When I was a sophomore in college, I got an instant message in response to an informal blog I kept on LiveJournal. The message was from a 17-year-old blue-eyed boy in Tennessee who had longish blond hair and a penchant for eyeliner and taking pictures of himself, as I gathered from his public profile and his own blog.

He was clearly intelligent, but cared little for grammar and peppered his language with gay slang and a sassy Southern drawl. He said he wanted my opinion on some poems he had written, noting that I occasionally posted poetry on my journal.

He told me his name was Chris. Most unsolicited messages I got back then were guys asking for my “stats” or wanting to jerk off on webcam, so I considered Chris unique and kept him as a contact. He was deeply sexual and angered about the fact that the LiveJournal group would not let him post naked pictures of himself anymore because he was underage, but Chris seemed to use sexuality not so much for pleasure but as a way to negotiate his identity and politics. He never tried to bring me in to it. He was online often and sent me poems every day, and I got the sense that he spent many hours behind a computer screen.

I was a recent ex-Catholic, and had replaced its gap in my spiritual life with an interest in astrology, which I saw as a gay-friendly belief system that filled religion’s promise that everything in life had a direction and a purpose. Chris talked me into giving him my phone number so I could discuss his natal chart (his sun was in Sagittarius and his moon in Cancer, if I remember correctly, which was about as in-depth as my astrological knowledge was) and about his life. (read the full article)

Everything was bigger in the ’80s.

The greed. The hair. The shoulder pads. The himbos.

The Me Decade was all about proving you had enough cash to provide you with leisure time, and the fads it introduced are aptly era-specific to a tone set by the excesses of A.L.F., Xanadu, and American Psycho. Dad frequented the sports bar, Mom had her aerobics classes, and the kids played Laser Tag at the video arcade.

Even the strip club became a legitimate business venture in Reagan America. Gone were the days of low-rent joints with seedy-looking women doing the Pony while having the DTs and just-out-of-the-joint ex-con rough trade shimmying to sleazy disco tracks; the men had their upscale gentlemen’s clubs where doctors, brokers, and lawyers could take in the buffet as they scoped out single mothers, dental hygiene students, and touring porn stars on the pole. (read the full article)

Hat tip to CTRL+W33D.

The economy is fisting everyone to its bicep, from blue and white collar workers to our artsy fartsy gay underclass and pink-collared moguls.

But don’t think the Great Recession has become America’s social equalizer. The furor over bailed out insurer AIG handing out executive bonuses with taxpayer money spotlights a nation on the brink of an all out class war, or — looking at the inflating cottage industry of financially lopsided dating services — opportunistic class love. ABC News’ Diane Sawyer covered the “growing sugar daddy phenomenon” a few weeks ago, pooh-poohing the concept as high-class prostitution and a gateway to infidelity, but the drab assessment ignored the arrangement’s history, its roots in love-twisted financial instruments like dowries and brideprices, entrenched for thousands of years. It also overlooked the ubiquity of age disparity in pre-industrial days (Pocahontas, by modern Disney standards, was a sugar baby).

I realized the economic pressure to be a sugar baby when I graduated four months ago with a B.A. in creative writing. I watched as my straight friends struggled to find work with their engineering and business degrees. None of them could land jobs, so I knew things were worse for me. I could have gone into newspapers and print media, where my experience lay, but print is dying. With any other field, who the fuck was going to hire a creative writing major from Texas Tech University? I was even getting rejected from basic secretary jobs. So I did what any self-respecting gay guy with no future would do: I went on the internets to find me a rich man.

Through a website I’d rather not advertise, I befriended a lonely 54-year-old sugar daddy who lived in the hills of Los Angeles. After just a week of chatting and surprisingly comfortable phone conversations, I found myself speeding west from Lubbock, Texas through the New Mexico desert in my shitty car on Route 66 (actually, I-40 to be less romantic). (read the full article)

When I was 14 years old, my mom apologized for having me circumcised as an infant.

I was in the back seat of the car while my dad was driving, and though I don’t quite remember how the issue came up, I do remember feeling, naturally, horribly awkward about discussing my penis with my parents.

My mom said it hadn’t been explained well by the doctors, and that once the nurse brought me back to her with my “fists clenched and white,” she knew she’d made a mistake.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“I don’t think about it — can we just change the subject?”

I didn’t even know what an uncircumcised penis looked like. I knew something about it having skin that would cover the tip, but I couldn’t picture where that skin attached. Did it just hang down from the head like a second scrotum or an earlobe?

The mysteriousness of it turned to a perverse curiosity, and it happened that my first boyfriend, who I dated when I was 19, was uncut. By then I’d learned what to expect by watching porn, but I couldn’t have predicted how turned on I’d be to see an uncircumcised penis in the flesh. The shaft seemed more thrust forward and determined, without that circular scar in the middle that would break up the shape, and I loved the way my boyfriend’s cock could tuck itself into a sheath when flaccid — it looked just as hot to me then as it did hard. (read the full article)