The Grindr Report: Before Clark Rockerfeller
Symonne Torpy writes about life inside the closet before Clark, without a nom de plume, and having sex with gay men.
There is something profoundly transportative about chocolate. The intimate moment a woman shares with her melting cup is one that makes men envious. She’ll wrap her lips around the mug, dipping the tip of her tongue into the dark, inviting liquid, and if it’s the right blend, she’ll feel a pulse race down through her throat, from her chest down to her thighs, reaching the deepest recesses of her active mind until her clitoris throbs with pleasure and her earlobes twitch.
If only this were a woman’s response to cum.
Ejaculate is fucking repellant. Anybody who tells you that the taste of her lover’s semen is even close to tolerable is indulging in serious self-deception. Or perhaps she has her heart stuck so far up his ass that its smell overwhelms that of the white, salty substance flowing out the other orifice. I have always been a swallower. There is nothing pleasurable about keeping the flavour of cum on the palate any longer than it needs to be, and swallowing is the fastest way to remedy the situation. The post-oral-sex taste of number 5 Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau was masked by Marlborough cigarettes and Monoprix mimosa.
The apartment was quintessentially Parisian. There was a small gap between the bed and the roof; it was suspended in an Ikea-esque attempt to double the thirty-square-foot floor space. Climbing five wooden stairs to reach the mattress was difficult when drunk, and a feature charming only to a new resident. By the end of the week it was insurmountable – swallowing feet that had been danced into fatigue, devouring knees that had been bruised by too many blowjobs, and defeating a mind that had only prepared itself for obliging taxis and fast elevators. The apartment had one of those toilets that you couldn’t flush toilet paper down. An invention of personal slothfulness, a plastic bag rested beside the cistern for paper-waste, disposed of once in three days in fits of guilty tidying. Toilet paper itself was an unnecessary expense, and I was given to stealing napkins from restaurants. Often, I would forget to do this and run out of tissue, impatiently waiting for forgiving air-drying minutes to clock by. Once or twice I drunkenly groped for that plastic bag, searching for a napkin that could be reused – a not-quite-so-pissed-on motherfucking saviour of a towelette.
Frustration inspired by the accommodation was matched and exceeded by emotional complication. Laurent was a gay man. And so transgressions of nurtured sexuality and a fucking self-righteous toilet in an architecturally disobliging loft, defined many long days of Parisian sex.
By the time a stereotypically promiscuous homosexual male reaches the age of twenty-three, he has fucked in excess of two hundred men. The math is simply calculated by taking eighteen as the age of the legal clubbing debut, giving him five years to have fucked and been fucked – and conservatively multiplying this by forty – allowing for a weekly one night stand minus days off for illness or the holiday season, during which he may have returned to the paternal nest, taking a brief excursion into abstinence territory. The figure does not account for any number of sexual encounters clocked before adult sexual maturity, and it stands to reason that in most cases, this factor would significantly increase the number of sexual encounters within a veritable ‘little black encyclopaedia series’ attached to each gay male counted. It is understandable then, that when a twenty-three year old male who has operated within the cliché gay paradigm for some five years, fucks a girl, the rules are difficult to relearn.
The math is facile and the stereotype is heavy, but numbers are somewhat arbitrary; the ‘learned’ dimension of habitual sex exists after twenty-five or five hundred fucks. It should have come as no surprise then, that an intelligent gay male caught in the throes of a heated sexual encounter with a woman failed to remember that unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy.
The mundane simplicity of that biological factor caused hysterical laughter to punctuate a moment of sexual intensity as Laurent looked sincerely into my eyes and whispered that he had recently been tested. “We could go without protection”, he implored. It was a beautiful lightbulb moment when I replied, “If you cum inside me, my body and your sperm will work together to create a foetus”.
During those early days, we rotated the heteronormative ideal, turning it about like one turns a Rubik’s cube. The colours were impossibly muddled, but the sex was fucking good. Afterwards, I smoked, watching the spiraling loveliness of the cigarette disappear into the summer of the inside-outside space. The fractured French cliché was complete. Love and romance and sexual energy were conjured out of the cobbled streets below. The heat rose and fucking rose.
My orgasm came delayed. It surfaced post-sex, out of the smoke and my smudgy-eyed smoulder and his twitching muscles. Foreplay is overrated. Postplay is fucking heightening. Postplay is the remaining aggression of a well played sexual episode that refuses to die at the petit mort, but lingers in the gritty instinctual guilt of wet, sticky semen and skin and latex and sheets.
And when the mimosa is gone and when the cigarettes are over, we stain our sheets, we stain our mouths and we stain our lives with chocolate.
