12-23-2020, 08:15 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-23-2020, 08:16 PM by gayprojectforum.)
Good evening Project,
I’m a 45 year old gay with a very complicated and in many ways disappointing experience behind me. A few weeks ago I happened upon your blog and found your post "Gays and anal sex: false myths and pornography" and I found it very interesting, then I went to your book "Being Gay" and I read the part about sexuality and there too I found a lot of interesting things.
I tell you right away that my experience of the gay reality is probably so particular that it makes it difficult for me to integrate into the typically gay environments I have known through the internet and the smartphone applications. But to make you understand the real meaning of what I mean, it is necessary that I start from the beginning.
I was born in 1975. I’m an only child, my parents have never understood anything about computers, mobile phones and in particular the internet. I myself do not feel part of the modern hyper-technological generation at all. I bought my first PC at 30, because I couldn't do without it. In these things I was vastly behind the guys of my generation.
Why do I make this premise? Well, there is a specific reason: I discovered pornography in 2005, at 30! To some it may seem crazy but it is so. This means that if technology is civilization I was the typical "good savage" not contaminated by technological civilization and, as far as sex is concerned, not contaminated by pornography. I immediately clarify that I don’t intend to make any moralistic speeches on pornography, because I myself have used and abused it for years, but only after 2005.
I grew up in a very normal environment, parents neither good nor bad, all in all not bad, but they too are children of their time and their conditioning, a little bigoted, a little too preachers, of those who preach very well but practice much less well what they are preaching, in any case I don't judge them.
When did I realize I was gay? Very early, let's say around 13 years old, if not even earlier, and I realized it when I discovered masturbation and discovered it by myself, with some heartache, until I realized that it was not a pathological thing. At 13, without the internet, with nosy and big-eyed parents and a school that was certainly not today's one, obviously I could only keep my discovery to myself. My fantasies even then were about boys, all my fantasies where about boys, 100%. No one had ever talked to me about homosexuality, I had had some vague inkling of it from some lines of some movies but linked to caricature situations that I would never have compared with my fantasies about boys.
What is this speech for? In my opinion it serves to understand what in gay sexuality is spontaneous, original and what is instead learned from the outside. At 13, as far as sex was concerned, I was exactly like the good savage: I had discovered masturbation for himself and was creating my sexuality by myself, freely and spontaneously.
My fantasies about my friends were all centered around the idea of nudity in couple and mutual masturbation. I can say that basically the fantasies were always the same, I used to dream that I and the guy I was thinking about were naked together in the most natural way, without psychological problems, just like the most natural thing in this world, I dreamed that we could touch each other and that we could masturbate each other. Basically there was never anything else in my fantasies. All of this not only lasted until the age of 30 but lasts even now.
When at the age of 30 I discovered pornography, which seemed to me a very vulgar and absolutely false thing, I became aware a a world that put me in crisis, not to the point of leading me to question even being gay but almost. I told myself that if that was the gay world, I was certainly not gay. Oral sex, which I had never really thought about until I was 30, seemed to me a strange thing but basically acceptable, even if, I repeat, it had never been in my fantasies, but anal sex seemed to me just inconceivable. Not only it had never occurred to me that two men could have sex like that, but I absolutely didn't understand why anal sex was considered the pinnacle of gay sexuality. I, who felt 100% gay, never even imagined that guys could have sex like that. How is it possible that two gays come to have such different conceptions of sexuality? In my opinion it was obvious, just like saying that two plus two equals four, I had no doubt that pornography had in fact shaped the sexuality of so many guys.
After my discovery of pornography, I get obsessed with being alone and start chatting (at that time there was “messenger”) with a 25-year-old guy, whose name was Frank, met at an archeology site. I confess that back then, just to avoid getting entangled in strange sites, I frequented cultural sites, where you could also exchange some messages with other users.
From the beginning I really like the dialogue with Frank and as the days go by it becomes much more personal and in the end we also get to talk about sex, it is he who breaks the ice, tells me that he is gay, and I can only answer that I’m gay too, then it comes the exchange of photos, nothing pornographic, normal photos, from those of the degree to those with work colleagues etc. etc.. Frank is a nice guy, or at least more than passable and, what I didn't expect, I make a good impression on him. There are the conditions to move forward. Shortly thereafter, the first meeting on the street arrives and the first walk together around the city. Live he's really cute and smiling, he's the kind of guy who stimulates me a lot from a sexual point of view too.
After a couple of weeks we decide that we might as well try to have sex and he begins to explain what he likes when having sex, and here the world collapses on me. That guy's sexual fantasies basically had nothing to do with mine. He considered as stupid things what seemed essential to me and gave a lot of value to things that had never entered the horizon of my sexuality.
I tried to explain to him how things were but he was so convinced that his sexuality was the only possible, the only one gay by definition, that he saw me almost as a pathological case. I was beginning to understand that in the end there would be big problems because at a certain point I would have told him no, but I liked him a lot and I could see that he was interested in staying with me anyway, he was so much convinced that he would make me try things so amazing that I would have been fascinated by them, that I yielded to his insistence and we met at my house (I was living alone at the time) to try some sex.
Finally the day arrives. He comes to my house and we get started right away. I would have liked to hug him, I would have liked us to cuddle each other a little but this made no sense to him, that is, it wasn't sex according to his way of conceiving sex, and so I let him lead the game. Basically the scene he had in mind was a classic porn video scene. Oral sex (without a condom and I already felt shaking), and then
he takes out a condom and he would help me wear it but I don't feel like it, he insists but I don't feel like it at all, he is very upset, I read frustration and discomfort on his face, then he adapts and we end up masturbating each on his own, as soon as he's finished, he gets dressed and goes away, greets me before leaving but I can see that he is deeply disappointed.
After he has gone away I feel a moment of emptiness mixed with a certain sense of satisfaction and I hope the story is over because I realize that it cannot go on. But the story isn't over. Frank, even if I wasn’t aware of it then, had truly fallen in love with me, at first I thought he was only aiming to have sex with me, that is, to make me do what he liked better, but I think he would have easily found other guys with much more similar inclinations to his, but eventually he didn’t, or maybe he did it only partially, that is, he didn't exclude me from the list of his potential partners anyway.
When I realized that he was having sex with other guys too, I began to be afraid of HIV and detach myself from him, but that was not possible either. He understood that my fears were related to the fear of AIDS and took the test, which came negative, and the day he got the result, he brought me the report, to make me understand that there was no risk.
We started having sex together again and this time I did what he was lusting for. He asked me if it made me sick and stuff like that. I replied that I wasn’t disgusted at all but I just didn’t understand what could be sublime and entrancing there. He clearly realized that for me it was just a mechanical thing and that there was very little participation on my part.
On the other hand, our meetings were so focused on anal sex that everything else was reduced to a few minutes. Basically I have never been able to have a moment of true intimacy with him, I mean in my own way. He said to me: “But what more do you want? There is no more intimacy than this!" A sentence like that sounded just incomprehensible to me.
Frank and I got along very well, he was a proper person, he never cheated me, that is, he was "Frank" in name and in fact, but on a sexual level there was no communication between us and we almost always came out frustrated from our meetings. We went on like this for a long time, then our contacts thinned out a lot, even if they never ceased completely and this was an important thing for me because obviously our story couldn’t be reduced to just a bit of sex, not even on his part.
In 2009 I met Maurice and meeting Maurice made me reevaluate Frank a lot, because Frank cared about me, perhaps to take me to bed in his own way, but he cared me anyway, while Maurice considered me just one of many.
The same problems that had occurred with Frank, occurred also with Maurice, but with Maurice it was impossible to get along even on many other things: sometimes he boasted about things he hadn't done, he used to told lie, he used to promise something without keeping his promise, denying immediately after that he had ever had promised something. In short, it all ended in three or four months, he disappeared and I never heard from him again, while I continued to hear Frank from time to time.
Since 2010 I have been using dating sites and I have to say that I have found there things of every kind, from fully insane people to dreamy and apparently naive guys that I did not understand how ended up in there, even if in the end I ended up there as well. My experiences through the app have been quite numerous but extremely superficial, from the guy who took it for granted that we would soon celebrate a Civil Union followed by a sumptuous party with regiments of relatives, to the one who didn't even want to give me the phone number because he had a thousand fears and was obsessed with privacy, from the married guy who cheats his wife with the guys to the bisexual one who lusts after you but also has a girlfriend, etc. etc..
This is how I got to 2017 when at the end of January I made the decision to delete the app, which was not really my thing. In all this whirlwind of more or less absurd stories there was only one thing that was not over and that was the relationship with Frank. Every now and then it happened that we talked. He used to tell me his stories and I to tell him mine. I liked hearing Frank's voice and after all he was the only guy who really wanted to stay with me.
By now I was over with the apps and so, slowly, I began to rethink the sex encounters I had had years before with Frank. Between us there was no sexual harmony, this is true, but even if each of us remained in their own positions, there was somehow the desire between us not to throw everything away. I had given a lot of weight to sexual disharmony and I had underestimated the fact that Frank had really fallen in love with me and basically, from his point of view, I had disappointed him.
We started calling each other on the phone a little more often and talking for hours, as we used to do in the very early days of our relationship. Shortly before Christmas 2018 he proposes me to go for a coffee together, I don't let him tell me twice, he hears from the tone of my voice that I'm happy with the proposal and tells me: “I can't wait to see you again! We haven't seen each other for many years!" I think about it for a moment and I realize that more than 10 years have passed.
On Sunday morning as soon an I see him I greet him from a distance. He says to me: "Can I?" and he hugs me in a very loving way, which he had never done before. I respond to the hug with a huge smile, then we walk through the city. He is still young as I remembered him, I, on the contrary, have changed a lot, but he tells me that I’m a mature man, but that I’m really handsome.
The day is freezing but clear, we walk until lunchtime, then we go to eat together. The atmosphere between us is enchanting, I never thought it could be like this, it was a continuous exchange of smiles, a desire to conquer each other's heart and love. I felt like I was a teenager again in his first love, yet I was 43 and he was 38.
I never thought that my relationship with Frank could rise again at that level. I felt that he really cared about me and this had a very strong effect on me. It was the first time I understood how much Frank had loved me. Between us we were very shy, we made very prudent speeches, careful not to in any way hurt the susceptibility of the other. We remembered some details of the first phase of our history but trying to leave the other partner the maximum freedom to escape and change the subject. That is, we were concerned not to create obstacles for each other.
We also went to dinner together and then I took him home, I think he would have liked me to go up to his house, but he didn't propose it to me. I realized that not offering it to me had cost him a lot and I said: "This has been the first time we met in ten years but it will certainly not be the last!" Said in these terms, the sentence seemed a polite banality, said perhaps only to say a polite thing, so I said to him: "Shall we do next Sunday?" And he answered with a squint: "You can count on it!"
Maybe because we are no longer kids, but the new phase of my story with Frank has been and still is now very different from the first. Now our concern is no more to make our fantasies come true but to never frustrate the other, to make him feel the best possible way.
A few months ago Frank and I began a coexistence, we did it by meditated choice, not by instinct, giving for granted the idea that we are still free to separate while remaining anyhow friends if it doesn’t work, but despite this premise, the story is working. Frank's smile for me is like the sun, he is happy to be with me, I never imagined that we would come to this type of relationship, 12 years ago it seemed impossible, but it eventually has become reality.
Do you want to know about anal sex? It will seem like paradoxical to you but he hasn't asked me again, he tells me that he doesn't feel the need anymore, that 12 years ago he still had an imitative sexuality induced by pornography, but then he built his own sexuality, which I feel much closer to mine. Now he understands the meaning of cuddling, of being embraced, of falling asleep in each other's arms. I told him the story of the good savage and he told me that he has now become savage too.
I know well that this story is not the paradigm of gay relationships and that reality is very often very different from my story with Frank, but I think that without pornography we could have lived twelve more years of happiness.
End of the story.