Queer Utopias

I’m very grateful indeed that the world I live in is vastly more accepting of sexual diversity than I dreamt possible when I was struggling to come out forty (good God, yes, forty) years ago--i n the midst of Anita Bryant’s saccharine crusade and the rise of the Moral Majority, in a time raw with the memory of Harvey Milk’s assassination. But I’m still not satisfied. I still dream about other ways we could be in the world. About other worlds we could live in. At key moments, writing erotic fiction about those dreamscapes has helped me go on wanting and believing in a world where queer men are fully at home.

Several utopian novellas have come out of those daydreams. Below you’ll find the opening of one of them. I’ll post a chapter a week of this story until it’s complete, interspersed with other posts.

Topsy Turvy celebrates three queer men who risk inventing new forms of loving connection. It’s also about intergenerational love (relax, everyone’s over 18), about the potential of our sexuality to blast through psychic roadlocks, and about the sexiness of differently abled bodies.

I know that in creating a differently abled central character, Paul, I run the risk of objectifying someone with an embodied experience  very different from mine. I’ll say three things about that. First,  there’s some of me (or wishful thinging about myself) in Paul's character, given my non-standard, degenerative spine and the (so far) mild disability consequent on it--not that most people immediately notice the limitations on what I can do, at least for now. Second, I narrate the story in the voice of another character who feels full respect and growing awareness, as Paul educates him about what he can and can’t do, about help he needs and help he doesn’t. Finally, I’ll gratefully receive feedback and correction about this aspect of the story I’ve spun.

I hope you enjoy.

Topsy Turvy: A Utopian Erotic Fantasy

1

The music is insipid and too loud and the lighting stinks, but Underdog is the best bar in town for our Saturday night tandem cruise–the sort of place you find only in a Midwestern college town, with enough gay guys around to create critical mass, but not enough to split apart into erotic niche markets. Corn-fed blond farmboys who desperately want to get their legs in the air, but you’ll never read the signals if you aren’t a corn-fed blond farmboy yourself; willowy, epicene aspirants to the remake of Brideshead Revisited (one kid, I swear to God, came in every weekend last fall wearing tweed and schlepping a teddy bear); daddies like my Jim; a gaggle of drag queens who regularly arrive en masse as the cast of the opera the music school is currently performing; aging preppies like me; and several extremely hot trans men, one of whom, with quite possibly the most perfectly defined chest in town, and almost certainly the hairiest, is chair of the economics department. It’s a scene that could go horribly awry with rampant bitchiness: everybody knows everybody, at least by face. But somehow, it all holds together with good humor and good will, and the gossip remains if not minimal, then at least mostly benevolent and playful.

It took Jim and me a lot of time and some very rocky steering to work out the arrangement that had brought us here together every weekend and reunited us at home by Sunday noon to compare notes, usually to end up back in the sack together for another hour, getting each other off on common ground while swapping stories of scenes we couldn’t imagine sharing.

Nearly three years ago in 1997, at the September reception for new faculty, we zeroed in on each other across a room awash in academic small talk. Within fifteen minutes we’d sequestered ourselves in the corner. So much for networking with the other new hires. Jim’s thick white hair, his close-cropped beard, his ice-blue eyes, the heft of his shoulders under his shirt, all drew me to him. His tanned, thickly muscled forearms reminded me of my grandfather’s as I sat as a little kid on the arm of his chair, watching him blow smoke rings while the Cincinnati Reds ran the bases on TV.

Before I’d screwed up the nerve to ask him back to my place, he asked me back to his. We tried to be discrete about it, but the matching bulges in my freshly pressed chinos and his faded jeans must have given us away to anyone who glanced our way below waist level.

We’d barely closed his door before we started clawing off each other’s shirts. Ten minutes of necking finally landed us in his bedroom. Racing to kick off our pants, we backed far enough away from each other for me to get a look at the full length of him naked except for his boxers, and my jaw dropped. He could have been my grandfather’s twin, transported forward in time, from his neck to his waist. The same sexy, sinewed forearms that had me riveted back on campus; the same firm curve of long-toned and well-preserved muscle sloping forward from his collarbones, the same broad, taut plane down his stomach to his crotch, the sixty-something softening of his flanks.

Not for want of trying when I was six or seven, I never got much of a look at Grandpa completely naked. So I had free rein to imagine that I was staring at his cock now. Jim’s shaft pointed toward his navel, practically flat against his belly through the fly of his shorts, his circumcision scar deep brown against the ivory skin above and below it. I wanted to trace it with the tip of my tongue. Showing off, he pulled his nuts through the opening to let them hang like two ripe plums in their tightening drawstring bag. They fit perfectly into the palm of my hand, my thumb extended up along one side of his pole and gently brushing toward his frenulum. He groaned and cradled the back of my neck, gathering my face into the tiny, tight point of his nipple, then pulling me down with him as he sank onto the bed.

Clutching the width of my briefs from waistband to leghole in his fist, he hauled them down to the middle of my thighs, flipped me over onto my back, and pushed into my chest with the flat of his other hand, straddling my hips. The head of my cock poked underneath his nuts, stuck in a fold of skin on the backside of his scrotum.  His balls rose and fell as I thrust up and down under him. I reached forward to twiddle the head of his cock. After a couple minutes, spitting into my palm, I pulled myself out from underneath and laid our two shafts parallel in my grip while I went on bucking my hips. Our sacs collided on each forward thrust.  When Jim grabbed my dick and shoved it back under his balls, I felt a momentary surge of unspoken irritation but pushed past the annoyance, as I angled further down between his legs, my cockhead grazing his perineum. An almost burning intensity triggered my flow of precum.

He still held my chest down under the weight of his upper body behind the flat of his right hand. The hint of coercion in it started to stir up some very old anxieties. He shifted, lying down on top of me so that we pressed together groin to shoulders. We were drenched in sweat by now, sliding over each other in the saltiness of it. The pressure of his chest slamming into mine and the heave of our bellies against each other distracted me from being still pronged under his balls, the top of my glans still rubbing his cock root.  He rotated his feet to clamp them around my calves, wrapped both arms tightly around my shoulders, and rolled to flip us over again.

I’m on top of the hottest man within fifty miles, I thought, and I know exactly what I want to do with him. Reaching between us to dislodge my dick again, I spread my legs wide enough to catch his shaft in the furrow between my scrotum and thigh. The feel of my whole midsection undulating against him took me to a place where I can hang at the edge of orgasm almost indefinitely. The radiating energy turned my whole torso into one vast erogenous zone.

As if reading my mind, he reached for a bottle of lube from the drawer of the night table, drizzled it over me, slid his hand to my root and up again. Fuck, you’re perfect, I thought--if I was capable of thinking anything by then. Fixated, relentless, I started to settle back into my rhythm against his abs, when he reached down to run his lube-slicked fingers into the crack of his ass, then hiked his legs up, preparing to sling them over my shoulders. I hadn’t noticed the condom he’d taken from the drawer along with the lube. Now he handed it to me.

Shit, I thought.

“Put it on. I want you to slam the living hell out of me,” he said, closer to a command than a plea.

“I can’t,” I finally spat out.

“I bet you can.” He broke into a grin. “And I promise you can do anything else you want with me afterwards.”

“No. I mean, I really can’t.”

We looked at one another for what seemed like forever, watching the fantasy melt away in each other’s eyes. He lowered his legs, sighed, and laid his cheek on the bulging biceps of his crooked arm.

“You were really into what we were doing,” he said. “I guess I broke the mood.”

“If I could, I’d do it,” I said, starting to go soft as I sat astride him. For all my frustration, I meant it. Our eyes met again. I looked down at his chest–at my grandfather’s chest–and then felt sheer rage with myself for bursting into tears.

“Sshh,” he murmured, half sitting up to put a hand on my shoulder.