Let’s establish something up front: I’m not gay. Which is not to say I haven’t given it a fair shot. I’ve kissed guys before at bars and parties — I was drunk, they were there, it was 2002 — and although the experience was pleasant enough, the pink neurons just didn’t fire. I’m an ardent admirer of the male form, but a six-pack and cannonball shoulders are qualities I’d rather view in a mirror than under me in bed. (My first and only male crush was on Bret Michaels — I was fifteen, and it was more envy than lust.) I have gay friends, but I am literally girl crazy. The only thing that mars my practically unblemished record as a straight man is my undeniable — at times, overwhelming — desire to suck a cock.
Occasionally I’ll fantasize about watching straight porn with a guy before jerking off together and emulating the acts on the screen. Or sucking off the more notable of my girlfriend’s sexual conquests. Or lining up a varsity swim team and making like a circus seal. Put simply, I think penises are awesome. And therein lies the problem. I’m turned on by a body part, not so much the person it’s attached to.
Penises are the Kinder Egg element of the human body.
Although I’m not sure how to categorize this desire, I know that I’m not alone. In talking with my male friends, I’ve never been as candid as I am here, but careful probing revealed that some of them share a similar fascination with other men’s penises, a willingness to go where no straight man is supposed to. Nine hours into a recent roadtrip with a guy I’ve known for years, I felt bored, tired or comfortable enough to hint at the concept of giving another guy head. My friend’s knee-jerk reaction was to label me a "fucking fag," albeit with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. "You haven’t thought about it at all? Ever?" I pressed. With the oncoming traffic headlights working like truth serum, my friend began to lay forth conditions for how it would have to, ahem, go down. "Well," he began, "he would have to be very clean cut." We drove half a mile in silence before he added, " . . . and really hung." To cut the awkwardness, we both instinctively reached for the radio dial and accidentally touched hands.
The genesis of my phallic love is no great mystery. I’ve been told many times, by many women, that they felt like the third wheel in the relationship between me and my little guy. Not to brag, but my dick is a resoundingly handsome piece of work. While not the biggest in any given locker room, it points perfectly straight, bereft of any bumps or bulges. Its peaches-and-cream complexion is not unlike Kate Winslet’s might be on a blustery day. It has a faintly vascular look but falls far short of those scary, veiny porno dicks that resemble Iggy Pop’s forearms. Its only shortfall: try as I might, I can’t get the bastard into my mouth.
This doesn’t just plague my thoughts when I’m conscious. I’ve dreamt about being able to auto-fellate more than I’ve dreamt about showing up at school naked. It’s not getting head, but giving it that excites me. I wonder what it would be like to delve into a pair of jeans and seize an organ that will transform its shape, size and constitution in nanoseconds, feeling its weight and girth before staring it face-on.
Penises are especially interesting to me because of the way they, and their owners, are mythologized by women. Girls love talking about how they were bamboozled by a man’s penis size after calculating all the usual indicators: job, hand size, make and model of car, etc. Men can get a general idea of a girl’s endowments before unveiling them, but penises are the Kinder Egg element of the human body. As you’ll remember, cracking open one of those yellow capsules could yield something fun and useful, or shitty and pathetic. In reality TV, this moment is called the "reveal."
I suppose it’s not entirely the act of sucking cock that appeals to me, but also this tumultuous reveal moment. Though it’s been a point of contention in past relationships, I’ve often quizzed my girlfriends about their encounters with other men’s equipment. They almost always have stories about one that was impractically large, another illustrated using their pinkie as a prop, and all manner of genital oddity in between. I find all of it thrilling to hear.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that all the muscle relaxants in Beverly Hills won’t enable me to achieve my goal of auto-fellatio, so I’ve had to start thinking about how I’m going to scratch this itch. Some might say that when you live in New York City, sucking an anonymous dick should be a snap. Couple of problems here. First, I’m not sure how someone who’s "fresh on the scene" goes about offering to fellate a stranger without being taken for a crackhead. Glory holes, should they still exist, are gross. Foraging in the deviant embers of Craigslist is like going to a glory hole, but without the benefit of total anonymity, and with the distinct possibility of meeting a shamefaced neighbor in a dark alley.
Secondly, as previously stated, I don’t dig dudes on either end of the manly spectrum, so my ideal candidate would have to emit an air of neutrality that would baffle the Swiss. He would be in shape, but not in an eye-catching way. Sweet-smelling but not manly-musky. Not effeminate, yet not macho or brutish. A few times when I’ve been hanging out with a friend, the possibility of a round of dick-sucking hung thick in the air, but the company just wasn’t ideal.
I know this sounds like a list of excuses. But to me, it’s more complicated than that. I wonder whether my diametrically opposed set of desires has a categorization at all. Or, as I suspect, is it such a part of the normal hetero psyche that it doesn’t deserve one? Maybe I’m still confused about what being a bi male even means. Bisexuality, like Cop Rock, seemed both novel and workable in the heady early ’90s. For about five minutes, it was the sexual category to end all categories, a way to self-identify as fabulously enigmatic. It was then revised to mean something that a girl with a Chinese symbol tattooed on the small of her back was for half a semester in college.
Today, bisexuality among men remains largely theoretical. Who is flying the flag? Bowie, Jagger, Iggy and Lou Reed were merely implicated as bi in the mid-’70s. I remember Kurt Cobain and Bret Anderson of the London Suede describing themselves as bisexual men who had never had a homosexual experience. That’s the biggest cop-out I’ve ever heard.
Perhaps bisexuality has never really had a practical application for most men because in other people’s eyes, it means changing forever. Plus, quite frankly, it sounds exhausting. Having sex with boys, sex with girls and then having to explain the duality? I don’t want a new label. I just want to try deep-throating and see if I like it. I want the autonomy to investigate without surrendering my identity. Consider me try-sexual.