Sex: an Oral History

Nearly everyone loves to gossip or brag about who's sleeping with whom or who just had a hot night. Many of us have some idea of what our friends' sex lives are like—how often they have sex, with how many partners, whether or not it's enjoyable. But we have almost no idea what they are like in bed. What do they try? What do they avoid? What do they think about? What do they feel?

The people we've interviewed are ordinary Americans from various walks of life. (Their names, however, have been changed.) They describe sex—what works for them, what doesn't. But they also talk about the emotions suffusing sex, about its meanings, acknowledged and only suspected; about the joys of monogamy and promiscuity; about intimacy and distance; about honesty and lying.

These people spoke at one moment in their sexual history. Although we tend to think of sexuality as fixed, sex for most of us is in flux. It changes most obviously as we learn about it. It changes as we gain or lose confidence in ourselves. It changes with our status in life. It changes from relationship to relationship and, with any luck, it changes within every relationship.

Sex is one of the best windows to the self, and we all choose, every day, how far to open the curtains.

Sally Laughlin is 24, shares an apartment in Washington, D.C. and is about to start graduate school in social work. She was raised near D.C. in an upper-middle-class suburb. Her father is a partner in a big law firm; her mother was a housewife until the kids were grown and is now an analyst at a brokerage.

In high school I liked kissing a lot, but I didn't really want to do anything else. I didn't mind boys groping around my shirt and I didn't mind kissing, so that's what I did. By my junior year I decided that I needed to learn how to perform oral sex, figuring if I did that the guys weren't going to bother me too much. High school boys are easily pleased. So I invited my best friend Dennis over, I got him kind of drunk and I said, "I'm going to perform oral sex on you to figure out what to do. You teach me." What he told me was, Don't ignore the balls. Touch them, lick them. Guys love that. I was like, OK, cool. And he told me basically to let myself go. Lick, don't bite. And don't suck. The point is not to suck. The next boy I did it to followed me around like a puppy for the next year and a half.

I finally slept with a couple of guys in college, but the sex never felt very good. After college, I moved back to D.C. and met Leon. He was completely different. He was black, from a welfare background, had been in jail, had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He was street-smart, no-nonsense and very sexual. One night we went out dancing, and we had sex three times before we actually went out and four times after. And he was 32—it wasn't like he was 18 or something. One night I stripped for him to music. He was the first person to fantasize out loud to me about what I looked like, about what we were doing. He'd say things like, "You're so hot, you're gorgeous, you're so sexy," while we were having sex.

After I broke up with Leon, I had a few one-night stands. And then, that summer, one of my roommates had a friend over named Mikey. About seven or eight of us sat around having a big talk about what was good for each of us sexually. Afterward, all the women were dying to have sex with Mikey. He said he liked to try a lot of positions and liked to work it out so the woman could masturbate. We all perked up our ears to that.

Mikey and I ended up going out for a year. He was cute and he was good in bed. Sex was it, that was what we had. He and I would fantasize, fantasize, fantasize. If we didn't have much time, we'd both masturbate, and we'd help each other out, like, "What do you want to hear about?" And we'd get each other off. We'd talk about doing it in public, or me going down on him in restaurants.

My favorite thing to do while masturbating was to go down on him, and he'd tell me a fantasy. Usually, I'd be on my back, because I prefer to masturbate lying on my back, with my head turned to the side and him in my mouth. He wasn't really fucking my mouth, but it felt good on my tongue and lips. In that situation, the point was for me to get off, so whatever I wanted to do to his penis was cool.

There was one problem with Mikey. He didn't perform oral sex on me as much as I wanted. I found out at the end that it's not something he liked to do that much. He did it three or four times, one of which was incredible.

We'd broken up for a while, and he invited me to go to a New Year's Eve party in New York. I flew up, wearing a teeny dress and spike heels. We went to this party and the whole night we were around each other but weren't able to have sex. It was a warm New Year's Eve, so we went to the roof of this place. There was a view of the World Trade Center. I went down on him with him leaning against a wall and me kneeling, which he told me looked wonderful, and I'm sure it did in that particular outfit.

After he came I thought maybe we'd have sex. But then he started lifting up my dress, and I said something like, "No way, Mikey, you're going down on me?" He was like, "Yeah." I stood up, he was kneeling. That dress is so small and tight, you just squinch it up a bit and it stays there. He pulled down my stockings. I'm not sure if I was wearing underwear.

The feeling of it—oh, when he would go down on me, he would go down on me well. I remember the feeling of my fingers in his hair, my back against the wall, and there was an exhaust heater going, so it was warm enough, and I just stared at the World Trade Center.

My current boyfriend, Greg, could never do that to me—go wild on my body. Mikey would forget I was there, and I liked that, because I'd forget he was there, too.

With Greg, it's like he wants to make love and I want to fuck [laughs]. Greg is the only man I've ever come with just from fucking, though. Three different times, when I was on top of him. I don't get it, because sex with us isn't that great. And it's not the best orgasm, to be honest. I think he just has a prominent pelvic bone or something. Well, maybe I just feel comfortable with Greg in a way that I never did with Mikey.

Otherwise our sex has been rotten [laughs]. In fact, we haven't had sex in a month. We have a hell of a lot more in common than Mikey and I did. But sex with Greg is not very sexy. It's very loving, which drives me crazy. It always feels as if he wants something from me when we have sex, and I feel turned off by that.

Often what happens is, we'll start kissing, and I just turn off. I'll be like, I can't do this. Now we aren't even trying because it's hellish. The way he kisses drives me crazy. It's this Mother-may-I kiss. I'm like, God! Fucking kiss me if you want to kiss me.

He's also never been able to suck or touch my breasts in a way that excites me. He doesn't use his tongue hard enough. I've tried to explain, and I'm sure he's trying, so I start to think, God, maybe that wasn't it. That's what I thought that the other men were doing, but maybe not.

•

At 57, Judith Rothstein figures she's slept with more than 1000 men, and she didn't really begin until her 30s. She is the daughter of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Czechoslovakia and grew up in poverty on New York's Lower East Side. She married at 18 to escape her family and found herself trapped with two children in a bad marriage. In eight years she never had an orgasm. Now she is divorced, retired from her job as a social worker and living in an apartment on New York's East Side.

The only men I'm attracted to are the ones who are a challenge. If I can take someone like my father, who shows absolutely no interest in me, and get him to love me, well, that's an accomplishment.

The best example is this bachelor I went out with for ten years. I met him in 1968 or 1969. We saw each other every other weekend. It was the best sex I ever had, and I've had sex with a lot of people. I found out that not only could I have an orgasm, I could have 26 orgasms. And he would not stop until I had all 26. He was a craftsman. He knew how to control his own orgasm. He would have only one to my 26. He could maintain his erection for all that time—for two, two and a half hours. He did everything except go down on me. He was bright, sarcastic—and very cold. In those ten years he never said "I love you" or "I like you" or "You turn me on." He didn't talk at all.

Still, I thought it was heaven. I mean, to find out you can have 26 orgasms! And I didn't feel like I owed him anything—that was the beauty of it. Most men's attitude, even if they do know how to play you, is: Hurry up so I can do my thing. His was: This is giving me great pleasure to give you pleasure. And to see if we can break our record of 26 [laughs].

The only thing is, I did get emotionally involved. I did want him to say "I love you." I would have liked him to say "I'll come during the week" or "Let's get married." But he rigidly kept it to every other weekend. And the understanding was that we would both go out with other people.

So during those years with him, I was dating. Probably in my 30 years of being single, I've had at least 1000 guys. And I always had sex on the first date. Either you turned me on and I had sex the first night, or I was never going to have sex with you. I've had several long love affairs; those were people to me. The rest were just numbers. My women friends all thought I (continued on page 148)Oral History(continued from page 118) was crazy, because I had an attitude about sex like men did. If I saw someone I liked, I'd walk over to him and say, "Hi, I think you're handsome, do you want to fuck?" He didn't have to be the right age, the right religion. He wasn't going to be my husband. I already had a boyfriend I really liked. This was just bed.

I'm not saying I didn't have emotional problems or that I wasn't very needy. I think a lot of the time I would have been happier to not have had sex, if I could have crawled up on his knee and been babied and held. But you can't say to a stranger, "I'm really feeling low, can I climb on your knee?" You can say, "I want to fuck."

What makes a good fuck is not what makes a good husband. It's a man's ability to distance himself from you, to make it a purely mechanical act, like running a race. That's why I've always found the first night is the best. Even in good relationships, the ones that last, there is nothing like the excitement of the first night. The newness, the strangeness. Once you know somebody, they're human. But that first time, you're not a human being. You're a faceless fuck.

I like tender and gentle, but not in sex. There was hostility even in the forcefulness of my response. I didn't lie there like a lox. I took control. I didn't want it to be loving. I wanted it to seem like I was being assaulted. I've had men say "Kiss me." Kiss you? That's not what I'm into at the moment! I don't want to kiss you. The affection is before or after but not during. The act is two animals clawing at each other, thrusting their bodies as hard as they can until they scream. Where is the affection in that?

I talk a lot during sex. I wish more men would do that. It's also important for a man to tell me he's coming. I don't even know sometimes. They try to keep it all in. A man coming turns me on. If he lets me know, usually I can come just by virtue of having made him come, because it's such a turn-on to see someone so excited.

In general, I have a lot less sex now than I used to. Part of it is because of AIDS. I still have sex, I just try to be careful with whom. By that I mean a man who's middle-class, not a drug user, not bisexual. And I insist he use a condom. At one time I would have said to myself, "What the hell, let's have sex even though I'm never going to see you again," but now the tendency is, "What the hell, let's not bother. Why take the risk? I'm never going to see you again."

•

Sue White is 21, married 2-1/2 years, a month into an affair. She is attractive, with straight jet-black hair, pale skin, green eyes. She is wearing a low-cut minidress and high heels. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she works in an office and attends college.

I started having sex when I was 15. Until I was 17 or so I didn't have any boyfriends. I had a group—there were about ten of us who were close friends. We'd have parties every Wednesday and Saturday night, and I think that we all had sex with one another at some point.

I moved to the city when I was 18. After I had been here about a month I went out with Freddie. He plays in a band and he's three years older than I am, so, of course, I thought he was really romantic. He came home with me, we had sex, we went out every night and we got married two months later.

He has a big sexual appetite. We still have sex once or twice a day, which I guess is unusual. I've cooled off a little bit because I work and go to school full-time, but he hasn't. I'm always hitting him and telling him to go away, but he doesn't. We have sex all the time. Late at night. After dinner. In the morning.

He used to work across the street from me, and we'd have sex at lunch in the men's room in his building. We've had sex all over the place. The men's room at a fancy hotel, which was funny. We were waiting for a movie, and we had about an hour till the show started, so he went into the hotel's men's room and said, "Sue, it's empty, come in here." We had sex in the stall, standing up. It's a clumsy thing, because bathrooms aren't made for sex. You're always straddling a toilet or tripping over it.

Sometimes we have sex several times a day. He almost killed me one day. He wanted to see how many times he could have sex. He said he thought he could do it 25 times. I think he got up to 16 and then it was midnight and I told him he had to stop because the day was over and it wouldn't count.

We like everything. You name it, I'm sure we've done it. Oral sex, anal sex. He brings home porn films, which I don't like but he does, so I let him watch. My girlfriends can't spend the night because he always wants me to have sex with them while he watches. He's like, "Sue, crawl into bed with her." I say, "Freddie, no." It gets so embarrassing.

He tries to get us drunk. If it's a close friend of mine, I'll warn her. Then we tease him. One night a girlfriend and I got terribly intoxicated. She and I are very affectionate, we're always kissing each other. We came home and I don't remember what happened. He says we did it, but I don't believe him. I think she and I were more likely to have been throwing up than having sex.

If I'm tired, I've found it's easier to just have sex with him than to try to dissuade him. If I tell him no, he'll say—and he means it to be funny—"Then I'll just have to satisfy myself." He starts to masturbate, and he'll run his elbow into me while he does it, and he'll make little sighing noises. "Oh, my wife doesn't love me and she won't have sex with me." I get sick of it after a while and have sex with him. I usually end up liking it even if I try not to.

I've never had an orgasm. I read that a lot of women don't until they're older, so I don't worry about it. I figure that trying to have one would make it frustrating, so it will happen when it happens. I never masturbate, I don't really like it. What I like about sex is not just sex. I wouldn't sit around and do it myself. What I like is the other person.

I'm definitely not looking for more sex than I already have. The affair I'm having is more for emotional reasons. Freddie is very self-centered. We get along pretty well, but we have nothing in common. This other man, his name is Alvin, he and I have a lot in common. He's 35, so he's a lot older than me. Except for the fact that we're both involved with other people, we have a normal relationship. We're getting to know each other slowly. It's the opposite of the way I got married.

We haven't had sex that often because we don't have much time together. Alvin's a very good lover. Of course, he's not as oversexed as Freddie. I don't think many people are. And sex is much gentler with him. He waits to see what I want. He likes giving oral sex more than getting it. He's interested in pleasing me and making me happy more than anything else. He doesn't know I don't have orgasms. Since I'm so loud, neither of them has ever asked me, and I know if a man thinks a woman hasn't had an orgasm, he asks. So I just don't bring it up. I don't want to hurt their egos.

(continued on page 229)Oral History(continued from page 148)

Alex Woodleigh is 42, head of computer services at a large company in Ohio and father of two boys, ten and five. His marriage is unconventional: He and Anita, a psychologist with a private practice, have been together for 15 years. For the past three they have "opened" their marriage on the condition that both will disclose their other relationships. She has had one serious love affair, which ended when she refused to leave Alex; he has had less consuming liaisons—until now. Recently Alex fell in love with another woman.

It happened at a conference in Miami with a woman named Diane. I've known her for a long time, but not well. She's married. She's also a good friend of another friend of mine, and I said I'd say hi to her. So I did. Thursday night there was a big reception. I started talking with her, we had a couple shots of tequila and we were attracted. We walked on the beach, sat and talked and, well, one thing led to another. How do these things happen? It was pretty clear that we were either going to bed together or we would walk away and never be able to see each other because we wouldn't be able to stand it. The attraction was instantaneous—physical and emotional. I don't know why it would happen after years of associating, but it did.

We went back to her room. I still wasn't absolutely sure I was going to stay the night, or what we were going to do. But I stayed, of course. It was magical from that moment, and it's been magical every time I've been with her.

Anita knows all about it, though right now she's pretty angry. I didn't think it would be a big issue, given what we've been doing for a while. But it was, because I did it without telling her first. What really set her off, though, was that I talked to her while I was in Miami and didn't tell her anything was going on.

It got scarier until I finally said, "Well, if you really don't want me to do it, I won't." That was fine for about a week. As long as she knew she had that power, it was OK. Then suddenly it wasn't anymore. I was getting ready to go on a business trip with Diane, and it upset Anita to have to face that. Of course, I was scared to tell Anita what was happening to me, for fear it would drive her away. She asked me if I was in love with Diane. I said yeah, but I didn't say it was this complete obsession. I felt possessed.

Right now, Anita is not sleeping with me. She says she can't bear to be with me. Meanwhile, Diane told her husband about us. They had an understanding before that if either of them ever had an affair, they didn't want to know. So she wasn't going to tell him. But eventually she realized she had to say something. She put it in the context of opening up the relationship and allowing him some freedom, too. So far he's been fine about that. I think she was more discreet and a little smarter than I was; she didn't make it obvious just how involved we are.

Sex with Diane feels spiritual. I would never have said anything like that before. It sheds a completely different light on what sex can be. It's like our bodies merge. If there were such a thing as an aura, or a spiritual body—it's a connection on that level, instead of one that's just physical.

If you were looking from the outside at us in bed, it would be like, God, aren't they ever going to stop? We made love for two hours straight last night. I had an erection the whole time and I felt something like orgasm many, many times, though I didn't ejaculate until near the end.

We rented a room in a fancy hotel. I took her out to play tennis. We got all sweaty, and she had a top on but no bra, and her nipples were erect—she was beautiful. She's about 5'5?, 5'6?, dark hair, dark eyes, very dark skin—she's Italian and 42, same age as me. So we went back to the hotel, had a drink at the bar, drank about half, went upstairs and took our clothes off. I lit two candles. We started holding each other and kissing.

I remember I made her put her arms back so she wasn't doing anything, and I just licked her nipples. Her body shuddered, like the energy was too much. Later I touched her clitoris with my penis for a long time. Very slow, sensual, inserting just a little bit, not a lot. I don't know how long that lasted.

She was mostly on her back, though it happened other ways, too. One time she ended up on her back with her head down between the two beds, like a back bend with her legs in the air. I was holding her by her thighs. Then I turned her over and I came in from behind. Slow at first, and then I pushed hard and got almost violent. I told her to suck me. She spent a long time doing that. She does this thing—it's the best—when she starts sucking me, I try to grab her and touch her, but she'll take my hands and put them back on the bed. So I'm lying completely open and she's sucking, hard and soft, and she sucks my balls.

Last night, for the first time, I used some oil and softened her anal area and came in there slowly. Used my hand to touch her clitoris and inside her. I did that for a long time. When I finally ejaculated, I don't know how to describe it—it's like an explosion of explosions. It feels almost like I can't separate from her after that. I couldn't tell you how many times she came, but it was a lot. And there are times when I come—well, I don't come, but I get a wave of sensation like an orgasm, and I'm satisfied, but I stay hard and I don't ejaculate. The roller coaster gets up to the top and goes back down. Whether you want to or not, you're on that ride, and you just let go.

One night in Miami I found myself saying, "How could we ever have been apart?" I was overcome with something like sadness, and I burst into tears. She was on top of me and we were fucking. It just came out of my mouth. I have no idea what I meant. It had no connection to anything logical. I could make up something like we're soul mates, or we've been connected in a past life, but I don't believe any of that. It just felt like somebody I had been away from for a long time, and we were coming back together.

In one way it scares the shit out of me. Whatever is happening, it's put my marriage at risk—a very solid 15-year marriage. I mean, I've gone through all sorts of things, and I think most anybody who knows Anita and me would say we have one of the most successful marriages they've ever seen. Yet I'm willing to risk it. That's frightening. I'm in a quandary: Can I have it all? My marriage has been wonderful and our sex has been great. I don't want to lose that. Yet there's this other thing that I don't understand.

•

Rachel Monroe is 31, a dancer living in San Francisco. In manner and appearance she is soft, feminine, even girlishly innocent at times, and her emotions are close to the surface. "When people meet me, they often think I'm tentative and vulnerable—more than I really am. I don't show the other side of me much."

She started masturbating at an early age and began having intercourse at the age of 15. Since then she has mostly slept with men, though she has had several experiences with women, including her current girlfriend, Liza.

I've known Liza for six years. We were friends. Then two years ago it happened. I was in her apartment and I wanted to take a nap. I asked her if she wanted to lie down with me. We were both on a tiny bed. I said, "I'm not going to be able to sleep." I was aroused for the first time with her. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. It was so forbidden, and my whole body was an electric current. She was touching me, seducing me. It was amazing. I felt from the first moment, Jesus, this is a skilled lover. Liza understands that a woman's arousal zones are not only breasts and cunt. She taught me about the crook of the elbow and the place behind the knee. Licking there. The neck, the ears. She showed me my G spot. She touches my whole body with her breasts. Touching her breasts, the softness of them, feels forbidden every time. And she never touches my cunt too soon. That's a problem with most men. And then the way she kisses is extraordinary.

Sex with a woman, at least with Liza, is very one-sided. With a man, you have the penis in there and you're holding onto his body, so it can be mutually satis fying. With a woman, you give sex or you receive sex. We tried spreading our legs and putting our cunts together, but it didn't do much and we laughed the whole time. And we don't like doing 69 very much, because it's hard to concentrate long enough to have an orgasm.

Mostly she makes me come with her mouth. She uses a kind of circular motion with her tongue on my clitoris. And she puts her finger inside me—just one. She can use two, but I prefer one. Men think they need more than one for the thickness, but that's not it at all. If you have just one finger in there, it can be much more subtle. I don't need a lot of movement. It's not the friction I'm after. It's more a probing motion, in and out. Or on the surface, just moving in at the opening. Teasing, but forever.

One night we were in bed with my boyfriend. We were all a bit drunk. Threesomes can be difficult—someone always seems to feel left out. So we were playing this game. I was whispering in his ear what he should do to her. It was like I was touching her, but only through my whispering. I was guiding him because I always thought he was too quick. It was going great. He was doing everything I said, stroking softly, kissing everywhere. Then it got to the point where he was going to put his penis in her. This was my big moment, because I always want a penis when I have sex with her. Now I was gonna get to fuck her, using him. At the last moment he said, "OK, that's it, don't you think I can handle it from here?" I was so upset, it completely broke my mood.

That's fairly typical of the men I've been with. Like Scott. I call him the Rabbit. It still enrages me that through our whole relationship the motion of sex was fast and hard, and it couldn't be any other way. It was like he had no control over his body, and every encounter was a quickie.

If Liza's going down on me, she understands that if I push her head away a bit, it means there is too much pressure. It's instinctual for me, and she knows it doesn't mean, Stop, I hate you. But with another lover, Noel—sometimes if I try to push him away, he goes harder.

A few weeks ago I wouldn't let Noel use his hands at all. I pushed them above his head and made him stay like that. Then I began to touch his ass. He reacted so strongly that I got my dildo and fucked him in the ass with it. I'd wanted to do that for a long time, but I never had the chance before. It had never happened to him, either. He had the most amazing orgasm I'd ever seen.

Sometimes I use fantasies. They might have to do with somebody raping somebody. Me raping somebody. Me having a penis. Sometimes I'm licking a virgin girl until she's excited, or I make her suck my penis until she screams for me to stop. Disgusting, huh? But I love the feeling of all this power.

•

Matt Sherrill grew up on a farm in upstate New York. His father is a doctor, his mother a housewife. He has two brothers. "I had a conventional childhood and youth. A completely functional family. All this business that fucks so many people up didn't happen to me."

Now he is 45, a stockbroker, living in an immaculate apartment in Greenwich Village. He has short blond hair and is dressed in jeans and a work shirt. Among the photos on the walls are several of him as an extremely handsome young man. He makes no attempt to hide his sexual orientation from colleagues or anyone else.

The kind of sex that excites me is almost completely anonymous, what I call electric sex. You see somebody, and 15 seconds later you're all over them. The encounter may not last more than ten minutes. It may or may not culminate in coming home and going to bed together.

I have four or five people in the city—most of them live within walking distance—who are sex buddies. This, as opposed to electric sex in commercial establishments. These people call me, or I call them, at midnight and say, "Do you want company?" They come over and we have sex, drink a beer and they're gone in 1-1/2 hours. In New York, gay people don't stay over, not if they live nearby. It's so much more satisfying to just sweep them out. Then you can put on your comfy flannel PJs and get into bed and read. Of course, you're just dying for certain people to want to stay, if you're drawn to them in a romantic way. It's wonderful, but it doesn't happen very often.

Plus, I'm not very good at love affairs. I'm too sexually voracious. There are people who I think are wonderful, and I'm absolutely smitten by them. Then I find out after not many times in the sack—five, six—that I'm thinking about someone else when I'm having sex with the person who is supposed to be number one. And I think, What's the point?

There's an organization called Sex Addicts Anonymous, and I went to a meeting once out of curiosity. It was so corny and hokey. People were actually unhappy. I'm not unhappy. I recognize that I'm addicted to instant sex. Lots of it. At an age when most men, straight or gay, are precluded from it because they're not as attractive as they were at 22, I seem to keep up.

As far as I know I'm HIV-negative. Since 1979 I've been part of a study that tests my blood every four months. I was very nervous about AIDS for most of the early Eighties, until they discovered that the only real way to get it was by being the receptor in intercourse—something I've never been able to master.

The places that I have sex—there are various bookstores. There's one bookstore where you go in and pay ten bucks. It's a labyrinth of booths upstairs and downstairs. Any time of day or night, particularly at night from about 11 to three, there are 50 to 80 men in there having sex. There are various movie houses where this goes on. There are various sex clubs. And then there's a sauna on the East Side, one of the last gay baths in the city. I went there last night and had a richly rewarding time [laughs].

There are people of all kinds in these sex clubs: people in their 70s, people in their teens. Mostly white, but ten percent to 15 percent black. And what people do is a great deal of endless shopping. I know it's true for me that the selection and the conquest is far more exciting than the consummation.

A lot of time is spent in what someone called S&M, which means Stand and Model—checking out who's there, what they look like, what they act like, little visual cues, following people around. This delicate minuet of courtship takes a lot of time. Part of it is that people are naturally fearful of rejection, so before they initiate conversation, they want signs that their advances are going to be welcome.

Also, there's a pecking order, from the most desirable person to the least desirable person. Naturally, people want to fuck up rather than down [laughs]. So everybody's paying attention to people above them on the beauty ladder and trying to ignore everyone below them.

You're wandering around and immediately people start coming up to you and brushing past you in the corridors, groping you and saying, "Do you want to come to my room?"

I've always felt I was skinny and not very strong. I suppose by way of compensation, I'm fascinated by people who are strong and muscular. Genitalia have always been pretty uninteresting to me, whereas a lot of gay men are riveted by big dicks. When I had my first gay sex, with a bartender in his seedy apartment in Paris, he said, "Cheer up, you've got the biggest dick I've ever seen." And everybody else I've had sex with who spoke up has said the same thing. Probably that's why I'm not that interested in dicks, not feeling deficient in the dick department.

But if I go looking to round up somebody to sleep with, I always go to a place like the baths where everybody is naked. Because at the age of 45, it's not like being 23, when you walk into a gay bar and all heads swivel. All of a sudden, at about the age of 35, you become invisible. So in the baths, I just hang the towel round my neck instead of wearing it round my waist. So cruel is the world.

•

"I guess I'm just a shy guy," says Ted Stewart, and that seems true enough. He is 40, tall, slim and handsome, with salt-and-pepper hair, a high forehead, strong jaw and nose, pale blue eyes—a hint of Mel Gibson. He grew up in the South with an older brother and younger sister. Now Ted lives in a West Coast city and works as a free-lance graphic artist, though not as successfully as he would like. A few months ago he married Mary, the woman with whom he has lived for nine years. He is, he says, like his father: "Loyal to my wife, but not faithful."

My sexual relationship with Mary has never been explosive. It's gotten better over the years as we have come to know each other's ways, but for the first five or six years it was kind of boring. It's more a relationship of compatibility. There's a fondness, a familiarity, a comfort.

Last year I was having dinner with the woman who was my first real love, Jacqueline. She knows my feelings toward her are still strong, and she challenged me. She said, "You just want to be comfortable." That hit a nerve, because I guess it's true. And it's not just sexual. I didn't have passion for Mary, and that goes beyond sexual. It's a passionate feeling of being in love with someone, and I never felt that. I didn't feel an electric spark. For years I thought maybe I should break up with Mary and go back to Jacqueline. Or try to find someone I felt passionate about. In the past I've been with women who were really great, and I broke up with them for no reason except I wasn't ready for a relationship. So I just kept thinking about how compatible Mary and I were, and I didn't want to give that up.

Temperament has something to do with it. We're both pretty easygoing. We share interests in politics, art, everything. We like to act silly, goof around. Being shy, it's hard for me to express myself physically. Mary and I don't have boundaries about stuff like that. We're always putting our hands all over each other. And not just in affectionate ways, but in ways that might be offensive to other people. I'll grab her and stick my hand right up her crack, or I'll do that in a tickling way. How many times a day do I grab her breasts? Or she'll grab me. She's very affectionate. I like that.

It was mainly the sex I was dissatisfied with. I felt she was passive, which might seem to contradict what I said about her being affectionate, but there's being affectionate and there's being sexual. There wasn't the feeling of getting hot and bothered, where you're moving your bodies and there's a rhythm. There were times when I would almost scream because she would just lie there. I felt like I was using her, like I was fucking an inanimate object. I'd say, "Do you want me to go down on you? Do you want this, or that?" She'd say, "Oh, I enjoy it all." I didn't totally accept it because I know what it's like when a woman is really turned on. Not that everyone has to respond the same way, but I knew Mary was missing out on something.

An orgasm for her was a little blip. A little tremor, a half-second shake. Of course, what do I know about a woman's orgasm? It just didn't seem like enough.

Maybe if I knew more about what it really felt like, I would feel less guilty about having sex with other women, or I'd be able to give Mary more pleasure. When I say guilty, part of my assumption has been that men get more pleasure out of sex than women do. I'm not sure that's true, but it's part of my conditioning. If I were convinced that women enjoy it, then I'd be more inclined to accept my own sexuality and my own desires. But I don't get clear responses from Mary. We do it about once a week. I'm happy doing it once a week with her, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it. I'm frustrated that I'm not able to meet more women and have more affairs. Flings, that is. Affair implies something ongoing. I have one fling a year at most, but it's always on my mind. I can walk down the street and fall in love every 20 minutes. No, every five minutes.

I'm reticent about starting anything. Maybe it's because of all the horrible things that women are presented with—guys are always coming on to them. I associate it with being dirty, being bad. Even when I wasn't living with someone, I still felt like my interest in a woman was something bad. I guess that's a common attitude in American society, where sex is bad. It's really stupid. Tragic.

It reminds me of this other girl—she was a girl at the time. I was working on an ad campaign, this was eight or nine years ago. I was drawing sketches and she was a model. She wasn't at all shy about standing in the studio, taking off her underwear and putting on other underwear. I found myself being turned on, because this girl was really attractive. Later on she came back to my studio alone to look at the sketches. We were hanging out, and I wasn't sure if she wanted to look at the pictures and leave, or what. I could have taken the risk of rejection, but I didn't. It's uncanny that it's so hard to say certain things about sex without sounding moronic. But what goes through my head is: Here's a young woman, I'm a young man. Why is it so hard for people to look each other in the eyes and say, "Shall we or shan't we?"

"I didn't lie there like a lox. I took control. I wanted it to seem like I was being assaulted."