Sex: Part Deux
It's amazing what my writing one article on my sexual insecurities has built up within me.  I've even told someone that I am insecure with the whole act of sex this week and I felt no shame in saying it.  So now my thoughts turn away from insecurities and drive into directions that would help me feel more secure with sex, its timings, its rhythms.  I'm starting to make it sound like a rhumba or a samba, but somehow we all see the correlation.
It all began as I ran into my ex, Dan, this fateful Monday evening.  People who have once dated seem to act perfectly as catalysts for self-improvement.  The great thing about that special person who once meant so much in your life is gratefully doing the same thing as you are.  That, however, is the beginning for a whole different article.  Let's get back to me and sex.
Dan and I conversed as if there was no change in how we deal with each other and I enjoyed that.  This has always been one of my fortes in life; the ability to stay friends with ex's long after the relationship has run its course.  Somehow and someway I manage to break through the walls that could divide people and rekindle the bonds of what brought them together in the first place.  I just don't seem to have an abort button in my brain that says give up and walk away.  No, I hold my head high and charge into friendship like Teddy Roosevelt charging San Juan Hill with the sheer confidence that the intimate relationship still exists.  I've always thought this was a gift and I think I always will, but something of a startling discovery was made.  I may have inadvertently tapped into a gauge for sexual minimums.
Sexual minimums?  Is this even a valid concept?!  No gay man would want to touch it with a ten-foot pole, let alone a six to eight inch one.  Let's not lose focus on this idea too much.  This gauge is not a limitation of what a guy needs to get turned on.  Sometimes all that takes is a hotdog at a carnival.
No, sexual minimums would be described as the absolute length of time a guy can go into a monogamous relationship without sex before the whole thing shakes, crumbles and collapses due to the strain of the everlasting hormonal pressure system.  I'm sure my gauge would have a + or - percentage of accuracy and there would be many scientific doubts as to its legitimacy.  It would be analyzed and questioned on various levels such as "is oral sex really sex or just compensation?" and the obvious "what if the first anal sex is bad, does quality of sex play a significant factor?".   Maybe questions would be raised as to whether the two people had the intention of going into a monogamous non-sexual relationship.  Surely one night stands would be removed as valid data.
I guess it may not have very much scientific merit, I think the sexual minimum gauge may have some validity.  For instance, without the introduction of oral sex on at least one of the participants, one to two months are an absolute minimum of the whole relationship.  However, with its addition, the relationship has the ability to go as long as six months.  This of course is all just based on personal studies and should not be intended as a sexual minimum gauge for every such person.  All you have to do is grasp those personal studies for the alternating perspective and the numbers apparently change dramatically.  Touche on behalf of my ex's and I am honoured.
This thinking does have a purpose and it somehow leads to the depths of my personal beliefs.  It has always been my belief that sex came after marriage and this concept seemed great when I followed popular opinion rather than my own yearnings of the heart in the matters of sexuality.  Somehow it seemed honourable to the women I dated about the wait for sex.  Of course, more likely it was my lack of interest in anything further than cuddling with a female that had more to do with my chastity.  I believed in it and it played perfectly into the scheme of life.
Now two and a half years into discovery of my less than heterosexual side and those beliefs are . . . well . . . not really believed by anyone except me.  Have you ever said the word, "chastity" amongst the male patrons of a gay bar?  Trust me, you are either greeted by three responses.  The first is the absent stares and the solitude sounds of crickets.  The second is the retort "That's very honourable of you"(or respectable by another friend).  The third is the catcalls of bitchy fags exclaiming, "Yeah sure since Friday night!!!!  Or was it Saturday afternoon?"
When I have told other gay men that I haven?t had sex, I've left them in a traumatic state that usually renders most men blind and speechless.  I have always thought that this was ridiculous, but now I'm not so sure.  In my state of confidence in my beliefs, I have made myself the conqueror of everyone else in the whole sexual gay world, being greeted by the lined crowds on either side of me as "Steven the Honourable".  Instead, I may have kept myself from the masses and at a vantagepoint of superiority for not other reason than fear.
I think those fears were very well articulated in Sex: Part One and I don't need to reiterate them, but maybe because of those fears, I have made the consequences of my romantic relationships apparent before I got there.  Maybe I have been playing games with people just for the sake of my pride.  Maybe I'm still friends with all my ex's because really friendship was no different than the actual relationship.  Self-realization really sucks.
So now this means I will be having sex on the first date, picking up guys from here to Tijuana and having a jolly good time to learn as much about each guy's proclivities as quickly as possible?  HAH!  Not likely!  I may have self-realized, but the realization about social stigmas in the gay male community were in place long before I got there.  I still believe I'll wait for the big stuff, but maybe I can give in a little and give a little back.  I may not go all the way, but maybe I can still make part of the journey on the map and stop to take a break.  Life is just that, a journey, and maybe the destination shouldn't be the worst of my fears.  Maybe the worst of my fears should be that I didn't listen well enough when sex became an issue.  If a relationship is based on the fundamentals of communication, maybe I have to learn how to converse in the language of sex instead of avoiding the topic with beliefs partly from fear, much in the same matter that we avoid discussing our personal sexual triumphs with our parents.  Sometimes silence is communication, but so is inactivity.  It says that I'm only here for the talk, so why don't we become friends, so I can get sex elsewhere.
Make no mistake, half of the word, "boyfriend" is "friend", so talking and listening have to be there too, but they, like sex, are part of a relationship.  They don't have to be all there is, but they have to be part of what is the relationship.  This doesn't mean I'll be running back to my ex's with my newfound beliefs, but I'll have a better understanding of their sides of the story.  They in so many ways have proven themselves more than friends.  Who says ex's can't have their uses?   :)