Sex Without Strings: A Handbook for Consenting Adults (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Well, Jack, that’s about it. In retrospect, I guess I did have some guilt feelings toward my wife in the sense of her sitting home alone while I was out having a good time, Now I don’t have to worry about that. Everything’s well with me, and I hope all is well with you. Keep on writing those good books and helping to open up people’s heads.

  Sincerely,

  Paul

  Alvin

  The sort of double life we observed in the last chapter is very much a way of life for the whole world of “closet” homosexuals. These, of course, are men who are to all appearances exclusively heterosexual in their orientation. Often they are married and have fathered children. Yet a desire for relations with other males leads them to seek this forbidden sex—sometimes through clandestine meetings with friends in similar circumstances, more often through furtive anonymous couplings with strangers in Turkish baths or other public places.

  It is perhaps questionable whether the closet homosexual qualifies as a swinger. Although he may enjoy group sex with other similarly inclined men, his major concern is not the number of partners he has but that they be male. To be sure, he “swings” in that his homosexual relationships are engaged in purely for recreation; his emotional involvement is likely to center on his wife and family. But this is not swinging in the context of this book.

  Nevertheless, closet homosexuality is occasionally a component of swinging. In one case with which I am familiar, a bisexual male had for some years frequented gay bars once or twice a week to seek sexual companionship. One night he made the unfortunate mistake of responding to the overtures of a slender young man who turned out to be a member of the Vice Squad. He was arrested, evidently because he did not have enough cash on his person to bribe his way clear, and in the course of things his wife found out about his activities.

  After a considerable amount of discussion and soul-searching, the man and his wife decided to find in group sex a means of gratifying his homosexual desires without his being forced to lead a separate life—and, incidentally, without risking police harassment. They began swinging, either with bisexual single men or with couples of which the male member was bisexual. In this instance the wife discovered that she too appeared to be bisexual, although she had had no prior experience in that area and had been aware of no conscious desires for sexual relations with other women.

  And, as far as I know, they’ve all lived happily ever after.

  In Alvin’s case, swinging provides a means of enjoying homosexual relations in a manner which he finds especially satisfying, for reasons which we shall see. His wife is unaware of his activities and will likely be kept unaware of them if Alvin has his way. He swings as a single male with other couples. This is somewhat easier for him to arrange than is the case for most single males seeking such situations; as a bisexual, he seeks couples including a bisexual male, and such couples are more likely amenable to trios with single males.

  Alvin is forty two, dark-haired, of medium build, and balding. His penis, he confided to me, is considerably larger than average. I have only his word for this. He is a media buyer with a New York advertising agency and lives on Long Island with his wife, his two sons, and his daughter.

  • • •

  What’s funny is I never thought of myself as gay. Your typical closet queen is a guy who gets married because he’s fighting homosexuality, or because he makes the cold-blooded decision that he wants the gay sex but not the gay life. In either case, he’s a guy who ultimately goes back to what he was doing all along.

  My case is a little different. I’ve been married sixteen years. I got married right after I got out of the Service, and at the time it never occurred to me that I would ever have the desire to have relations with another man. I knew I was a “normal” guy and I loved to ball girls and I met what looked to be the perfect girl, so I was getting married to her and that was that.

  Now I don’t mean I never had any homosexual experience before marriage. That’s not quite true. I’d better explain that. First of all, when I was about eleven or twelve years old there were a group of us who used to get together and jerk off. We would have contests to see who could come first, or who could shoot the farthest, or sometimes we would jerk each other off. I don’t think this whole business went on for more than a couple of months and I’ve never thought of it as homosexual in nature. It was sex with other boys, but they weren’t sex objects in any sense so it was more a matter of all of us being together to share the experience of discovering about our sexuality; I know a tremendous proportion of kids go through a brief stage of something along those lines and in the greatest number of cases that’s the end of it and they never have any sort of homosexual relationship again.

  That wasn’t the extent of my experience before marriage. In fact, if my previous experience had amounted to nothing more than a few circle jerks I don’t suppose I’d even bother to mention it. There was also the habit I got into in the Service.

  See, we were stationed at this toilet of an Army base in Texas. This was back in the days of the peacetime Army, before Vietnam, and the thing was, there you were for two years, and they really didn’t need you for anything, so after training they stuck you somewhere in some godforsaken part of the country and gave you whatever boring things they could think of. I knew how to type, so I was a clerk typist and spent two years filling out forms.

  Being in that remote a place, it was almost impossible to get any sex when you had a pass to town. The towns near bases are supposed to be wall-to-wall cunt. Well, maybe that’s true of some bases, but not this one. There were a couple of grungy whores around if you could find them—and if you could afford them. As far as the local freebie stuff was concerned, all I can say is, I never ran across any of it.

  So what you very often did was hang around the Y and one of the local fairies would take you on. There were two classes of them in that town. There were the ones who wanted company, wanted you to spend a couple of hours or a whole evening with them, and if you did you got your drinks paid for and your meals and possibly a few bucks extra.

  I never went for that. The whole idea of being close to another man sexually for any length of time, I didn’t like the idea. But there were other guys who would take on one soldier after another. You know, giving blow jobs. There was a guy who had a room at the Y and you’d line up in the alleyway around the corner and he’d take on all comers. And there were two others who worked the men’s room at the movie theater. They’d take turns, one of them watching while the other’s working away on his knees, then the first one would get a little of the action while the other kept an eye out for cops and MPs. The MPs knew about it, of course. Everybody knew about it, but nobody was getting hurt so they let it alone.

  The thing was, there was this distinction. To our way of looking at it, the guys who gave the blow jobs were homosexual, but the guys who received them were not. It was a way of getting your rocks off that was better than jerking off. And it took what—two minutes?

  It wasn’t something you were necessarily proud of, and as I remember, the guys generally didn’t talk about it afterward, but a lot of us went that route. You would go into town and make the usual ritualistic search for girls, and not find any, and then before you went back to base you’d let one of the tube-cleaners do the job on you.

  One topic that came up once in conversation, I remember, is, would you want your wife to blow you after you were married. There was divided opinion about this question. Some guys said, hell yes, why not. Others said it was a sort of a disgusting thing for you to want from a woman you loved and respected. I wonder if kids nowadays think that way. Remember, this was something like twenty years ago. Attitudes have changed, kids aren’t uptight about as many things as we were.

  For myself, I’m not positive how I felt. I think I had certain reservations about asking a woman to go down on me—I mean about the concept of it, since I had never asked a girl to do it, or had it from anyone but the queers in that little Texas town. On the o
ther hand, I really didn’t like the idea of going without oral sex for the rest of my life, because the sensation was indescribably pleasant. I didn’t have any feeling for those guys except contempt, and complete bafflement that they wanted to do such a thing, but I certainly got a lot of intense physical pleasure out of it.

  When they did it, I would always imagine it was a woman doing it to me.

  For the first, oh, six or eight years of my marriage, I don’t think I ever had a homosexual thought. But then I began to get a sort of nostalgic feeling about a really first-rate blow job. The question we had asked each other back in the Service had resolved itself. My wife and I did practice oral sex together, but it wasn’t really terrific. First of all, when she performed fellatio it was never an end in itself, always a prelude. We invariably finished things off having intercourse. She had an absolute fear of having me come in her mouth, as if semen was composed of sulfuric acid or something. Also, she had read in some cockamamie marriage manual that oral sex was all right as preparation for the real thing, but that it was abnormal if it became an end in itself. I don’t know where she got that marriage manual. I think the Pope wrote it.

  I had occasional desires for really satisfying fellatio, but it was nothing that you could call an obsession. Then one evening, before I caught the train home from work I was in a men’s room and a guy made overtures to me. I brushed him off and got out of there, but that put an idea in my head. I had always thought of that kind of sex as something tied into the whole business of Army life. I certainly knew it was available everywhere, but I hadn’t thought of it that way.

  The next thing that happened, I can’t remember exactly when it was, is that I was involved in an evening on the town with a prospective client. One of our pitches was that we would do a much better job of media selection than his present agency, which was very traditional and unimaginative mediawise, at least the way they were treating this particular account. The evening wound up in a high-class East Side whorehouse, an apartment with half a dozen chicks, and I wound up with one of them, and she went down on me. Up to this point, based on my experiences with my wife, I had sort of thought that only homosexuals enjoyed giving head, and that women were never good at it. Well, I don’t know that this chick enjoyed it. I suspect she found it simpler and more comfortable than intercourse. But I do know she was damned good at it.

  Over the next couple of years I saw prostitutes on several occasions. What put me off was the expense, plus the fact that I was troubled by the knowledge that it was just a business for them, that they got no pleasure out of it. I don’t want my sexual partner to fall in love with me, for Christ’s sake, but I don’t like the feeling that she’s just there for the dollars either. After that first experience with the hooker, I began to think more and more in terms of finding a free source of that perfect oral sex. And it became a simple matter to find out where you could pick up a guy for a quick impersonal blow job. Certain subway rest rooms, for example. And then I discovered the baths, and that was perfect.

  There was a whole code there. You rented a private room—at least I always did. I didn’t like being in the open or cruising around. And then, if you happened to want to be blown, you lay on your back and played with yourself so that you would be sporting a nice hard-on if anyone came in. Your position indicated what you wanted, namely to be blown.

  I got in the habit of going to the baths once or twice a week. The expense was next to nothing and the anonymity perfect. I felt, too, that I was not risking disease. This is nonsense, as I discovered once when I picked up a mild dose of clap, which I fortunately got rid of before passing it on to my wife. But the baths seem clean, you know, in the same way that a public toilet seems dirty, so you have the feeling you’re less likely to catch anything there. I had no trouble keeping my activities from my wife. As a matter of fact, I told her I had joined a health club.

  • • •

  At this point Alvin was functioning as a closet homosexual. He still did not fully recognize his behavior as homosexual, but did not take him long to realize that his enjoyment of relations with other men earned him that label. Also, it was not very long before his preference for passive fellatio led him to desire to find out what the active role was like.

  • • •

  I understand this happens to almost everybody. It was a great surprise to me. I tried to push the thought out of my head at first. In fact it was this troublesome thought that several times led me to skip the baths and try having sex with female prostitutes. But it didn’t work. It got to the point where I would make love to my wife and have fantasies that I was sucking a penis, and that really gave me the willies.

  Well, to make a long story short, I tried it and I liked it, like the Alka-Seltzer commercial. Liked it? I loved it. I developed a real taste for it. And before long I was digging everything. I liked to be blown and I liked to blow other guys. I liked to bugger and be buggered. I liked the whole thing. I still cringed at the idea of kissing another man on the mouth, and as a matter of fact I still do. I could never have anything like a love relationship with another man. In fact, I would not like to have sex with any male with whom I have any other sort of relationship. I don’t know why this is, but for me homosexual relations are nothing but a sexual matter and I have always wanted to keep it that way.

  The unsatisfying aspect of my “closet” existence was the guilt that always went through me. There seemed to me to be something very grubby about the whole business. Whether it went on in a filthy toilet or an immaculate steam room, it was still somehow distasteful to me. I would go through periods of giving it up, I would have occasional affairs with women, I would try everything, but there was something that compelled me to keep returning to the baths.

  As I see it, the picture of the closet queen, sneaking gaily off to the baths while his wife has her hair done, is a little simplistic. I’d be surprised if most of the guys in that position don’t go through much the same thing I did, being filled with remorse from time to time, swearing off homosexuality from time to time, the whole bit.

  I went to a shrink for a few months. It didn’t do any good as far as I could see. It was just a matter of lying there and talking. He was pretty much of an orthodox Freudian, from what I understand of the whole business, and he hardly ever said a word to me. I figured I could talk to myself a lot cheaper and I broke it off.

  • • •

  One possible way to “normalize” his circumstances, Alvin thought, was if he could have not homosexual but bisexual experiences. He knew he was not exclusively homosexual; he was always able to perform with his wife, and invariably derived considerable satisfaction from sexual relations with other women. It was more that he seemed to need both male and female sex partners. The possibility of having partners of both sexes—and at the same time—subsequently occurred to him. It was a pornographic novel which suggested the idea.

  • • •

  It was a piece of homosexual pornography. I had read a few books of that sort, although I never dared to buy them, as if what some pimply bookstore clerk thought of me should make any difference. Periodically, though, you would find them at the baths. Guys would bring them along, read them to get excited before they started cruising, and then toss them in a corner rather than tote them home to Scarsdale. They usually didn’t do much for me, but this particular one put a bug in my brain.

  I still remember the basic plot. This older man gets a crush on a young kid in his twenties. The kid is married. He befriends them both and seduces the wife as a way of getting close to the husband. Then he seduces the husband. Then each finds out what’s been going on, and the three of them wind up having orgies for the last seventy or eighty pages, with everybody doing everything to everybody else, and at the end they talk about how much fun it will be in a few years, because the wife’s pregnant and they’ll have someone else to play with soon.

  It was revoltingly written, of course, and the dialogue was incredibly bad, but it was fantastically exci
ting to me because of the possibilities it opened up. The idea of having sex with a man and woman at the same time—it was what I had actually been wanting for years, only I hadn’t realized it.

  My first idea was to have my wife get involved with another man, a bisexual like myself, but, as taken as I was with the idea, I knew how utterly impossible it was. She was just not the right person to put in that kind of role, and thank God I never took steps to bring anything like that about, because she would have either dropped dead of shock at the thought or run off screaming, never to be seen again. And I don’t want that to happen. I love her and we have a very good marriage, and I want to keep it that way.

  In certain ways I might be better off if she did divorce me, and I might eventually find a woman to marry who is on a keel with me sexually—for example, a bisexual girl who enjoys the swinging life. That might be ideal, but at the same time I know what it’s like financially for guys I know who’ve been through the divorce mill. They make big salaries and it all goes for alimony and child support. Also, I don’t want somebody else raising my kids. I enjoy spending time with them, and I’m not a bad father, either. As a matter of fact, I think I’m a pretty good father.

  To get back to what I was saying, I realized in plenty of time that this was something my wife would never be the slightest bit enthusiastic about. She enjoys sex—provided it’s fairly conventional, and at night, and preferably with the lights out—but I don’t think it’s terribly important to her. I’m always the one to initiate lovemaking. She always welcomes it, but if I don’t make the first move, nobody does.