Brittany Spears, obviously), teen idol Kandy Korn (Mandy Moore?) and country music idol Fate Will (Faith Hill, I assume). There's also Catherine's ex-lover Stephanie, a Native American stripper/escort who dances under the name Princess Poke-My-Hiney...plus random beautiful guest stars of 18-21 who are all seriously sapphic, blithely promiscuous, and open to trying pretty much anything involving lesbian BDSM. Males rarely appear, although there is a subplot where Fate Will orders a dozen of her ranch hands to impregnate Melissa so that Fate's husband Grim (Tim McGraw) will return from touring and think Fate's given him a child...and Fate won't have to risk her looks and figure with a pregnancy or allow anyone male to have sex with her. 

The stories are hot, yes. They're also fairly funny, and all parties, top and bottom, enjoy the BDSM. Even the subplot where Melissa is being bred by the cowboys is only an excuse for Princess Poke-My-Hiney to rescue her and have hot sex with Melissa ("Gosh, her taste reminds me of Catherine...I wonder where Cathy is these days!"). Everyone loves (extremely) large plastic strap-on dildos, and all actual males are mocked for having tiny penises. All the girls have foot fetishes, too-- which may or not say something about "Rebecca", or at least say something about fashionable fetishes in the Noughts. 

If I have any real criticism it's that the various girls who are topping Catherine or Melissa or Lynn or Jennifer do a lot of sexual humiliation based on slurs ("Get over here, you cunt-loving little lezzie slut pig"). That part seems...unnecessary and mean-spirited. I wanted Melissa and/or Jennifer to tell the older characters that they were all "lezzie sluts" and that there was nothing at all wrong with that...and that they were proud bottoms, but not "pigs". I also had to wince a bit when Fate Will hires Princess Poke-My-Hiney as an escort and makes her talk in 1930s cowboy movie-stereotypical "redskin" dialect. Beyond that, "Housewives at Play" is fun.

Amazon does have some collected editions of "Housewives at Play", but they're asking something like $140 for a collection of issues Nr. 1-4. I like the series, but I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a paperbound graphic novel that's nearly twenty years old. 

If any of you out there over the aether know anything about the publishing history of "Housewives at Play" or about its author/artist, I hope you'll let me know. I'd like to know if "Rebecca" ever finished the story, and I'd like to see more of her art.

Next time I post here, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into why it's no longer possible to have any sexual preferences and why kink-shaming is now seen as perfectly okay. I want to write about why I can't imagine ever asking a partner to do anything specific or ever telling a partner about any particular interests I might have. I once heard a gay acquaintance described as "so far deep in the closet he can see Narnia", and I want to write about how that phrase can be applied across the gender-orientation spectrum these days...and about how we seem to be losing any sense that sex is worth doing, let alone exploring.

Three Seven Nine: Berlin

Last evening I discovered a new FMTY girl's channel at YouTube. She calls herself "Lucy Huxley" and her channel is called "The Whore's Bedroom". 

She's a Vancouver girl, an ex-ballet student who's ended up as a Berlin-based escort. Her YouTube videos all begin her sitting cross-legged on her bed in Berlin and talking about her life and career:"My name is Lucy. I'm a whore, and this is my bedroom." She talks about how she sees her job and her clients, and she tells stories from her life. 

Lovely girl-- auburn hair, maybe not quite thirty, lovely eyes, wry sense of humor. If I sound like I have a crush on her, well...of course I do. I like her voice, and I love the deadpan introduction: My name is Lucy. I'm a whore. I do like the way she makes the word sound. My own parasocial voices whisper to me that while I'd never have the money to book her, she'd be very likely to be someone I could have a conversation with. 

Huxley, she says-- she chose Aldous Huxley's name for her own work name. Well, I do like that. I like a few of Aldous Huxley's books ("Crome Yellow" and "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" and "The Devils of Loudon") rather a lot, and for whatever it's worth, Aldous Huxley died on my birthday. How's that for a connection?

She explains in her first video that she has a firm policy-- any booking of three hours or more has to come with lunch or dinner, since she's a girl who gets hungry easily and becomes irritable when hungry. My first thought was...steak or Szechuan? It's all too easy to imagine booking her for four hours and spending half of the time talking over dinner.

She says that she prides herself on her Girlfriend Experience talents, and I have no doubt that she'd make a wonderful companion. Again, this is all very parasocial, but listening to her stories makes me believe that I'd feel secure enough with her to explain what my interests are and ask for the things that would give me pleasure. The sense of humor she has in her videos is dry as the Atacama Desert, and that's exactly to my tastes. 

I did follow the link to her Twitter feed, and she has excellent legs and a very knowing smile. That may well be all GFE marketing, but that's fine. I'd love to be able to talk with someone again, to be able to talk to a lovely girl who'd be willing to listen to me. She says that she's always liked older men-- ever since she was a budding ballerina --because, yes, they have financial security, but also because their stories are better. She says that she's never laughed at or mocked a client, and that she understands that many of her clients are just a bit afraid. Well, that's something that did make me sigh. You've read my last several entries. You'll understand that here in this grim and charmless year 2024 I am anxious and afraid of the idea of telling a lovely Young Companion anything at all about myself and my interests. 

Now one of her videos explained that she's based in Berlin and can visit clients all across the EU, and that she could certainly visit friends and family in Canada-- but that she's excluded by law from ever going to the US. Apparently, if you're a sex worker the US won't allow you entry (even though sex work is legal in Germany). I hadn't known that. Yet one more thing about US law that makes me shake my head in disbelief. It makes me very uncomfortable, too, that US Border Control monitors social media to help identify sex workers (even nude models) who might be trying to enter the US, even as nothing more than tourists. 

Well, I could never afford Ms. Huxley, but I do enjoy her YouTube videos, and I wish I could look across a table at someone like her and just say, This is what and who I am, and this is what I enjoy. Is that something you could work with? 

Here I am tonight, listening to hard rains falling over my city. In some better world Ms. Huxley and I would be talking over Campari-sodas about games and kinks and flirting shamelessly. I really would like to have a girl in my life and bed whose judgment I'm not afraid of, and whose skills and discretion I'd trust.

Three Six Four: Ghosts

 I haven't been here in a while, and I do apologize for that. This blog is a project I do want to keep up, and I hope to write here often enough to attract comments and questions.

I'm thinking tonight about ghosts. Not the ghost girls who've been part of my life and still haunt my dreams, but about the ghosts of erotica past.

I've been saying for rather a while now that erotica seems to be fading as a genre. There seems to be less and less erotica available. Porn clips at streaming services, sure. PornHub and its fellows are readily available. But actual erotica-- written or drawn or painted, not put on video or conjured up via AI? The boundaries seem to be shrinking.

I hadn't gone to Literotica for a while-- well, yes, several years --and my thought when I did go back this week was that there seems to be a dearth of new stories. And there seems to be an utter drought of inventive stories. No one seems to be writing anything elegant, transgressive, stylish, powerful. 

The boundaries of erotica seem to be collapsing towards the ordinary. What erotica I can find is flat and dull. The link between the erotic and the darkly elegant seems to be broken. Even S/M stories are just...boring. There's no longer an association between S/M (I dislike BDSM as a term) and style and elegance. Where there is any attempt to be transgressive, it veers towards urban punk and not towards decadence. And for me, decadence-- rooted in class and style --was always key.

Tonight I'm thinking of two figures from my past-- Michael Manning and Olivia de  Berardinis. Both of them erotic artists whose work meant something to me in the days of my lost youth. Olivia began work in the l970s doing her "O Cards"-- greeting cards with wickedly clever and highly erotic art based in decadence and dark elegance. Michael Manning appeared in the mid-1990s. His work combined goth, manga, cyberpunk, and gender fluidity. I miss both artists.

Olivia's work came under attack in the early '90s, if I recall correctly. A lot of her '70s and early '80s work had references to s/m, certainly, but also clever references to drugs. By the '90s, cocaine was no longer a chic quirk or erotic accessory, but a Social Menace. She was pressured to discard much of her early work, and her work became ever less explicit throughout the '90s. Once upon a time, I'd buy several dozen O Cards at a time, some for my own collection, but most to be sent to lovely young companions during correspondence. That's all gone, now. I have no idea what happened to the O Cards I saved, and there's nothing out there today from her that has the wicked and elegant darkness that her '70s and '80s work had. I've seen interview snippets where she apologizes for the explicitness of her paintings and cards. That's deeply sad.

Michael Manning's graphic novels-- "The Spider Garden", "In a Metal Web", "Hydrophidian", "Illuminagerie", "Tranceptor", etc. --were amazingly erotic and engrossing. His heroines crossed through boundaries of gender and sensation into some very dark and elegant places. He incorporated cyberpunk and biomechanics motifs as well as lovely Oriental architecture. For a while, late in the 1990s, he was with a now-vanished publisher called Eurotica, which is where I discovered his graphic work. But in the world of the Noughts and beyond, he found it increasingly hard to market his work. 

The Culture Wars caught up with Michael Manning, I suppose. His version of gender fluidity was based on sci-fi and fetishism rather than trans ideology-- he had characters who were self-described "androgynes", fabulous creatures whose "trans" status meant "trans-human". His androgynes were languid, willowy, goth-Heian, cruel in their beauty, and eerie. That didn't help Manning in the current age. And late-capitalism caught up with him, too. It became harder and harder for him to get credit card transaction companies to process orders. In a world of on-line marketing, he was hamstrung.  I haven't seen anything new by him in years. I can look at his "Cathexis" collection and feel like I'm looking at lovely art and wicked stories from a lost age.

There's less and less erotica out there that wants to take chances. There's less and less erotica that wants to link class, style, and darkness. Experimentation is frowned upon, fetishism (either in the anthropological or the private club sense) is rejected. There's less and less out there that I find erotic. 

And so here we are, in the spring of the Year Twenty-Three, focused on politics and economics, and with no interest in the possibilities of the erotic.  

Three Four Seven: Morning, Rain

 I've posted this before. It is one of my very favourite stories from Jill in Wellington. It's been eight years or so since she first wrote me about all this, and the story is still amazing and shattering. It's been a major fantasy image for me ever since. I want it saved, and I only wish Jill could be here to tell me more.

Rain was pelting on the windows. i woke up on the floor, naked under a kid's Toy Story blanket. dry mouth, pounding headache, very shakey. i sat up, and looked around for my clothes. an asian girl was snoring quietly on the couch. there were bottles strewn everywhere. i felt sick and dizzy. my black jeans were in the corner of the room, covered in mud. my keys and $650 were scrunched into my pocket. weird, i never carried that much cash. i pulled them on, then vomited into a pot plant. i couldn't see the top i thought i'd been wearing, so i grabbed a men's shirt that was hanging on the back of a chair and buttoned it up. i had no idea where i was or what i'd been doing. 

i wandered through the small apartment. there were three men asleep in one of the bedrooms. in another bedroom was a few weed plants. i looked in the fridge and took out a beer. one of the men woke up and asked me if i wanted a smoke. we stood on the balcony, under the eaves, and smoked in silence. i have no idea who you are, he said. i just shrugged. you're wearing my shirt, he said. i just looked at him. i was feeling too dazed to put a sentence together. you can keep it, he said. he flicked his butt off the balcony, and offered me another. he lit it for me. 

can i see your tits, he asked. i nodded, and he undid the buttons on his shirt. can i take a photo, he asked. i nodded. he took out a battered iphone and took a few pictures, then started slowly sucking my nipples. he was tall, and dark haired. he had a beard and green eyes. i fucking love your tits, he said. 

do you want to suck my cock, he asked. i undid his jeans and took out his cock. i got on my knees and took him in my mouth. i was still feeling sick and almost vomited once or twice, but i loved the feeling of him in my mouth. 

do you want me to fuck you, he asked. i nodded, with his cock still in my mouth. i stood up and he bent me over the balcony and slowly peeled down my skinny, muddy jeans. he kissed my neck and fucked me in the rain. the motion of it made me vomit over the balcony. i moaned at him not to stop. it felt so fucking good. his hand was rubbing my clit and his cock was deep in my cunt. i had purged and felt light and pure as air. he came, and rested his body against mine. he pulled my jeans back up, and buttoned my shirt. he put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me. i walked to caitie's apartment in the rain barefoot. i wasn't so far from there, 4 or 5 blocks. 

Amazing story. I fell in love with it as soon as she sent it to me via email. I always loved stories from Jill's Slutty Party Girl past. Caitie, by the way, was Caitlin, the girl Jill was dating at the time.

It floored me a couple of years ago when she started backing away from stories of her past. It wasn't that she was rejecting having had promiscuous, often random, sex with strangers and Older Men in her teens and twenties, it was rejecting the stories themselves. She was crossing the bar into her early thirties, and she saw herself as a serious professional, as a chartered accountant at a high-powered boutique firm in Wellington-- and someone like that wouldn't have stories like that. Stories about sexual adventures and encounters, however powerful, however hot, weren't something she should be telling people. She didn't want to be tagged as a Posh Slutty Party Girl now that she owned a house and was trying to be made a partner in her firm. 

I live through stories-- my own and others'. Stories are the way we present ourselves to the world. I liked Slutty Party Jill, Jill who could sit at a Wellington bar or lie next to you in a hotel bed and tell stories of adventures and encounters. I could understand her not devoting her nights to drinking bourbon and sleeping around now that she had a professional life to build, but I couldn't (and still can't) understand her redacting her past. 

I do miss her, and I miss her stories. I miss her telling me stories that would become shared fantasies for us. I miss the sound of her voice taking me into her memories. Right now, here in my flat, I miss the days when lovely, long-legged, underwear-averse girls would share stories and lives with me.

Three Two Two: Celebration

 An email notice from Good Vibrations in San Francisco ("Educate, Explore, Empower") arrived this weekend. The notice informs me that May is "National Masturbation Month". What can I do but sigh in exasperation?

That notice isn't meant for me. I'm absolutely not the demographic for the ad, let alone the celebration itself. I'm male-- cishet male.  Everything that I am falls outside the target demographic. I'm a gentleman of a certain age, of course, and I'm sure that aging cishet white nominally-middle-class males aren't aren't the people Good Vibrations is targeting.

Educate, Explore, Empower... All good things, I suppose. But masturbation is not something that aging white cishet males are supposed to engage in...or even admit to. It's assumed in popular culture that males don't need any education in the activity, since it's something they've obviously been doing compulsively since something like age twelve. It's also assumed that any exploration in the activity by males, aging or otherwise, is by definition creepy and unacceptable. All male sexual fantasies these days are considered to be creepy and tantamount to sexual assault. And male participation in the activity-- in the Solitary Vice --is regarded as pathetic, creepy, and risible, and never as "empowering". 

Male participation in the Solitary Vice is regarded as a sign of sad failure, never about learning about pleasure and what to tell a partner about how your body responds. Sex toys and masturbation aids designed for women are seen as charming, sexy, something to be proud of. Women of the target demographic can talk about favourite vibrator or dildo preferences (Lelo seems to be the choice of hip, late-twenties young ladies in the know). It's impossible to imagine anyone male-- straight or gay --talking about Fleshlight or inflatable doll comparisons.

Consider the moment in "Stealing Beauty" where the young Liv Tyler is almost discovered masturbating by Jeremy Irons, who's in the next room. She's reasonably blasé about what she's doing. Her concern is about being seen three-quarters naked by a stranger, not about what she's doing. Compare that with the moment in "Pulp Fiction" when John Travolta mutters to himself that he won't risk making a pass at Uma Thurman-- his boss' wife --and that he'll just go home and jerk off. The audience is supposed to laugh at him. The very terms used for the male Solitary Vice ("jerk off" or "wank") are regarded as pathetic and open to instant mockery.

At my own advanced age, there isn't a way I could indulge in the Solitary Vice without feeling the instant lash of self-contempt. Admitting that I found physical pleasure in any activity (sexual or non-sexual) would be far too risky. I am not now and will never be in any sort of target demographic for someplace like Good Vibrations. I suppose I might be a target demographic for the Blue Pill or ED clips or penis pumps, but that's yet another reason why I'd never go into any shop that markets sex toys.

Here this May I have nothing whatsoever to celebrate about my body, or about sex, or about avenues to physical pleasure. I wish I could find a good cultural history of attitudes towards male masturbation in the last hundred or so years...or even since the 1960s. How did the male version of the Solitary Vice become so treated with contempt and derision? How did male desire itself become derided as inherently creepy? I'd read about those issues. A monograph with the full academic panoply of footnotes would mean something to me. Educate, Explore, Empower can't (by definition) mean anything to me.

Three Two One: Flags

I had a discussion not so very long ago about the idea of being "non-binary"-- NB or "enbee". A friend told me that she was beginning to regard herself as non-binary, and was considering coming out to her friends and family. I of course will fully support my friend in whatever she does about this, but I, as an aging roué, am very much out of the loop on just what NB is and what one does as a non-binary person.

My understanding is that NB is a gender identity, that it's an identity where someone doesn't identify as either "male" or "female". Well, fine. But what exactly does that mean? Is being NB a way of saying that you're able to move back and forth between social identities as M or F, or that you identify as something that's neither? Functionally, how does it differ from being bisexual or pansexual?

I spent a great deal of my academic life studying nationalism and the idea of nationality--- how nationalities are created and how they define themselves. How do "imagined communities" (Benedict Anderson's famous phrase about nationalities) define themselves? So, yes, any view I have of non-binary / NB people is going to be based on nationality studies, and I have no idea if that'll be a valid sort of comparison.

Any community that forms needs its markers. It needs criteria for who's inside and who's excluded. Any community needs a Secret Handshake or its own On Thursdays We Wear Pink rituals. It needs ways for members to find one another, and it needs ways to separate itself from outsiders. The rituals, the common symbols, help build and cement identity as well. It's more complicated that just thinking that any group creates its own uniforms, though of course they do. And the group's markers need to be recognized as identity markers by the outside world. There's that, too. 

Social identity requires social presentation. That's clear. If you want people to see you as a Serb, you use Cyrillic lettering and you go to an Orthodox church. Believing yourself to be something (anything!) doesn't give you any social position-- other Serbs and the rest of society have to see you as that as well.

Of course the markers are likely to be arbitrary and often trivial. A left ear piercing versus a right ear piercing. Handkerchief colors in hip pockets. Lapel pins. An in-group argot (see, e.g., Polari). Sleeve buttons on a blazer that actually unbutton. Saying zed instead of zee. The markers are arbitrary and often trivial, but all they have to do is mark out some kind of distinction. They give a new community a way of saying we do this, not that. It's a way of saying we're this, not that...and this is how you tell.  Class, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sexual interest/kink-- the point is to have a distinction.

So...what are the NB markers? What's the checklist for new NB community members? I know that there's an NB flag that can be flown on Pride days, but a community needs more than that. What do you do-- socially, as presentation --to let others know you belong to this group? I asked my friend that question and she was perplexed. Does everyone else need to know? she asked. Can't I just tell the people who need to know?

My first response was that of course you need public, social markers. If you want to have political and social leverage-- a key reason for having  a community --then you need to find ways to make members feel like they have things in common and that they have ways to let each other (and outsiders!) know that here's a community whose interests need to be addressed. A flag is a place to start, but a community will always end up creating a checklist. 

Which brings up the idea of an NB Checklist. What does a potential NB person do, wear, sound like in order to create a distinction. Social distinctions are by definition socially constructed-- arbitrary, often trivial, but often of key importance. 

We're talking about creating stereotypes, yes. But that's part of community building as well. Humans create uniforms for themselves. 

So I will ask anyone out over the aether who reads this... What are the Official NB Identity Markers? This is a web age, and some website, some listicle, some Reddit  board has created checklists for this: clothing styles, bands, slang, accessories and accoutrements.  There's the equivalent of the Official Preppy Handbook out there somewhere on the web. 

We'll get to the other discussion here-- what being NB means in terms of what one does as NB --later. I'll need to discuss with my friend how taking up a new identity affects her sex life or her styles of romance. Does it make any difference at all? She's always been bi as long as I've known her-- will being NB make any functional difference? What's the connection here between gender identity and sex life? 

Well, I'll get to that discussion later. Right now I'll see about what's on the Official NB Checklist. 

Three One Seven: Salle D'Armes

 My lovely long-legged blonde friend Jill in Wellington NZ told me once about her high school friend who became a nationally-ranked fencer. The girl was good enough to get invited to fencing competitions and fencing master classes all around the Pacific. The girl's name-- I think --was Sarah.  My NZ friend knew at least two other girls named Sarah when she was at her posh private school, so I may be wrong about the name.

But what I do know is the fencer girl (we'll call her Sarah anyway) went off to a fencing training camp in China and had a very hot, fairly public affair with a "much older"  and rather famous German fencing coach. Some things remain unclear in the story. Was the man her coach or just one of the coaches at the camp? I can't decide which would be hotter--- having a torrid affair at 16 or 17 with her mentor at fencing (foil? épée? sabre?) or meeting and hooking up with an internationally-rated German coach while in the Mysterious Orient. So-- I know she was sixteen or seventeen (Jill was just turning seventeen when she and Sarah were emailing about Sarah's adventures in China), but I don't know if she was in Shanghai or Beijing. I don't know what "much older"means here, although given Jill's own tastes in those days, I'd suspect that "much older" means that the man would've been in his forties. 

The story (or as much as I know of it) really is hot. And I would love to know more. Backstories matter, mind you, just as Details Matter. Context and setting are always key. It matters how they met, and how the flirtation began. It very much matters who made the first move. 

My friend at McGill in Montreal told me that she'd gone to university very much in order to have affairs with distinguished and literary older academics, but she was always brought up short by the feeling that she didn't know the correct procedure for initiating an affair with a distinguished Older Man. Was she supposed to look young and vulnerable and wait for him to be predatory? Was she supposed to drape herself on his desk in something slinky and offer herself up as muse and sacrifice? What, she asked, were the procedures in these matters? Who was supposed to initiate? What costumes and poses did she need to know about? Importantly-- which of her female friends should she tell, and how dramatic should her announcement be?

The athletic world-- and especially something like fencing, which strikes me as a fairly incestuous community --might be a place where physical affairs were carried on fairly openly. After all, as an athlete, everything you do is about your body: you're focused on the flesh, and on competition. It may also be a place where mentor-mentee relationships are common. Maybe. I have no idea how age-disparate relationships are seen in China, or what age gaps are regarded as acceptable. And...what are are rules for overseas training camps? Remember the old naval saying: No sin below the equator? Did something like that hold true? If you're a few thousand miles from school and home, training and competing amongst foreigners, are all the usual rules suspended? My Montreal friend laughed once and told me that at Comparative Lit conferences in New York or Vancouver or London, the accepted thing was that quick affairs and gender experimentation were perfectly fine. Distance made everything seem permissible...and hotter.

I do wonder about whether Sarah and her coach spent whole nights together, or whether they sneaked off to dorm rooms or offices or showers for sex. What were the mechanics of the affair. Jill in Wellington had given up underwear by seventeen, but had Sarah? Could she be wickedly panty-free in a fencing costume? How easy would it be to get out of fencing togs for impromptu sex? These are the things I wonder about, after all. And...was the man married back wherever home was? Did he laugh over drinks and tell other coaches about Sarah?  How did Sarah tell her fencing companions...and what did they say? She fired off dozens of emails to Jill about what was happening, but did the fencing authorities in Beijing or Shanghai know what was happening? I'm under the impression that Sarah's affair with the coach was fairly open, that she loved being on the man's arm in public, or at bars. Jill's circle at school did love shocking their audiences, so there may have been some of that.

I have no clue as to how long the affair lasted, or if Sarah ever saw the man again. All I know about Sarah is that she lives in Melbourne these days and has a practice as a physiotherapist.  Before the pandemic, Jill would fly over to see her once or twice a year. 

I wish I knew more, and that I had photos of both of them from those days. There's a very hot tale to be crafted from the story of Sarah and the fencing coach...and a very hot film to be made. I might suggest casting Kenna James and Mick Blue in the video...or maybe Riley Reid and Mick Blue.

Any thoughts?

Three One Three: Boxes

I've been going through boxes and looking for ghosts from my past. I found the journals Levin gave me, and I've spent nights sighing over them. It's odd--- I have so few photos of Levin. I have her pencil and pen-and-ink sketches in the Pentalic journals, and she did lovely self-portraits. What I regret, though, is not taking photos of her. 

That's always been a regret for me. There are really no photos of me, let alone any of me with lovely young companions. I've always avoided being photographed. I can think of only two that I know exist. One is of me at my brother's wedding. The other is me standing outside the house where I'd rented rooms while I finished my doctorate. One of me in a tuxedo, one of me in black blazer and black long-sleeved tee. Two existing photos in all these years. I suspect you can guess the reasons. I'm not fond of my body or my face. And to be photographed next to a lovely young companion would only emphasize how I don't belong there next to her. 

The first time I went to Europe, I flatly refused to bring a camera. A camera, I thought, would mark me as a mere tourist, a rube from the provinces. And so I have no record of my life in Vienna. A year of my life might as well not exist. I feel the same way now about photos of girls I've been with, girls I've loved. I've no clue if any of them contrived to get photos of me, or if they managed to get photos of the two of us together-- though I know that I didn't get any.  Back in the day, I'd have been terrified of being photographed, terrified that any photo of me with a lover would be a kind of mockery of the stories my young companions and I told ourselves about who and what we were. I'd have been terrified that her friends would see photos of me and feel only disdain and contempt. 

Levin and Liberty were able to be muses for older lovers. Miss Ginny in Montreal, too. They were all of them proud of being someone's muse. For Levin that was the painting professor, the man who did that nude portrait of her. For Liberty it would've been the gallery owner in Santa Fe. And for Miss Ginny, it was an aging Russian emigre who played chess with her, taught her to do vodka shots, laughed at her obsession with Swinging London and the early Sixties, and gave her a couple of cartons filled with old issues of Cahiers du Cinema. I'm sure they each had other older lovers for whom they were muses and inspirations, but I keep thinking of that portrait above Levin's bed and about Miss Ginny sitting on the floor of her rooms near McGill, going through articles about half-forgotten French and East European films. Or of Liberty in just a man's shirt, being taught how to paint desert light. 

Liberty told me about her mysterious journal with its "My Older Lovers" chapter, about the entries she'd been making since she was sixteen about the things she'd learned about older men and about how to manage older lovers. I never asked to see it, of course. I certainly never asked her what she said about me--- or if I was in her entries at all. But I do have visions of Liberty sitting cross-legged on a sofa in just a pair of faded, cut-off denim short shorts, brushing that mass of red-gold hair off her face and reading from her notebook on older lovers. I always loved her voice, and I can imagine her doing a kind of podcast, telling her stories out over the aether. Liberty was always very direct and straightforward, always very earnest. It's easy to imagine her reading out her guide to older lovers not as regrets or even as erotica, but just as a clear set of memories--- an operator's manual with clear descriptions of procedure.

Miss Ginny claimed to have something similar, by the way--- written in French, like a good Montreal girl, and bits of her father's Polish ---with lists of books and films older admirers had told her about. Miss Ginny, though, would have focused on the books and films. She wanted, she told me, to sleep with at least one famous academic and one rare book dealer. She wanted the lists, she said, wanted to have a bibliography, an annotated bibliography, to go with her life and experiences. 

There are boxes somewhere in rooms wherever Liberty and Miss Ginny and Levin are tonight. I have to believe that they still have boxes, that they've kept journals and notebooks all these years, that they treasure the stories and the lists they made.  All three girls told me that they set out very deliberately to find adventures and experiences, that they  spent their late teens and early twenties keeping notes and lists, finding raw material for the art and the books they wanted to create.

I miss them. I miss that attitude. I miss the way each of them saw my age as a positive thing, the way each of them set out to design a world for herself, the way each of them kept notebooks and lists. 

Three Zero Three: Crushing

 Here in the time of the Red Death,  so much of erotic life has been restricted to the web. I haven't been doing cam experiences or FaceTiming with lovely Young Companions. Life, alas, doesn't work like that.

But I have been listlessly sitting up at night looking at clips on PornHub and its kindred. I feel almost ashamed of that. I'm not one to spend time looking at online porn. The implication of indulging in the Solitary Vice does make me ashamed. The Solitary Vice is not something males can engage in without being held up to mockery. Autoerotic adventures are for women only. 

I'm not bitter about that, really. I understand the politics of self-pleasure, There's a large industry out there over the aether devoted to empowering women sexually, to allowing them to find pleasure on their own terms. Those are good things. But I do have to sigh and note that there's nothing like Good Vibrations or its kindred boutiques for men. Self-pleasure for men is regarded as creepy, pathetic, and aesthetically displeasing. I've said it before here--- once you've heard the word "wank" you can't really be male (or maybe only straight male) and indulge in the Solitary Vice without feeling ashamed and sad.

Nonetheless, I do sit at my work desk and search out PornHub clips. I'm impressed with how niche some of the clips are, and even more impressed with the sheer numbers of things even the most arcane search terms bring up. It probably took less than a month before there were scores of Covid-19 porn videos, with masked scene partners and storylines about Red Death quarantine bringing the most disparate and unlikely couples together (lots of step-siblings, a surprising number of Hot MILF and stepdaughter clips). I'm socially aware enough to wear a mask every day if I go into stores or shops or amongst crowds, but I do have to wonder what sex in a mask would be like. I'd probably start gasping for breath early on, alas.

I have found porn actresses to crush on. However not? I discovered a lovely long-legged blonde who calls herself Kenna James and a petite garconne who calls herself Kristin Scott. They've done a couple of scenes with each other, including some non-sex scenes in a story-driven  coming-out film called "Teenage Lesbian". Both very lovely, both very hot. 

My crushes on both are sexual, of course, but I think that it's their interviews that have fed the crushes. Both have several interviews on YouTube about their lives and careers, and they each have very good long interviews on Holly Randall's podcast. Ms. Randall, by the way, is the daughter of Suze Randall, one of the great glamour photographers (and female porn directors) of the Seventies and Eighties.  Both Ms. James and Ms. Scott are clever, funny, thoughtful, and well-spoken. So my usual track is to look for scenes each has done on PornHub and then see what interviews I  can find at YouTube. 

I do like it that porn actresses are giving interviews.  I like the idea of hearing about their lives in their own voices.  It says something about me that any fantasies I've ever constructed in my head about either Kristin Scott or Kenna James are largely about flirtations and conversations, They're both very lovely girls, and I expect that they'd be good--- adventurous, experimental, kind, open ---in bed...even with a male partner. Maybe--- maybe ---even with an older male partner. Still, now...all my fantasies begin with conversations and explanations by both me and a potential partner. 

I can't imagine sex without talking. I can't imagine sex that doesn't happen in the head long before it happens in the flesh.  I can't imagine sex that isn't about telling stories, about creating stories with a partner.

Three Zero Zero: Debriefing

 I wrote here earlier in the summer that:

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)... or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things... but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

I'd love to see Liberty's journal and its "Older Men" chapter. She always saw affairs as learning experiences, and she was very earnest about that. It mattered to her that each lover, male or female, left her with more knowledge about the world. And, yes, I'd love to know what all those things were. I'd love to know what categories she put experiences into. I think I'd especially like to read the very early entries, to read the entries were Liberty was deciding what she wanted to learn and what avenues she wanted to explore.

I wrote this, too--

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

I do wish I knew how each of them defined "experience". The stories Levin and Liberty and my NZ friend Jill told me were often extremely hot, but what I'd like to do is get at the underlying structures, to get at the decisions each of them made to seek out and be open to experiences. Why this particular lover, this particular thing? I'd very much like to know what Liberty's chapter on Older Men says--- what makes someone worth/not worth being a learning experience. I'd like to go through her checklist of things she did to manage Older Lovers, to properly utilize them. 

Backstories matter, just as details matter. The why of something is as important as the thing itself. 

I'd also like to read the letters another friend has been sending out during the season of the Red Death. You know the backstory:

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do. 

I'd love to read those letters, to read what she thanked them for teaching her. One of the letters I know would be to the much older man who told her when she was sixteen that she needed to stop being afraid and actually make the effort to be admitted to Oxford. That affair re-shaped her life, and I'm taking it for granted that she wrote to tell him that. She told me once that what she has now--- a business of her own, a resume that includes political consultancy, a couple of terms as a town councilor ---owes so much to the older lovers who told her that she was capable of doing anything, who took her to bed and talked about the world. I'd very much love to read those letters with her memories. Yes...I wish I was a recipient of one of those letters. I do envy anyone who was worldly and knowledgeable enough to be chosen as one of her mentors. 

Bildungsroman, Erziehungsroman... and whatever those things are called in French. I'd like to know how Levin and Liberty and Jill constructed the tales of their lives--- my friends in Montreal and Edinburgh, too. How have they structured what Older Lovers taught them? What things in particular did they want to learn, what things did they learn, what checklists and outlines have they drafted...? 

Experiences have to be crafted into stories, into essays, That's always key for me: taking experience and trying to make it mean something. Liberty's journal, maybe whatever was in Levin's Pentalic sketchbooks and notebooks--- those are all things I'd love to know.

Two Nine Three: Lessons

Last night I watched "Altered States"--- a film from c.1981 that I've always rather liked.  If you haven't seen the film, I will recommend it.

There's a moment in "Altered States" where Wm. Hurt has the first physical symptoms of regressing into some kind of archaic hominid. He's in bed with one of his students at the time (she calls him "Dr. Jessup" when he leaves bed and dashes to the bathroom to look at his transformation in the mirror). The actress is named Ora Rubinstein; her character is billed only as "Young Medical Student". I like that...and wonder if you'd still still have that character if you re-did the film in the Year Twenty. Could you still have Dr. Jessup sleeping with one of his students? The film takes it for granted that he'll have affairs with students, and one of his senior med school colleagues says off-handedly earlier in the film that he has to go, that he has a date with one of his students,

Which once again takes us back to Levin and her painting professor. That affair was something that happened long ago, and certainly long before #MeToo. Levin had no objection to sleeping with her professor, and no particular thought that she was being exploited. She found some of his stories pretentious and self-involved, but that just went with being in the art world. What I'd like to know is the full backstory. At what point did she sense that his interest in her was a seduction? How did she react to the discovery--- surprise, amusement, excitement? Did she ever think she was being exploited or used (in a bad way)? Did she laugh at how cliched it all was--- art student and her professor? Did she decide to sleep with him early on, or did she make a quick decision that night in the studio when he asked why she wasn't naked yet?

I asked her once when she made that decision about me, and she shrugged and told me she'd decided early on, when I was telling her what films and books I liked. Just seemed like you'd be interesting, she said. I mean, I'll take that as a compliment and a perfectly valid reason. But I did wonder when she'd made a decision and what criteria she was using. 

Levin was a fine arts major. I do wonder how her criteria compare to Liberty's.'s criteria. Liberty was a coastal ecology major--- a science girl, albeit in what was regarded as a "hippie science". From what I could infer, all the "soft" sciences--- the ecology programs, anthropology, biology ---were very sexually active. Funny thing--- "Altered States" gives the same impression, that the physical anthropology students and faculty are more sexually active than the hard sciences or even the liberal arts. I need to look into the accepted mores of various academic departments. 

I of course was a History major--- a department not noted for carnality. Fine Arts and Comparative Lit were of course notorious for both ambisexuality and teacher-student affairs. Neither Levin nor Liberty ever seemed to find sleeping with faculty to be anything out of the ordinary, mind you. And both seemed to have accepted bisexuality as perfectly ordinary since their teens. Okay, yes, great--- I'm now thinking about a survey and analysis on sexual criteria by academic major back to the Sixties. Somebody get me a research grant and a Netflix deal.

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

Though I suppose it's possible that they wanted the idea of "experience" more than any particular concrete experience. Levin was part of the art world, and there's still a strong master-pupil attitude there, the idea of learning by transmission from some older figure with talent. That may be part of it all.  Levin and Liberty (and my friend in Montreal) liked the idea of having experiences,  of collecting experiences that they could use to form themselves. I suppose I felt the same way in my own late teens and undergraduate days. The idea was to be able to say that, yes, I did this, or that I'd read that, that I had a range of experiences (all approved in novels or films) that I could use to become (or become seen as) the sort of character I wanted to portray.

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)...or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things...but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

Two Eight Five: Pedagogy

Someone told me once in passing that a certain kind of erotic linkage underlay all education. They were talking about Plato and the Symposium, but I understood what they meant--- that the desire for knowledge and erotic desire are often hard to separate one from the other. Falling in love with a certain kind of knowledge is easily transmuted into desire for the person with the knowledge. Having one means having the other. Or so any number of French coming-of-age novels and any number of films about teacher-student affairs tell us.

Back a while ago I wrote this about my friend in New Zealand:

My lovely, long-legged, posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me once upon a time to answer questions about her adventures in her teens. Her life as a posh bad girl has always fascinated me, and I did send her a master list of questions about the things she did when she was a self-described wicked schoolgirl.

I asked her the obvious question about encounters and adventures with teachers--- something that's the stuff of any number of coming-of-age films (right now I'm thinking of Mischa Barton and her teacher in "The O in Ohio" or Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation").

This was her response to my question about whether she'd ever had sex with one of her teachers back at her posh private school in Lower Hutt:

I slept with a teacher a few times...but he was sort of a family acquaintance. But he was also my science teacher, so it totally counts! (I was sixth form, so 16 when I did it)  

She also wrote me to say that:

At 15, i sucked a maori trainee-teacher's cock behind the school gym... just sucked him that one time...i would have loved to fuck him though!


I'm wild to know all the backstory for each encounter--- how it happened, what she thought and felt during and after, if she discussed doing either thing with her circle of close female friends. I'd love to know if she was ever discovered--- by parents or staff ---doing schoolgirl-teacher things.  Those questions do matter to me. She was I think thirty or thirty-one when she answered those questions, and I do wonder how she sees her fifteen or sixteen year old self, and if she has any regrets.

I think I noted before, too, that I've come to suspect that not all the stories she's told me over the years have been true. So while I'd very much like those stories to be true, I just can't be sure. It's sad and disturbing that I can't just believe her outright these days, and all the more so since for years I've known that I'd run off and live with her or marry her for the asking.

But let's assume it's true. Let's assume that she did have sex with her science teacher. And that she gave head to a Maori teacher-trainee behind the gym. Those are great stories, and I can add them to my list of teacher-student stories from girls I've known.

Liberty of course slept with her coastal ecology instructor when she was at university. From all I understand, the environmental sciences department (regarded as a haven for hippies) was notorious for things like that happening. I do love the idea of the sleeping bag and the dock (see my earlier entry), and I'd like to know if she slept with him again after the field trip. I suppose it's possible that it was only that the rules are suspended on field trips, but it's something I wish I knew. And if she was ever jealous that the instructor (oh, obviously and inevitably) slept with other co-eds in his classes.

Levin told  me once that she'd slept with one of her art professors. In some ways the affair had been a perfect art school cliche--- she'd even modeled for him. She was rather proud that he'd painted and sketched nudes of her. She had one framed in her bedroom. She was proud of being his muse, proud of being painted. The affair (and it lasted for a while) was art school cliche and filled with art school drama. Levin discovered that the professor had also slept with a boy she'd dated her freshman year...and who was now living with a girl Levin had once had a fling with. I nearly fell off her bed laughing and applauding.  She agreed with me that it was funny, although it made her feel that  art school was far, far too claustrophobic and incestuous.  I'll note here that I found that whole round robin thing far easier to believe than some of my New Zealand friend's stories, if only because I'd spent enough time around art school undergraduates and faculty in my clubland days. Art school always seemed to me to be a mix of indie mumblecore movies and Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen.

I will say, too, that the framed nude she had in her bedroom was very, very good. Very evocative, very powerful, very alluring. I did envy her art professor's skills, and I envied him for seeing all the things in Levin that he'd put on canvas.

Marsha told me once that she'd  had a thing with someone who was almost her teacher. She was in geometry in Grade 10 and he was a student teacher doing his required couple of weeks of classroom teaching. She ran into him away from school the next semester (memory says at a pizza place) and he remembered her. All the stories I've told here about Marsha involved cars--- the vintage MG in Thessaloniki, the Triumph along the river road here, the police car on the  levee ---and so does this one. They first had sex in a parked car here, though I'm unclear whether it was around the lakes by the university or atop the levee along the river road. I do remember her telling me that the car was a battered old hatchback, and that he had an ice chest with beer (dark beer, she remembered-- Heineken Dark?)  in the back. She got her skirt up and rode him in the car, and of course there was road head.  They may have done it at his parents' house a few times, and once she made him park at night in the school parking lot and do her with the seats lowered. He'd have been maybe twenty-two. His people, she told me, were "wild Hungarians", and his name was distinctively Magyar. Memory says that he went to Colorado, and of course in some perfect world (or at least a rom-com world) she'd have met him again when she was as the Colorado School of Mines. That didn't happen, but it should have. She told me the story just before she and I went to her senior prom together, possibly to make me just jealous enough to be competitive. After all, he was older and almost her teacher.

Teacher-student affairs do intrigue me. Or maybe it's that I'm interested in how girls see them a decade on. My NZ friend, Levin, Liberty, and Marsha all seem to have taken the encounters in stride. None of them was (or thought she was) in love, none of them felt 'groomed' (or at least felt that that was a bad thing), and all of them liked having the stories to tell later. Levin and Liberty certainly saw their academic affairs as just part of their lists of adventures, and certainly not as anything traumatic. My friend in NZ saw her affairs as competitive markers amongst her friends, who were notorious posh bad girls.

If any of you out there reading this have experiences that you've turned into stories, do tell me about your own academic encounters. Tell me how they happened, and what you thought while they were happening. Tell me how the memories feel to you now, some years on.

Two Five Three: Blonde

Once upon a long ago time, my leggy blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me the story of her first time with a girl. I don't know how much faith to place in the account. After all, I don't believe her stories of travels all over Asia and the Pacific, and I have serious doubts that she was ever married to a wealthy businessman.

Nonetheless, this story has been something she's referred to for several years, and her various mentions of it have been consistent. I like the story, and I can see it as part of the autobiographical novel she's always talked about writing. So I will put some of the accounts she's sent me in my archives. The story is one worth saving, I think.

Long ago I asked her about her experiences with girls. She'd had a few, she told me. She defines herself as cis and hetero, she says, but she says that in her circle at school and after--- amongst upper-middle party girls in Wellington ---a "bit of bisexuality" was considered fashionable. Again, I can imagine arts girls saying that with a straight face. So let's see. When I asked her to tell me about her first encounter, this is how she responded over a few months' worth of exchanges:

Her first girl, she wrote, was a hippie girl named Julia:


i met julia when i was 13, at high school, and it would have been a couple of years later-ish.

Julia and I were at school together. Her mum ran off with another woman, leaving Julia and her sister Fran largely unattended. We had so many parties at their house, drunken all nighters. She is a single mother of two part-Maori boys these days and lives in a pretty grim council flat.

Julia was my age, and Fran was a couple of years older. We met at school. They lived by the beach - their parents were divorced and their mother was off living her new life as a lesbian, so the house was almost always free of adults. We always wagged school there. Julia and Fran were both hippy girls - no shaving, into natural remedies etc. Fran was seriously into drugs. Julia and I weren't as much, we just liked to drink and eat each other out. We had so many parties at that house. We never had 3 ways, but Julia and I fucked all the time. I may have eaten Fran out once. Fran would walk around naked, leave sex toys out in the lounge, have loud sex in the next room and come into the bathroom while I was in there. We did shower together once, and Julia, Fran and I swam naked together a few times. She had lovely big tits, and a hairy blonde cunt, just like Julia did. Now, Julia has 2 part-Maori sons, and I actually have no idea what happened to Fran.

hmm...i liked Julia's personality. she was up for anything. and maybe just that she was there. an unsupervised house, lots of booze and free time... she was pretty too, blonde and hippyish. she didn't shave.

first time with julia was at her house one day when we were supposed to be at school. we'd been working up to it for a while, flirting, taking things a little further each time. we were drinking wine, taking shots and taking an item of clothing off as we did.  shots and wine led to kissing, led to fingering, led to us both naked in her room on the floor. i didn't tell anyone, i don't think, but her sister definitely knew.


this was either year 11 or year 12, so 15 or 16. julia had left school by year 13 so it was before then.

[That would've been 2001 or 2002 for the first time. By 2004 my friend was an undergraduate at VUW in Wellington, reading English Lit]

i remember one night with julia, an old friend from school. i was about 15 or 16 and staying at her apartment in town while her mum & her lesbian lover were away. we raided the liquor cabinet and were really drunk. we were out on the balcony and i was licking her clit and had my fingers in her cunt. she came and pissed at the same time, and a bit got in my mouth. i was not into it at all, and i grabbed our bottle of tequila and had a few big gulps. julia apologised several times...but also said how good it felt to cum and piss at the same time. i'm always very open to new experiences so i gave it a try...and it felt amazing. it made my orgasm so much more intense. julia loved it too...
later i discovered pissing while purging which is also amazing.

One night we found her older sister's sex toys and were up together until dawn just playing and experimenting. I loved that hairy little blonde cunt...

She noted that Julia was one of those girls who was beautiful and amazing at sixteen, but who burned out early. Currently the single mother of two half-Maori boys, though my friend didn't mention if the boys had the same father.  The "grim council flat" idea is deeply depressing. She'd noted that she had no idea whatever became of Fran, but some months later she wrote to say that she'd heard Fran had died--- an epileptic fit at 29. I'll note that it's all-too-possible, especially if serious drugs were involved.  It's a sad thing, and sadder still that I did raise a suspicious eyebrow.

My friend once mentioned buying weed in WGN from a hippie friend, and she later mentioned that a hippie girl she knew had been arrested for weed. I have no idea whether that was Julia or not, and no idea how long it's been since she's seen Julia, let alone since she slept with her.

I want this story for my archives. I want it to be something I can remember years from now. It's something worth saving, though I wish I could know more.

Two Five Two: Beliefs 2

I have this from the same girl I wrote about earlier in the month, the girl who was supposed to be going to Pitcairn Island and Patagonia and Lhasa and Victoria Falls this year.

She told me this back in June 2016--- three years ago now. She'd vanished for a while at the end of 2014 and stayed amongst the missing pretty much all through 2015. And then she messaged me one night to tell me this:

I  have a few stories to tell!  I decided this morning that, fuck it, it's time!  I have a confession for you. I got married last year... It was such a whirlwind, running into him in Auckland when i was there for a long weekend, then spending every waking moment together, a proposal in Taupo, then married a month later!

It really was crazy... I didn't tell anybody. No one in my family knows, a couple of friends, that's all. It was never going to work long-term. and i knew that. he was a brilliant first husband though.

I was amazed at the story. She'd told me before she vanished that she'd flown north on a concert weekend and run into an old flame at a hotel bar. I'd thought she might be living with someone. But this was a confession worth following up. I did raise an eyebrow at the initial message--- a whirlwind marriage was one thing; a secret marriage was another. Just how would that work? How would she avoid telling family? How would she avoid telling HR at work? Wouldn't there be tax forms to change? How would she keep friends from spreading the story?

She told me more later--- that she'd recognized very early that the marriage wouldn't work, and they hadn't lived together for much of the time. She'd kept the house she was renting (or owned...which is another story) and went back and forth with her Golden Retriever from one house to the other. I might've have understood if she'd leased out (or sublet) her old house, but she was clear that she'd kept her house all for herself.

She never did tell me about any divorce. I looked up divorce law in the Land of the Long White Cloud, of course. It's a simple procedure, and inexpensive. You can get an order of dissolution if you've been separated for two years and apply for an order. The fee is something like $NZ 215.00. Which raises the question of whether she ever got a divorce and, if so, when? If they'd agreed to count the start of living separate and apart sometime early in 2015, one or the other of them could've applied for a dissolution order in 2017. She never mentioned it, never mentioned any divorce or any proceedings. I did think about so many questions. If he did indeed have (as she insisted) $10 million in the bank, wouldn't there inevitably have been a pre-nup? Were there community property issues? The purported husband was a successful businessman,  which to my mind means that there would've been lawyers telling him that he needed to protect himself. But she never talked about any divorce or any aftermath.

So here we have another story, and one that strikes me now as deeply suspect. Moving in with someone after a whirlwind romance is one thing. A marriage where one party has ten million ($US? $NZ?) in the bank is something else altogether. And a divorce, however amicable, isn't just something one forgets. She'd have been twenty-nine or thirty when all this supposedly happened--- and a chartered accountant. She'd know how these things work, and known the legal and tax ramifications...and so would any husband's lawyers.

My blonde friend in Wellington is like me: we both grew up living inside books and stories. We've always wanted our lives to be crafted and shaped like stories. I can understand her longing for a doomed whirlwind romance and marriage. A bittersweet tale to tell later. I can understand all that. But what if she can't escape the stories she's crafted in her head? What if she made up a brief marriage just as I believe she made up trips to Buenos Aires and Mt. Fuji and Shanghai? How do I ever ask her?

I'd like to think that someone reading this out over the aether will have thoughts....

Two Three Six: Interlocutors

I ran across an article the other day lamenting that men, because they have no male friends or social support networks, rely on their wives and girlfriends and partners to keep them emotionally stable, that they burden and wear down their significant others with their psychological needs. A persuasive article, mind you. And it made a real point--- masculinity as defined in contemporary North America leaves no real place for men to develop support networks amongst themselves.

I've said that before at this site. A North American male--- straight, white ones certainly ---past about twenty-four or twenty-five is socially discouraged from maintaining any close male friendships.  Having close male friends past that point leaves one open to accusations of being closeted gay or else a man-child who can't commit to a "real" relationship. You know the term I use: either a Peter Pan or a paederast. And so men throw all their psychological needs onto their girlfriends or partners--- one more weight for the women in their lives to carry.

The article made very good points. There's no denying that. Still, though--- it is disheartening. Dispiriting, anyway.

I sat at my office desk reading the article and felt vaguely guilty. Vaguely empty, too. Truth to tell,  I can't think of any male friends with whom I'd discuss anything personal or emotionally deep. There are a few people with whom I'd trade stories over drinks--- tell tales from books I'd read, bring up odd   bits of information on line, talk about films ---but none with whom I'd discuss anything approaching within cannon-shot of intimate. If I told any stories about myself, they'd be the kind that fall into the category of once-upon-a-time about places gone or adventures in my university days.

So there's that much truth in the article. There's no one I'd invite over for drinks, no one whom I'd call and suggest going anyplace. If I made a list tonight of people I'd count as friends, there's not one who's been to my flat, not one whose home address I know. I have female neighbours who run back and forth between apartments--- cooking, having drinks, sitting outside and talking 'til midnight. That's just not something I can do.

The article also made me vaguely ashamed of ever thinking of long conversations with girls who've been friends-and-lovers. I read the article and found myself deciding not to send emails or make phone calls or send texts. For much of my life friends-and-lovers and I spent long nights on the phone, talking and flirting and having  extended, complicated, random conversations about anything and everything. Looking back, I feel somehow guilty. I feel guilty about being an emotional burden, or about taking up someone's time or emotional energy.

I'd always thought that one of the key reasons for having a girlfriend, a lover, a partner was that you'd have someone to be part of those late-night talks. I'd always thought that being able to have an interlocutor, a confidante, a late-night voice was a key part of a relationship.  Late-night conversations made so many things better, offered a sense of belonging, a sense of comfort and safety and value. Sharing confidences, sharing stories, offering support and belief--- those things were so much of why you wanted a lover, a partner, an affair. I treasured those conversations, and now I feel ashamed of them. Nowadays those long late-night talks sound more and more like an imposition, like a burden and an emotional drain. Asking for time at all sounds like coercion.

So here we are: unwilling now to contact anyone, to call or write or text or do anything that could be construed as asking for anyone's time or energy.  I find that I can't do that, and I can't contact anyone, especially someone who's a friend-and-lover. I won't be a burden, and asking  for time, advice, support, sympathy--- that's no longer acceptable. Unburdening oneself is a burden to others; sharing one's intimacies is an imposition. I can't--- won't ---do that.

Two Three Three: Characters

A lovely friend in the Upper Midwest wrote this a few days ago:

rambling thoughts, now that I’m off vyvanse. Feel more clever, creative, but also difficult to channel this energy.

heading to Denver at the end of the month for a work conference. it’s fine.

falling hard for a boy who’s probably terrible for me- but the way he nuzzles my neck in bed, whispering how beautiful I am! the way he slings his arm around my shoulders and gazed at me with soft eyes. he’s gorgeous, can keep up with my brain, but we enable each other. “Do you want to go to the bathroom?” “I’ve already cheated at this point, so let’s just take our clothes off”. I’m riled up just thinking about his nearness.

I want to consume him, wrestle my fingers into his hair, feel his thighs intertwined with mine. it’s a lost cause, this craving. Nothing good will come of it. 

we stay up till dawn, listening to Russian synth pop, trading key bumps and tequila shots. his lips next to my ear, urging us to be better, to not keep going. But I always want to engage and go further.

this yearning is doomed: everyone tells me to be careful, to not get too close. I am willful and powerful and never say no. just try me, tempt me with a good time. I never say no to a dare.

I want a love the eats at me, a love unfurling in my lap. something dangerous to others but satisfies my wicked energy. 

I’m sitting in my office (door ajar, legs apart), thinking about him and only him. right now we could be dancing in darkened rooms, hipbones interlocked and mouths pressed firmly. I am obsessive, I’m possessive I know. but don’t I look good with my ripped fishnets and fading lipstick? Does he not want me like I need him? 

I despise the tuttering of others, their hushed judgments. Let me run wild with this boy, it’s all I’m capable of right now.

I read that and sighed. It's been a long time since a girl has written something like that about me.  I'm trying to decide whether what I feel is jealousy or envy. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to draw a distinction between those two things.

I know that I do feel empty and useless when I read her message. Girls have written things about me in the past. At least one made me a character in a short story she wrote where her surrogate has a teen affair with an older lover one Baltimore spring. I haven't been to Baltimore in a thousand years, but I was flattered, and I loved the description of the two characters sitting outside at a table by the harbor, the girl trying so hard to look sophisticated and open to seduction at sixteen or seventeen, the older man trying to introduce her to Thai food. I felt thrilled that she'd put me inside a story ,that she'd created, a story that was so obviously about things she wished she'd done.  I remember that when she read me a draft of the story we argued about whether "seducible" was a word. If it wasn't, she said, it should be. She remembered walking through Baltimore when she was sixteen or seventeen aching to be thought someone who could be, should be seduced.

One other girl wrote about me--- again, so long ago now. She quoted something I'd said to her one night, something about how her body was something I wanted to explore, about how her body was like a map to an unknown country. She quoted that at her blog and then asked, Why has no man ever said that about me before? I read that in my office the next day and I sat there at my desk, thinking that here was a beautiful girl who thought I was worth writing about, who thought what I could say had value.

Those things don't happen any more, and haven't for a long time.  Growing up, I'd always thought I'd be a character in at least a few stories or novels. That was vanity, true, but it was also something else. I think that in my younger days I took it for granted that if you knew literary people you'd end up as a character in their stories, that you'd be in at least a couple of short stories by age thirty or thirty-five.

I'd like to think that I was valuable enough--- or at least interesting enough ---for a lovely girl to write about.  It's been a long time since I could look into the mirror and imagine being someone a girl could think of as worth writing about.  It's been too long since I was able to imagine having any sort of effect on a lovely girl at all.

I'd like to inspire doomed yearnings, to inspire hunger.  Those days are likely enough gone, though. I'm not someone who'll be a character in any lovely girl's stories or fantasies. Here we are though, the hopeless and barely-reliable narrator of my own story,

Two Three Zero: Shower

A Story, then. I'll sit here tonight with a bottle of sparkling lime water and add a Story. A lovely girl sent me this years ago--- almost a decade now. She always told wonderful Stories. I of course was desperately in love with her all one lost summer. We'd talk on the phone for hours--- sometimes literally all night. She broke my heart in the end, but she'll always be someone I remember.

Anyway, dear friends and readers...a Story for my archives:

I was 15 when I first showered with a boy. It was my boyfriend at the time. His name was David. He was 17. I used to sneak over to his house when his mother wasn't there. That's when we would do things like shower together. It was more fun than sexual in a way. I suppose it's always been that way for me. Even when I've had sex in the shower with men, it's always been playful rather than sensual.

We were both each other's firsts in terms of any sexual acts aside from intercourse. I think the reason that we never actually did have sex was because I was a little scared, and he was sure he was corrupting me. He would get very depressed about it. I recall him crying about it while dropping me off at my house one night. He didn't want to make me do anything too early in my life. I thought he was being completely ridiculous and told him so. But I think he always felt guilty for doing anything sexual with me.

However, he didn't refrain from hitting on me years later when he was drunk at a party. He told me that I gave much better head than his girlfriend. I didn't sleep with him that night either.

I found this, too. From earlier in that long-ago summer. She copied it from a blog she had in those days and emailed it to me. She called me "my Doctor" or "my Older Man". One of the few times in my life when my doctorate did anything positive for me.

She wrote this:

I'm loving late nights on the phone, a soft voice on the other end. My Doctor. He's inspiring and beautiful in so many ways I can't explain. When we're talking, the whole world washes away and it's just the two of us. I have major, major fantasies of running away to another country with him.

My Older Man introduced me to Neko Case:

"I can say that I've lived here in honor and danger
But I'm just an animal and cannot explain a life
Down the chain of days I wished to stay among my people
Relation now means nothing, having chosen so defined

And if death should smell my breathing
As it passes beneath my window
Let it lead me trembling, trembling
I own every bell that tolls for me."

Fucking beautiful.

Neko Case... I still love Neko Case. How many times have I listened to "Hold On, Hold On" and "Deep Red Bells"--- a couple of hundred times each?

It's a melancholy thing to not be part of story arcs. It's a melancholy thing not to be someone to whom a lovely girl will confide her dreams and her adventures.  I miss that. I miss her particular voice, of course, and I miss thinking that my own life can be shaped into stories,  or that a lovely girl might want to lead me out into adventures for the two of us.

Two Two Four: Lasers

The last night of the year, and I'm thinking  of stories  told me by young companions down the years. I do want to remember the girls who told me these things--- lovely voices and presences gone missing over the years. Well, let's put a few more stories into my archives.

The first one is from a girl I knew back in the lost world of the early Nineties. The tale actually came by letter. I still have the actual letter, complete with a Van Nuys postmark. A letter close to thirty years old now. I have no idea what became of the girl who wrote it--- vanished into domesticity somewhere in southern California, I expect. But the story itself is fun and highly visual, something done in blues and greens and black:

Hi! Mmm-- new tales to tell! I actually had sex in a laser beam! It was basically a starfuck. This band (all black) called Voodoo Posse played at After Hours, the dance club at Magic Mountain where I'm working this summer. So I met the drummer after the show, and we ended up at Mystic Lake (in the park still...) where the fireworks/laser show is. We ended up skinny-dipping and swam out to this one platform where a laser (green) shines down on a plume of smoke that rises steadily. Fortunately, a couple of weeks before,  I'd talked to a tech I had sex with a few times about how it all worked. So I ended up fucking the drummer, surrounded by smoke, in the middle of a laser. Have you ever seen a laser mix with smoke up close? It's really intense! This is the second black guy I've had sex with, and he was so much better than the first--- and he was one of the juiciest guys I've ever felt inside me. The oral sex was amazing! He was just crazy with me! Lots of trying new positions in the water!

I remember that her name was Gen--- Genevieve ---and that she was a lovely, brown-haired girl with soft pale eyes.  I have no idea where she is now, and certainly have no idea how she remembers her past and her adventures.

The second is from a posh girl in Colorado from the early Noughts. She'd gone to St.-John's out west, the western branch of the liberal arts college with a curriculum based solely on the Classics. I remember that she graduated, kicked around Europe for a while, was dumped by one lover in some roadside village in Brittany, and mugged in a railway station in Paris. She was last heard of living in Ireland. I'd written asking her about her adventures, and she responded with a few tales, including these---

Q.: Where and how did you first make love outdoors? What was it like? Was there risk involved? How do you feel about being naked outdoors?

Outside Christ Church College at the University of Oxford.  I was on a school trip and certainly was not supposed to be fraternizing with the locals - inside or outside - so there was plenty of risk.  The campus itself was imposing and lent the whole situation a gravity and drama that I have rarely felt since.  I didn't get completely naked, as I was wearing a short white skirt with no underwear that could easily be thrown up (though it did take some athleticism and flexibility to avoid getting grass stains on that skirt).

Q.: Where is the riskiest/most public place you've ever made love? Whose idea was it? What was it like?

The European headquarters of Opus Dei.  I've always been privately smug about this one and wish I could tell more people because it delights me in so many ways.  It was in the evening, and we were walking back from a movie.  I had been teasing him throughout the movie and on the trip back, and I guess he just couldn't restrain himself anymore.  We jumped over the fence for what I thought might be a quick blow job, but he threw me on the ground.  It was very passionate and rough, naughty and forbidden.  We were collapsed on the grass when someone caught us and we had to run, me carrying my bra and my jeans half on, cum smeared all over my shirt and jeans.  The man was shouting at us, and he said something about our souls being cursed or perhaps he cursed our souls - something rather violent anyway. 

This one is a bit more harsh, but it's also from Maegan, something from when she was sixteen, back in the first year of the new century. She told me the story maybe nine or ten years ago. I've never had any follow-up on it:

Hmmm, most guys I've met are a bit squeamish about their own taste....they're fine with it all over a girl's body or mouth, but seem to prefer it to stay there.

I was at my first ever rave with some friends, and this older college guy kept hitting on me and dancing with me, but I wasn't interested.  After awhile, I went to use the bathroom, dumb little naive girl that I was.  It was upstairs through a dark hallway, and I had no idea I was being followed, but shortly after I sat down to pee, I heard someone else enter.  I assumed it was another girl, but he kicked open the door, slamming my head against the wall in the process.  I fell back and of course managed to pee all over bare legs. I wasn't wearing underwear, or they'd have been soaked. I was rather dazed and didn't quite understand what was going on, but before I had any idea of who it was, he had grabbed my hair and wrenched my head back (I had two french braid pigtails).  He kept hold of them and used them to yank my head forward as well as control what I did the entire time.  Naturally with him forcing me like that, I kept gagging, but he didn't seem to mind.  He nearly gave me lock jaw, and he shoved his cock as far down my throat as he could; I have no idea who he was. After he left, I was shocked, stunned, and could barely walk. I went downstairs as best I could and stood by someone's car in the parking lot. I gagged for a while and cried. I wouldn't tell anyone else this, but I have masturbated to this story over and over since then. I keep remembering the sound of my own gagging and wondering whatever became of him and how he remembers me now. I can tell you, but no one else. 

Four stories, here on the last night of the year. I miss the voices that attach to the stories. I miss a time when stories about adventures were offered up as gifts and introductions, when stories were exchanged over the aether.

My hope is that in the new year, we'll all feel free enough to have adventures again, and to tell stories about both the past and our plans and hopes and fantasies.