When I original read this guy’s profile I thought it a very good example of a positive profile by a likeable top. But there was nothing that could be cleanly excerpted.

Then he wrote me:

Although some others on this site similarly indicate that is what they are looking for, most of them only want one time meetings as such or only in role playing situation.

Your Hard limits seem reasonable and mean while your soft limits seem flexible enough that I believe we might be compatible.

I want you to read my profile, and keeping in mind that although I list several interests I clearly state that none of them are mandatory.

After reading it take the time to write back to me and let me know if you agree that we MIGHT be compatible.

None of that off-putting manner by strangers who think writing “Tell SIR why you should be allowed to become His worthless scum slave property” is a way to say hello.

The guy I quote above doesn’t drive, nor do I so nothing will come of that.

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

A self-proclaimed – it isn’t as if there’s a licensing authority for the term – Old Guard Master shares his view of the M/s power exchange:

The distance between Master and that of Slave is greater than the Distance between Man and Ape.

The Master is African-American so given the recent media furors over the racial implications of images of primates this is an exceptionally unfortuneate metaphor.

But would be a damn silly assertion to make outside of BDSM porn anytime.

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

Because my sexuality is fluid and mercurial I can say many different – even seemingly contradictory – things about my desires and needs that are all conditionally true.

In my online profiles I’ve tried various strategies for honestly capturing my sexual and affectional orientations. To be honest without confusing or overtaxing the reader.

A proper profile for myself as a submissive and masochistic man would need to be a small website of about twenty pages. Since my changes are slim I’ve never actually put out the effort to construct such. (Though I did create one consisting of several pages in the time shortly before Charles.)

What you may get out of my profiles is contingent on your expectations, inclinations and patience.

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

Several times a guy pushing a “Family Commune” has attempted to attract my attention. The profile he has posted on behalf of the Master he no longer reads with is fairly long.

It opens like a cross between a bad self-help book and an invitation to join the local Baptist church:

Are you tired of living alone?
Are you yearning to belong…and to be part of a family?
Are you a caring, nurturing person and wish you had ‘something bigger’ to contribute to?

Are you emotionally vulnerable? A target for schemes?

Master is currently searching for a very nice, upscale place in beautiful South Florida to form a small and S-A-N-E family / commune / community.
There will be some nice rooms to rent to a few select, natural servant / slave / sub type men.

He is looking to buy a house and to find some suckers to make the mortgage payments?

Of course, you will keep your regular 9-5 life. And you will have your personal space and time.
However, your dedication to your family commune should come first.

Of course the cult will be the priority.

And though this is a roommate situation, there will still be some structure; like domestic duties, fellowship, eating and outings together, etc.
And, if you wish, assisting Master! (I had the honor and pleasure to do that for some time. How wonderful that was.)

So you only have to serve Master if you want to.

An ideal candidate must be submissive, humble, honest, and dedicated to serving.

Someone that can be pushed around?

You could possibly be there part-time only (ex. weekends) but you would have to pay full rent, as you would still have your own room available to you anytime.

The main thing is pay the rent.

ABOUT YOU:

First, truly wanting to belong and be part of a family situation must be a priority.

You should be desperate, needy.

Be easy to be around and able to fit in with your new family. And you must be spiritually open.

Open to what Pentecostalism? Human sacrifice?

Family combined with commune makes me think of Charles Manson. Probably not that kind of thing going on here. Though there are so many cunning and disreputable people who come up with imaginative ways to bilk people …

Really it sounds like an attempt to get a bunch of submissive guys to make someone’s house payments. I’ve seen other online profiles by men that are obviously hoping to manipulate for profit slave-identified males.

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

Leather!

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

(Townsend inverted the colors of the illustration when he published these. I’ve flipped the colors back for online legibility.)

The sadist looks like he’s having fun. Hopefully his slave is as well.

What would a male masochist do without genitormenr? Not sure exactly is happening down there.

Two slaves punish a third. Bondage is the future it mysteriously says. The hand at the bottom appears to be holding a remote control. Perhaps to shock collars on the two guys standing?

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

Very likely all online dating/hooking sites have such a feature. A button you can click on a person’s profile to express esteem without having to trouble with the actual composition of a message. On Recon it is called cruising someone.

At first the cruising that came my way made sense. The other guy’s profile was in some way complementary to mine. Nothing came of this. The men lived far away and were expressing approval of my profile.

Time passed and I started getting more and more cruises from distant men. Increasingly there was no match. If the profiles too minimal to have meaning or incoherent. One fellow had clearly just banged on the keyboard a few times. It might have been a monkey’s profile.

And some of them would cruise me repeatedly. But it didn’t really feel like the man in France with a profile in French was really trying to get me to write to him. He could’ve written to me.

Eventually a pattern began to emerge. These guys all had galleries. Usually photos of themselves, often more than a hundred. These guys are all attention whores.

This was confirmed for me when I read the profile of a man in Boston who sent me a cruise. It was a nice profile. So I looked at gallery of photos he took of his lover /slave. The next day I got a message from him demanding that I cruise him. After all hadn’t I looked at the photographs he’d put up.

Some of these guys are so diligent they get over a thousand profile views a month. Maybe a few of them are trying to increase the chance they’ll meet a compatible guy.

Some of them are probably men who are Masters or slaves only online. Their only validation in their perceived role is in having their profile and gallery looked at and being virtually cruised.

You can opt out of Recon’s cruise system.

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

I am variously amused and aroused by over-the-top tops, er, excuse me, MASTERS.

The regularly scheduled whipping was the one thing I got out of The Story of O. But I don’t deny being as silly as the next masochist.

Old Guard TOP that believes every morning starts with a whipping and every evening ends with a whipping just as normal, daily routine to keep the mind in the correct place throughout the day. (Note that is a whipping, NOT a spanking)

The last line below kills most guys’ normal response to a personal ad.

SIR is a FIRM believer in total chastity n orgasm control, a faggot is never allowed to masturbate, faggotslave will go years, maybe a lifetime, without masturbating. So, SIR does NOT care about faggots endowment, one inch is even more than enough for a faggot. SIR is NOT interested in seeing PICS of faggot hard endowment or cum shots.

Talk about control freaks. Sounds like SIR isn’t easily bored.

Breathing, sweating n blinking come to mind as about the only things that a faggotbitch may do without SIR’S prior permission.

A new version of pansexuality.

Being a good sub/slave is not about romance or sex and SIR is not looking for a sex object. So, gay, bi or straight makes little difference.

In a way this isn’t a bad question. But – really now – many things wouldn’t be done if they weren’t felt to be humiliating.

How can it be HUMILIATION if MASTER orders it? Shouldn’t faggotbitch be proud rather than humiliated that faggot pleased the OWNER?

SIR isn’t very sociable.

If hundreds of miles apart n SIR has not listed that SIR is visiting faggotbitch area or faggotbitch is not visiting SIR’S area, DO NOT waste SIR’S time unless faggot intends to send SIR a ticket to visit faggotbitch area.

Once you start writing about lifetime orgasm denial you’ll attract all out of control submissive guys.

Wonder how many people actually meet up with the guy.

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

One of my favorite people in all of space and time.

Learning to appreciate gay guys who wear dresses*

As I type this I see someone is searching Google for “self sucking gay crossdressers.” Some sex fantasies can still surprise.

One nifty aspect of writing about yourself is the quickening of memory.Reviving memories almost forgotten.

In 1972 I’d left home and Ebba and Gordon were my roommates. Victor had left John for Nancy and John moved to Atlanta. With fatal foolishness I fell in love with him and moved into our own apartment;; slummy complex on Peachtree across from Piedmont park. The man below us was a Sterno addict and would keep us awake but in stitches mooing like a despairing cow.

Glenn, our building superintendent was an ignorant middle-aged man. He was trying or at least hoping to transition from genetic male to medically created woman.

Christine Jorgensen, the inspiration for Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, had undergone her gender transformation twenty years earlier. Her fame survived after a fashion so I’d heard of sex change operations. I think Glenn may have been taking hormones. He was often bed-ridden and so raffish I can’t remember if he went en femme. I didn’t think much about it except for a small doubt: was he sincere or just wanting attention.

Back when I’d been living with Gordon and Ebba I made my second abortive attempt to have sex (having someone’s roommate throw ice water on you through the bedroom door can’t help but spoil the mood). Thinking back the young little ice queen I’d climbed into bed with had on some kind of silken women’s undergarment. It would’ve been mentally if not tactilely invisible to me back then. I hated wearing underwear. Pleasure in wearing a woman’s undergarment wasn’t something I’d hear of for many years..

Bobbie, the ice queen’s roommate excited me strongly. A gentle, sweet guy very much in love with his hustler boyfriend. Bobbie was a naïve Southern boy with the special kind of face that can make a pimple into a beauty mark. Maybe if I’d understood the fragility and inevitable failure of such an entanglement I’d have made a pass at him, I dearly wanted to. Boys like Bobbie were always fiercely faithful (their boyfriends never were). Much later I saw Bobbie on the street dressed as a woman. First time I – knowingly at least – saw a passable transvestite. With wig and make-up he wasn’t a bit less appealing and lovable. My first site of a pretty drag queen, I’d have loved to have the boy under me even in a dress but only in recollection would I see that. Didn’t matter he’d donned drag to go hooking.

androgynous/masculine seeks androgynous/feminine

From my first personal ad appearing outside of The Atlanta Barb the gay newspaper that I helped run. Marc (aka Rose C’est La Vie) was the only person to answer. Marc sometimes wore dresses without makeup or in anyway trying to assume the persona of a woman. He looked fetching in a dress sans makeup, wig, or jewelry. A minor sort of queer political statement: genderfuck. Never gave his appeal in a dress a second thought. I called him and we laughed when told him that the ad was mine. Years later when I was living with Siobhanand visiting Atlanta, Marc and I got to know each other little bit better just before I left Atlanta after a visit. The laughter years earlier might’ve been a mistake.

If the word androgynous hadn’t appeared in the ad I don’t know if I’d remember it. Years later it would surprise me to discover I’d employed it in the first half of the 70s. A preference for a limp wrist aside it was probably that David Bowie’s early days had popularized it. The wild eyed boy from Freecloud then seemed the summa of androgynous male beauty.

Callow hermaphrodite fantasies

While I’d placed a couple of personals, I’d never responded to one until I was living in San Francisco. Off and on again I’d had fantasies of making love to a hermaphrodite. (I hope any pre-operative MTF transsexuals (or intersexuals persons) who see this will forgive me. Your struggles and pains, the misery with one’s biological lot, were unknown to me.) My fantasy image was inspired by the classical myth of Hermaphroditus the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. Honestly, yes it was a chick with a dick, a shemale – did that nomenclature exist back then? My dream boygirls were fuzzy conceptions, no suspicion that they actually existed.

What the ad said I don’t remember. “Pre-op transsexual” wouldn’t have meant much to me back then. Maybe she spelled it out: I have tits and a cock. The voice on the other end was creepy, bitter. She required a ‘donation.’ Back then there wasn’t much public help for men wanting to have the bodies of women. That the monetary burden has driven some mtf transsexuals into prostitution I didn’t know.

Back when I was selling callboys I’d intended to eventually pay for sex: half as a lark, half for a quirky sort of self-edification. Many youthful ambitions are never realized; I never did buy a boy even though by twenty-one I knew many male hustlers. Perhaps if the voice had been kinder or vulnerable, vulnerability has always had the power seduce me, I’d have happily made a donation. I can’t fault her. She probably heard from many self-proclaimed real men whose most tender line was that they’d show her what it was like to be a real woman. After the phone call I dropped the idea.

Here’s the kicker: I never connected my admiration for Bobbie or Rose, my call to the pre-op transsexual with my sexuality. I thought of myself as a gay man who only wanted other gay guys. Even when I lived with a woman for five years my sense of myself as gay never wavered. In my coming out story I noted my inner blindness. My eyes liked what they’d seen, my heart stayed shut.

Many years pass.

Have you ever been to alt.com? It is the match.com of BDSM personal ads, although the graveyard of online personals may be more apt. Personal ads are often a tentative gesture toward assuaging an unmet need or suppressed desire. The more atypical the itch the greater the likelihood of a retreat back to self-denial.

Browsing the listings of North Carolina submissives I ran across a photo of a crossdresser: nude except for hosiery, bent over showing his/her butt (I love buttocks, male or female). My body responded much to my surprise. Fashion photos of pretty boys in sweaters, Renaissance paintings of pageboys were my usual idea of erotica.

I like nudity as well as the next human being. OK, maybe not. Naked pictures are fine but I rarely see any that make me smile with delight. Vapid faces bereft of individuality. Without a hint of irony, prankishness, kindness I can’t perform my viewer’s role of investing the photo with sexual glamour. When I made myself healthy and my sexuality reemerged I tried to take advantage of the Internet’s vast erotica archives. (Aggravated my carpal tunnel to no purpose.) Playgirl centerfolds on their motorboats and motorbikes weren’t for me.

Also on alt.com, I saw a facial shot of a very gentle looking longhaired guy. His listing said he was transgendered male in the process of becoming a female. His words matched the vulnerability of his picture.

I made a small evolution. The gradations between male and female became alive, as full of erotic joy as the favored two. I found that the people in between and outside were just as lovely, just as lovable.

As a young gay man to me guys in dresses meant drag queens in bars. Back then, lip synching pop songs they looked like tacky mannequins that had melted under the sun. Their strenuous, aggressive personalities are probably necessary in their world (and dealing with the rest of the world). A little bitchiness is appealing but I don’t like being near loud, pushy people.

That was the early 70s. I hope their lot has since improved but back then even in the bars they perform in they were regarded by many as little more than grotesque oddities. Many of them lived in poverty with hustler boyfriends who were more likely to rip them off than kiss them. Some had regular jobs where they carefully concealed their weekends (like most gay men).

A new color of sex discovered I went exploring. It being the 90s I went online.

Inevitably I discovered the vastness of my ignorance. Most transvestites are straight, many married. Lucky ones even have wives who understand and support them. I ran into them on Usenet when first trying to learn about crossdressers. Finding out that I am gay, they were as intolerant as any other group and told me to find a drag queen in a bar.

I quickly narrowed my conversations to gay crossdressers. Do you think you have a hard life, that people don’t understand you, that you’re an outsider? Try life as a guy whose deepest satisfaction is wearing women’s clothing. The average gay man – who damn well should know better – can’t be expected to regard you any more kindly than the straight punk.

Invisible at the most horrific extreme are the guys who’ve never let themselves put on as much as a garter belt. Many of them want a man to force them to shave their pubic hair or mildly feminize them in other was (I remember the young jocks who wanted me to ‘make’ them shave their pubic hair). Others dress up at home their mirror their only companion. Thanks to the web transvestites can meet other transvestites. A few post photos of themselves anonymously, appearing en femme publicly with little risk.

In the Yahoo clubs and gay.com chat rooms crossdressers try to hookup with guys. Flirting that rarely leads to a meeting; true of most online flirting, least likely for them. Some are afraid of being beaten. Most are afraid they’ll be found unattractive and laughed at. The saddest minority covets the attentions of self-proclaimed heterosexual men, swine that can’t admit to themselves that a guy in a dress fulfills an appetite that a genetic female cannot. (At the risk of sounding defensive: that isn’t why I find crossdressers appealing. At the simplest level they are just part of a spectrum. If they are happy to accept themselves as a gay male even if playfully aping the rules then I can happily place them on a romantic pedestal. Sadly, they are rare.)

The bulk of the men trying to date transvestites mostly boast that they are real men and talking about the magnificence of their penis. Ashamed of their sexuality, unable to admit they are attracted to men. Interestingly they seem most fascinated with the transvestite’s phallus. Meeting one of them is apt to be as romantic as a prison gang rape.

And there is the terrible division between those who can pass as a woman and those who can’t. The latter often despise themselves for their imagined failure. Akin to people who feel themselves ugly but perhaps with more self-hate.

When I was on Yahoo daily I got messages from guys who wanted to meet me (99.6% of which to which I said no). The first transvestite who asked to meet me was a (I thought too young) guy of 25 who I was able to discern lived near me. He was skittish boy, who I felt needed to be able to talk with someone more than sex. Thinking a public place would give him security I suggested we meet at a nearby mall. He was so scared I suspected he’d never shown up. I emailed him the day before we were to meet. He never replied so I didn’t bother going. A public meeting may have been more intimidating than a less safe one in private.

A really smart transvestite emailed me for a date. His confession that he wasn’t passable didn’t’ deter me. I asked my (straight) friends to which restaurants I could take a transvestite without fear of harassment. Wellspring Grocery was my usual place for meeting possible dates from online. Over coffee I discovered he wanted to go to Legends a Raleigh drag bar. Bars bore the fuck out of me; I haven’t been to a bar since I left San Francisco. I assented but he could tell that I didn’t warm to the idea. We never met again. He’d thrown me in an odd way: he said the “man proposes and the girl disposes.” Femininity isn’t passivity, in an erotic context you can tell me where I’ll be and I’ll be there. A weakness for (even the sweetest) Bitch Goddess. Reflecting I’d say my reaction was ignorant. Role play is part of the experience.

A tall, super-slender crossdressing young cop I came very close to meeting. A gruesome series of crimes intervened. Bright and self-aware my interest was very strong. (Even if I have a phobia of police.)

The one I wish hadn’t gotten away: young, soft, tender, he wanted me to pet him and hold him in my arms for a long time before the ‘horizontal boogie’ as he called it. Pretty without any cosmetics, having his own long hair we made an assignment. Crime (not any that he had to investigate) again intervened.

Charles, who wears men’s clothing only (except for the heels he sometimes puts on) arrived and I told both never mind. Both were pissed.(As were a couple of guys who didn’t crossdress. In choosing Charles I implicitly slapped them in the face with rejection.)

Intentionally neglected are the locals wanted ‘motel room fun.’ Many of those were married. I’m a fairly amoral person but have never been up for adultery.

Why all the fuss about crossdressers

Folks who’ve seen my many entries on crossdressers may be surprised that I’ve never had much in the way of crossdresser fantasies. Crossdressers became a romantic possibility, not an obsession. I’ve always loved girlish gay guys. I’d latterly accepted that they might wear skirts and stockings.

Crossdressers are special to me in a couple of ways. Many of guys I’ve loved were picked on at school or had “Freak!” or “Faggot!” shouted at them from cars. My erotic tenderness has been dangerously reinforced with a hope to protect and uplift them. Crossdressers are outsiders even among gay males; they live more deeply with the outsiderness that still lingeringly colors queer life. Transgressive is a word that I’m tired of it but crossdressing is more transgressive than merely being gay. (When I was online more I’d get slammed for caring about them. Why would I be interested in an embarrassing freak when real men were to be had? I grew up with a violently ‘real’ man Even if you, like Big Mack, can bend bolts in your hand and pick up the back of a 1960′s care, you aren’t going to warm my heart. And there were the inevitable hasty readers who thought I was a crossdresser.)

Differently but maybe more importantly: my evolution either occasioned or coincided with much self-discovery. A new source of self-insight is more exciting than, say, a new fuck. My weblog is about nothing if not my own self-absorbed self-exploration.

Not that discovery of new erotic possibilities didn’t enrich my daydreams.** But come the dawn, come reality.

For me crossdressers inspired notions of playing with, teasing, toying with, ultimately transcending gender. The woman that I lived with never shaved her legs, wore a dress of carried a purse. Many male crossdressers want to be a woman in an icky way.

That crossdressers wanted to emulate bourgeois values shouldn’t have surprised me. Clothing aside they are just like the other happy Wal-Mart shoppers and Big Mac eaters.

Many of them wanted to be female in a dated housewifely way. I never wanted to live with Donna Reed or June Cleaver. Role-play can be fun but not taking it in dead earnest. Aesthetically the bad wigs and impossible clothing put me off. Bourgeois garments alienate me regardless of the frame beneath.

A big slice of them wanted to be dominated, overpowered, humiliated. BDSM is OK but the consistency was appalling. Few genetic women want to be told to “Get down on your knees, bitch!” or slapped in the face. I’d flattered myself with feminist insight but the gender stereotyping implied by this was a real revelation. I wrote a story to help me explore the idea of satisfying a submissive crossdresser.) In an odd way they mirror the surprising male sexism to be found in heterosexual male submissives. (That I was looking at listings of submissives on alt.com but cavil at some of their motivation isn’t as contradictory as it might seem. Pleasure in submission and pain is fine, self-hate isn’t.)

Simply put I like crossdressers who even if wish they could spend every hour en femme don’t hate being a male. Maybe they would’ve been born a girl if they’d had the choice. But they can accept being of both worlds.

The person above possesses clarity, elegance, individuality, competence and compassion . Because of his joy in wearing clothing not designed for males he’s mocked, he might even be beaten. Because of his rare quality, his nobility, if you will, even though crossdressers have never been an important part of my personal life I’ll always try to remember their status. I’ve always sent transvestites to his web site.

Dressing sexily & drably.

** I’ve segregated this part fearing that it will hurt or anger some crossdressers. This is a sifting of my tastes, not a manifesto on crossdresser fashion.

Pouting, yet sure of himself, the womanly curve of his back. Girlish and boyish in equal measure his image was part of my growth towards an appreciation of transvestites. (And if the copyright holder would email me I’ll remove the image or provide a link to your website which appeared to be dead.)

I’m susceptible to plenty of erotic clichés. (I’ve often wondered where they come from, having nothing from my youth to relate them to: probably fetish by osmosis.) Typical tawdry fantasy: a boy dressed like a girl hooker in hot pants. Less tritely: a guy who could use makeup to look like a girl in t-shirt (or halter top) and jeans: just a casual boygirl relaxing. The last is the imaginary crossdresser I can most easily imagine being with.

That I found this picture strongly appealing startled me. Momentarily I felt like a pervert. Really it is a very lovable image.

I’ve seen pleasing images of crossdressers in long stockings, short skits, Dresses? Sure. But a dress that looks comfortable, something you can relax in. Fancy dresses can be appealing but they are hard to pull of even if you were born with tits. Office worker’s drag, heavily constructed gowns – well I wouldn’t warm to those on a woman, nor you. Humor, strong stylizations are erotic; not emulating the commonplace.

Wigs are a problem. Good wigs are expensive. Some guys are lucky enough to be able to wear their hair long. Contemporary women do fine with short hair, it is a matter of styling. Old-fashioned whores and 60′s country music stars aren’t the best models.

Appropriate dress is a rare knack anyway. Probably if I were to go and look I’d find today’s crossdressers looking more like Pink than Martha Stewart.

* The safest phrase to use – finical quibbling over crossdresser vs. transvestite vs. drag queen merely wearies me. Drag queen is probably best left to the guy show perform in bars, the other two words seem merely matters of preference. I prefer crossdresser, transvestite – like homosexual – sounds like something in need of a cure.

NB: this is strictly about gay male crossdressers. Hetero crossdressers and MTF transsexuals are ignored for the sake of focus.

To quote the title of one of my Live Journal entries: Small town diva boy your mascara is smeared and I love you.

Richard Evans Lee, May 2003

Kindred entries: Are crossdressers transvestites?, Old transvestite paperbacks,Hating gay stereotypes, With his long hair and a short skirt made him look like a sexy girl, Nelly gay guys (and the history of my love for them), Queer as pansexual hasbian folk, Unconscious homophobia damages lives, ILikeNellyGuysDurham, Choosing to be a hermaphrodite, Fem Boys From Venus.

Written May, 29th, 2003

© Richard Evans Lee. All rights reserved

Fetish Meme | Fetish Pop Culture

No entry has meant more to me than this. Meant as my homage to ‘nelly gay men’ it is something of that and equally a summation of my sexuality. I fear it would’ve been better for me to spend a week or a month and not just a couple of hours writing this. Instant self-publishing isn’t always a blessing.

My love and esteem to every sexually atypical person who has ever been born. Gay, straight, transgendered, intersexual, or choose your own label. Below are a couple of thousand feeble words trying to record my joy in loving a select slice of you.

There’s more to love than boy meets girl.

Fall 1972. I’d entered Armstrong State College without having to complete high school. Actually I’d take a special calculus course (two classes back to back) in the summer session. My best two friends were Victor Story and John Emmet Belue. One afternoon when Victor came home from work they kissed. It was their way of coming out to me.

I didn’t care. Not having read about it in a book I didn’t consciously know about homophobia*. Stonewall was three years past but gay people didn’t really exist in the popular press. Not many days passed, one, two, a week – I wish I knew. What do you know: I’m gay too! (All written about in more depth in my sexuality pages.**)

Neglected sexuality floods in, knocking me down, lifting back up, showing me a world filled with beautiful boys. Boys who were blonde and pale, brown and dark, tall, short, in suits, in jeans, some with intelligent eyes, others dopey looking all as beautiful as song or sentence. The overreaching, intoxicating, overpowering desire that most discover earlier came to me in my young manhood as I was passing from seventeen to eighteen. (Frustration as well: I was fat but the fat was quickly shed so that I might remain sane.)

So I ogled and cruised on the streets and buses of Savannah. It felt so good, hurt so much.

I don’t remember the first guy I looked at with my newly enlarged vision. I do remember Charlie Poole. Charlie was a pale, skinny mildly fey boyfriend of a butch Jewish guy who’d become Victor and John’s landlord. I went to see a college performance of Brecht’s Good Woman of Setzuan. Can’t tell you a thing about the play but the nelly, long-necked beauty in the cast’s image is still with me thirty-one years later.

I felt helpless and trapped at home, indifferent to Savannah’s less human charms. I shed my fat and moved to Atlanta with Gordon.

I was ready to lose my virginity. David Paul McCorkle, who admired my ‘steely blue eyes’ and ‘scary’ deep voice, was the first boy I got naked with. (And not much more, I’d been drinking and was a flop, not that made it any less exciting – for me anyway.) A small point of self-respect: David and I remained friends for many years. In my moves I lost track of that vulnerable fellow, pity Google couldn’t help me find him again.

I can’t trace my mind’s insides clearly enough: was it coincidence or a fluke that David embodied what evolved into my theoretically ideal sexual partner: 5’8″ (perfect height for holding in the lap), pale, a very sweet and kind, stereotypically nelly gay boy of the early 70s. Um … well I really like very tall, very thin guys as well. I guess my fascination most easily fixates on the extremes.

David took the initiative as would boy number two, a small boned, probably illegally young little queen. He was pale blonde sissyboy who was very aggressive sexually. It formed my pattern: I never approached anybody. They had to (in a couple of cases literally) jump into my lap. (Number two was a failure as well: one of his roommates amused himself by throwing ice on my back. Happily that didn’t continue.)

To divagate for a moment: before I met either of them I saw a guy wearing eyeliner in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. I didn’t speak to him. But I was stunned by a jolt that went directly to my cock. There wasn’t precedent, at least to my memory. It was as if the young man with just a touch of makeup had appeared from outside my imaginings. A moment of almost painful erotic surprise.

Back then a certain wild eyed boy from freecloud was my erotic ideal. Androgyny was fashionable in the 1970s. Glam rockers with bogus bisexuality were popular for a time. Probably why in my dreams the ideal nelly gay boy has an English accent.

Not approaching other boys wasn’t a sign of massive confidence in my studly desirability. I was timid shit. I was never convinced of my own attractiveness. With a red face I’ll confess there was a very brief time in my days of virginity that I wondered if my penis was big enough. I’d never thought about my penis before except for the trite adolescent curiosity about finding a more interesting way to manipulate it in privacy. Fucking the couch cushions, say. (Measurements long since removed from my website.)

I could say it was an instance of the power of buried cultural imagery. But that is easy glib nonsense. I think it was just the talk of the first gay men I met in Savannah. The kind of queers of the time who rode around cruising and pointed out a man they’d readily sleep with if he were available but dismissed as “all meat and no potatoes.” Probably the sour species is still about; thankfully I haven’t met any in years.

Not all of the guys that I slept with were nelly. If you were nice looking and said “wanna trick” I was yours. Somehow none of the guys were either big or hairy. (OK, maybe three weren’t feminine. Almost all of them were young enough to get me tossed into prison. I – a teenage pedophile – was probably filtering people out without knowing that I was sending silent messages.)

In the almost vanished parlance of the time I was “butch” and almost all of them were “fem.” As gay men become visibly indistinguishable from hets they’ve divided themselves into tops and bottoms. Having been forcibly fucked by a couple of femme guys the idiom did and does seem silly. (Which is unfair: even for gay men what you can do with your body is subject to conditioning you can’t control. ‘Even for gay men’ doesn’t make huge since, otherwise we’d all be pansexual.)

There was one hirsute bodybuilder who wanted to sleep with me and I with him. He had an incorrigible honesty that reminded me much of Victor. (Victor was butch for sure and John’s femininity varied from just barely to extremely so depending on how high he was.) A testimony to the sex appeal of personality. Sadly the logistics never worked out.

But! For a short time I did have limp wrists. I think this was John’s influence. A sort of gay socialization. Probably many “Oh Marys!” originate in something like that. It fell away after maybe a couple of weeks. It didn’t fit. Nietzsche’s one must give style to one character is something I’ve always felt was true for most of us. I’ve never been able to work up patter or a persona that doesn’t harmonize fairly closely with I see really going on in my psyche. So my wrists returned to the horizontal.

Trying to rein myself back to my intended theme: from the drunken writer to the boy who’s great beauty frightened me the gay guys I’ve fucked, caressed, loved have never been ‘manly.’

I’ve sometimes wondered if I became a lover of nelly gay guys because they made themselves available to me. If it had been the heterosexualist homosexuals of nowadays would my sexuality become like those of the characters of Queer as folk. That my eighteen old self was transfixed and remembers a boy in eyeliner this many years later is an answer of sorts.

Somewhere in City of Night John Rechy says no one can make you feel more masculine than a drag queen. I didn’t associate with any. But it struck a powerful resonance with me when I read it. Probably also a superpower of feminine gay men.

Working for Atlanta’s gay newspaper, the forgotten Atlanta Barb, kept me mixing with people more than I ordinarily would. When I left the paper I was at loss for soft bottoms. I’d never liked gay bars and didn’t intend to start going to them. So I ran my first personal ad.

“Androgynous/masculine seeks androgynous/feminine.” If I didn’t remember that personal ad I wouldn’t be sure that I consciously knew that I liked feminine gay guys. The best answer I received proved to be from somebody I knew. (A guy who said he was Marcel DuChamp’s last lover, Rose Selavy (which was Duchamp’s own name for himself.) He made a pretty guy in a dress, no wig, and no makeup (for me, the most lovely kind). We had a good laugh. Years later we met again when I was living with a woman. We had more respect for each other than (nothing to do with this narrative.) I think we could’ve been sexually interested in each other. But I was living with someone.

I moved to San Francisco. Gay sex was easily had in the 70s, nowhere more than in San Francisco. I found myself saying no to indignant men with moustaches. The “Castro clone” look: short hair, facial hair was in vogue. Tall, dark curly hair, army boots, flannel, jeans I was a stereotype of the desirable gay man in San Francisco in the 1970s. While I would find myself in bed with a torturingly lovely femme guy my sexual activity actually declined. (Every single gay man I do remember sleeping with back then was fem. I wasn’t sure whether straight acting guy was going break down in tears or to try to kill me when I turned him down.)

I’d often had fantasies of sleeping with a classical hermaphrodite: woman’s breasts, man’s penis. I answered a personal ad in The Advocate (a tabloid back then with thousands of personals). The voice that answered was ugly and said I’d have to make a donation. I was ignorant of transsexuals’ economic needs. Maybe if my understanding had been evolved enough I would’ve decided to make that contribution. Not wanting to pay for sex I slammed the phone down and dismissed personal ads as a bad idea.

That I said “androgynous/masculine” in the personal ad back in Atlanta surprises me almost every time I recall it. Masculine wasn’t ordinarily a word I’d apply to myself (I’d have treasured the remark by the guy who told me I had ‘feminine consciousness’ if I’d felt he’s said it for any reason other than my giving him some cigarettes.) It would only be after a bunch of therapeutic Live Journal entries that I would finally accept masculine as a reasonable description of myself. I preferred to hem and haw with ‘conventional acting’ as though that was somehow better. I’m masculine, I guess. Doesn’t mean a sissy can’t get me where he wants me or put me in my place.

I lived with a very womanly but not feminine woman for several years. A long stretch followed when I was sexless, asexual – hard to say what. I simply didn’t think about it. Say, I’d been so deeply hurt that ideas of love and sex died.

Years later sex again came alive to me. This web site took its first form. An early page contained a short page speaking of my love for ‘soft boys. Baldly: I knew what I liked and knew what I wanted. (Not that I could think of it is such graceless terms.)

During the years when I was dead to the ideas of love and sex I didn’t fail to notice the pretty lads who came into Books Do Furnish A Room. There were plenty of handsome enough boys. But only three are alive in my memories. All were gracefully swishy. Two had ponytails, one lives a couple of blocks away (and I was foolish enough to tell Charles this – but that was before we became involved).

Trivial instances but I find myself drawn to those minor moments. And this was meant to be my celebration of feminine gay guys. Really it is about me but this kind of personal truth is necessarily autobiographical. That I might seen see dozens of nice looking young fellows and that only a tiny remainder lives on my mind is another unequivocal summation.

Looking for love on the web, I became a regular