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Sex

Stuff to Live For

Let’s just admit it: Life is fucking boring. Life is so monotonous and full of routine that it’s a wonder we all don’t just fall asleep whenever we look at ourselves in the mirror. The best we can hope for are those brief moments of clarity that snap...

Let’s just admit it: Life is fucking boring. Life is so monotonous and full of routine that it’s a wonder we all don’t just fall asleep whenever we look at ourselves in the mirror. The best we can hope for are those brief moments of clarity that snap us back into reality. You know what I’m talking about. The thing that happens when you wake up one day and unlearn everything you’ve always known? You forget why you would ever go to someone’s birthday party or why you bothered to do well in school and apply for those jobs and show up to happy hour and ask people how their weekend went or listen patiently as someone describes the dream they had the night before or gushes about their dog, or, even worse, talks about a dream involving their dog.

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You forget all of it because it’s no longer worth remembering. This stuff that we fill our lives with, you’ve realized, isn’t enough to live for. Give me stuff to live for or else.

This happens to me sometimes. I don’t question anything in my life because everything makes sense to me until one day it doesn’t. And then I do what everybody else does when they start missing the point of their life entirely: I start to actually have fun.

***

I am 20 years old and kissing my straight roommate’s penis on its head. He won’t let me kiss him on his face so I guess his dick will have to do. I have been celibate for an entire year because I’m convinced I look like Grendel, but now I’m hooking up with my straight roommate and starting to feel that electric shock again.

He’s not gay. Let’s just make that clear. I hooked up with plenty of closeted men in high school—guys who were clearly thirsting for cock underneath all those layers of teen misogyny and Abercrombie & Fitch cologne, but my roommate is not one of them. He just likes feeling wanted. He likes to be worshiped. He simply enjoys getting his dick sucked.

So that’s what I’m doing, I’m giving him a blowjob, and he’s trying very hard not to like it.  His neck is stiffening, and he’s applying pressure to my scalp and encouraging me to go farther down, like I’m bobbing for apples. I can’t believe this is actually happening. My sex life is usually as interesting as a Sofia Coppola movie on mute, but occasionally the gay gods throw me a boner and my life suddenly resembles a porn movie. Again, it’s that voice that creeps up in your brain after a long period of nothingness that says, Give me stuff to live for, motherfucker. You are so bad at living. Make things happen for yourself.

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***

A few months earlier, my best girlfriend and I took my roommate into a dark room and played a game of Marco Polo with his dick. (Instead of saying “Marco Polo,” though, we said “ Mary-Kate, Ashley,” because, duh.) We put our hands all over his body and started playing with his dick underneath his basketball shorts. He didn’t know who was pleasuring him because we were taking turns.

“Mary-Kate,” I would whisper, slithering like a snake up his thigh.

“Ashley…” My friend would hiss in his ear.

Even though we’d occasionally break character and start laughing at the absurdity of the situation, it was still very, very hot. It was one of those nights that could only happen when you’re young and treat your feelings like they’re rubber bands being flung carelessly against a wall.

After that night, I knew my roommate was open to dipping his feet into my little pool of homosexuality. I just didn’t know how to instigate it. Weeks and months had passed since Mary-Kate-and-Ashley-gate with no mention from either of us about the incident. Then one night, in the middle of researching a paper on female genital mutilation for my science and spirituality in Africa class, he came bursting into my room.

***

“I’m so pissed off,” he growls at me.

“What happened?”

“I was hooking up with Briana and then she stopped me because we didn’t have a condom. I’m so blue-balled and horny now. I need to jack off or something.”

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He plops down on my bed and sighs in frustration. I can immediately tell that something was off about our energy. We have lived together for almost a year and things have never felt this… ripe before.

We are going to hook up, I think. This is it. This is the night when things start happening.

Feeling a wave of courage and, more importantly, horniness come over me, I say, “You know, if you want to, you can masturbate in here. I won’t mind.”

Deafening silence.

Then there is the sound of a loosening belt buckle and then my roommate’s hard dick is standing in front of me.

He starts jacking off, and then I start jacking off. Then I say the thing that will seal the gay porn deal: “Would you like some help with that?”

“Mmmmhmmm.”

***

As embarrassing as it all sounds, it really felt like something had been awakened inside of me. I had spent the past year living some watered-down version of life. I ran away from any boy who wanted to talk to me because I felt undesirable and, damnit, being celibate for a long time isn’t for sissies. If you aren’t getting fucked, you’re fucking yourself. We all know that now. My body was going into survival mode and trying to wake me up. It was trying to get me to remember what it was like to be an active participant in my own life rather than a passive observer.

As it happens, giving your straight roommate a blowjob kind of feels like a cold hard dick slap across the face. If you don’t feel the essence of life coursing through your veins at that point, you’re beyond help.

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I sucked that dick like my life depended on it because, in a way, it did. This blowjob was the thing that was going to save it all and make me feel sexual again. My roommate was moaning loudly now, and I kept going deeper and deeper because that’s what you do when you want to feel all of it hitting you at once.

Then he came. He came all over the place. And then he cried.

I’ve had a lot of bizarre reactions to a blowjob, but I’ve never had someone cry on me before. I guess you do what you have to do in order to process the unthinkable, though. I hugged him and said it would be OK and that he was OK for getting a blowjob from another man.

“I’m not gay,” he wailed.

“I know you aren’t.”

And for once I actually meant it.

Previously - All the New Gay Boys

@ryanoconn