A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Ten

10

We climbed the slope again as the others emerged from the silhouetted house. Unlit windows behind them dimly reflected the darkening eastern sky. Jim and Rajiv laughed at each other’s half-hard cocks, swaying their hips to keep them flapping in front of them as they walked out to the half-circle forming around the table. Kurt, Jake and Hank stood with their arms slung around one another’s shoulders. Billy began opening lanterns all around the deck. The candle-flame of each guttered in the breeze until he closed it and moved on to the next.

Nine sticks of sandalwood incense already smoked on a second low table to the side; nine blossoms from the garden at the front of the house floated in a broad, shallow dish of water.  One for each of us, and one for Pete, beside a small glass phial of coarse grey ash. Jake and Hank began spreading sarongs over the railings of the deck that had lain folded at the side of the table: saffron, midnight blue, emerald, crimson, white, fluttering in the twilight to match the flags that hung in swags above our heads. Others they laid across the deck at our feet. 

Billy rang the bowl one more time, running the wooden clapper around the rim until the resonance seemed to emanate from the woods all around us. Stepping back, he looked around the circle. “We all made it in one piece,” he grinned. “The table’s set, guys. Come to the feast.”

Nobody needed further encouragement. We’d been priming ourselves and each other all day; the foreplay had gone on for three months, since we’d stood at the same table around the same magical bowl, looking out the windows at a late dusting of spring snow sifting down through the trees below. All around the circle, it blossomed. Eight men who made love perpetually, together and apart, for months at a time.

Jake and Billy clutched each other’s necks as they kissed. Next to them Kurt unsnapped a wide, studded leather strap from his right wrist and cinched it around his balls. Above them his cock flopped in the metal ring of a harness he’d buckled himself into halfway through the afternoon. He’s got the most beautiful equipment I’ve ever seen, I thought as I watched, uneasy but fascinated as always by the rough attention he subjected it to. He smiled at me and unlooped a set of clamps from his leather armband. Handing them to me, he asked, “Would you please do the honors, sir?” 

His beautiful, heavy nuts had gone red and taught in the ball stretcher. “Whatever turns you on,” I sighed as he knelt in front of me and took me in is mouth. He sucked like a greedy puppy while I opened one of the clamps, then grabbed my cock in his fist and screamed as it bit into his nipple. “You’re sure about this?” I asked, knowing the answer already. 

“Ready for Number Two,” he grinned up at me, still panting from the pain of the first. It was the meanest looking clamp I’d ever seen him ask for, long, thin, serrated along its unpadded steel surface. I tried to keep a straight face as I snarled, “If you want it, you’d better suck on that dick, boy.”

He obliged as if his life depended on it, swallowing me so deeply I wasn’t sure I could hold off any longer. He drew back along the length of my shaft until the tip of his tongue flicked across my frenulum. He’d gone down on me like this in the spring till I finally begged Billy to bring the bowl when I knew there was no turning back. 

I opened the second clamp and pinched his free nipple between my thumb and forefinger, pulling it out from the lean, flat, muscle and then sending the steel kiss home. I recoiled from the pain he was begging for, even as I delivered it. And yet in some recess of my soul felt pleasure in taking the power he'd surrendered to me, in playing the part I'd accepted. He screamed again from his throat without taking me out of his mouth.

Across the circle, Jim was on his knees, his back to me, his head bobbing into Rajiv’s crotch. Rajiv clutched Jim's long sidelocks with both hands and swayed to the rhythm. Arching his neck back onto Hank’s shoulder as Hank’s hand slid under his armpit and across his chest, Rajiv leaned his weight into the support behind him. Watching the muscles roll along Jim’s shoulders as he sucked, bastard, I thought, you never went down on me like that in the twelve years you were my lover. But go for it. I want to see you into it with one of us, even if you were never into it like that with me. It hardly matters now. We’ve all become each other’s lovers. For better or worse, none of us is for ourselves any more, or just for one other man. There’s no bed big enough to hold us all together. We need this whole fucking mountainside for the love we make.

Luke stood behind me now, massaging my shoulders and neck, one hand pressing down the lines of muscle to each side of my spine in turn. The scent of lavender swirled around me, vanished in the breeze, drifted to my nostrils again as his now-oiled fingers grazed further around my neck. As he pressed his fingertips firmly into the small of my back, the memory flared up, straight from my body as much as in my mind, of his cock inside me earlier, as vividly as if I still sat in his sweet yogic lap, impaled on his lingam, Lord Shiva’s life-spewing cock planted below my grateful, adoring heart. 

“I want to stay with you till you cum,” he whispered in my ear. “Jake and I have been scheming about bringing you over the brink for weeks. Is that OK? Can we help take you there?” 

I couldn’t turn my head far enough to lock lips with him, just enough to thrust my tongue out to meet his. As we licked wildly at each other, I felt a second mouth competing for my cock and balls. It was Jake nuzzling in beside Kurt, then standing again, hauling Kurt up by the shoulder strap of his harness, and pushing him toward the knot of men opposite us with a slap to his sinewy flank.

“Off you go. This one’s ours.”

Billy was kneeling behind Jim now, sliding a condom over himself, lubing Jim’s ass.  Kurt crawled on all fours around the table, a hungry puppy dislodged by a littermate, wriggling over toward them. It was the last I saw of him before the heat pulsing up my spine and down my legs obliterated awareness of anything but the scented hands on my back and the stubble of Jake’s cheek sandpapering my thigh as he feathered my frenulum with his fingertips. “It’s time to go for it, buddy,” he said, grinning up at me. “You got something in there for us?”

“Oh, God, it’s gonna go flying,” I gasped. “I need the bowl fast,” I pleaded. There was no time to get to it. I couldn’t move my feet.

Jake barely had time to reach around behind me to lift it off the table before semen started oozing out of me, running lazily down my shaft. Holding the vessel in one hand and bringing his other back to me, he pointed my cock down into it and stroked, slowly, in rhythm with my laboured breath. The flow started to speed up and dribbled off the tip, but I still hadn’t peaked. Somehow I managed to beg, “Please don’t stop,” just before purple flashes pulsed before my eyes--my retinas sharing the orgasm. My ass grabbed at the lubed finger Luke had slipped back inside me, and my first desperate jet shot against the bronze lip, running freely down the inside of the bowl and pooling at the bottom.

I remember trying to count the surges, but I got confused and disoriented when I’d made it to nine, the force of each still splattering against the side. At some point I went limp in Luke’s arms, all three of us falling into astonished laughter as we sank to the floor. I stared down at the bowl in Jake’s hand as he reached it back to its place on the table. “Yes,” he said as he turned back to curl into our three-way embrace. “That’s all you. Every last drop of it. Except for this one little bit no one will miss,” he added as he put the tip of one finger to his lips, kissing me deeply and then Luke in turn. On our tongues, my seed had an unfamiliar metallic tang.

I sank down into a place of needing nothing in the world but to be where I was, taking in everything around me as it glowed from within. As horny as I knew both these men were, none of us wanted anything but the feathery caress of fingertips on each others’ necks, or a palm laid gently, quietly, to cheek.

Requiem Aeternam

An old friend died this week—more of an acquaintance, really, of whom I was very fond, and whom I wish I’d known better—ten days after a catastrophic stroke left him without hope of recovery, and two days after he was taken off the machines in accordance with his end-of-life wishes.

I noticed Brian years before we met. How could I not? He was the omnipresent, fey-butch, scruffily bearded undergraduate who waxed a little zaftig as the months went on, at the other side of the first gay bar I frequented nearly forty years ago, a basement hangout full of university types trying bravely not to look or act as nerdy as we were. Later he morphed into the svelte swimmer at the athletics complex, who parlayed his cruising experiences there into his first book, a study of gay men and their relation to sport.

Eventually we ended up colleagues at the University of Toronto. At least once over the years we ran into each other at the baths. I don’t remember how or exactly when we transitioned from pleasantries to deeper engagement. I do remember, vividly, a first dinner with him, his partner, and their two dogs, and a conversation that ranged across the writing of novels, the travails of trying to get them published, Gregorian chant, and monastic retreats.

Brian and I shared a deep but ambivalent fascination with the life of men living together under a Rule. We compared our visits to the same Benedictine house in Michigan. For each of us, the woodland trails adjacent to the abbey were a welcome diversion when we’d had enough of chanting the Psalms. He recounted delightedly a session of spiritual direction with the guest master, one afternoon when he found himself “stuck”—an experience not too uncommon on silent retreats. Helpfully, the guest master had suggested that Brian try visualizing having sex with Jesus.

Our kind of monk, we agreed over dessert.

Toggle forward as I sit writing this in the common room of another monastic guesthouse, nearly fifteen years later, thinking about the barely submerged undercurrent of homoeroticism that flows through much of male monasticism’s homosocial world. (And, I have it on good authority, the world of women’s religious communities as well.) Thinking of monastic celibacy not as a denial of sexuality, but as a very conscious fashioning of the erotic self, a channelling of one's sexual energy into a singularity of desire for a man whose lean, nearly nude body is a ubiquitous spectacle and object of Christian devotion. A sexuality that in some sense is as queer as it gets--just as Brian, may light perpetual shine upon him, was as queer as they come.

A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Nine

9

Out on the deck, down the slope toward the stream, the shadow of the house lay before us. Some eager soul had already brought out the table and set the bowl in place.

“God, why do we do this?” I asked him.

“Uh… maybe because for the last year we’ve had the hottest sex of our lives?”

“Christ Almighty. Feast or famine.”

“You ever experienced anything like this before?” he asked.

“Never. I float for six weeks on the afterglow. Then waiting for the next time nearly kills me. I’ve been horny twenty-four hours a day since the end of May.”

“That’s the whole idea, remember?”

“Yeah,” I conceded. “Well, it felt like a good one a month ago.”

“We just need distraction from the thought of my cock inside you,” he smirked, taking my hand and nodding toward the burbling creek. “C’mon. One last dip. Maybe the cold water will help."

Long shadows played over the surface of the stream from the branches above, new depths revealed where reflections had obscured the creek bed earlier in the day. Luke lowered himself, flinching a little, then plunging beneath the surface. His hair swirled like black and grey seaweed in the current. The minnows that had investigated us in the morning swam up again but now seemed decidedly interested in our crotches. We stood still, side by side, arms slung over one another’s shoulders, fascinated by their attention. The sight and feel of their light nibbles were delicious and a little weird. Could such tiny fish could recognize a few premature sperm leaking out of us as morsels to snatch as they swam by?

“I don’t want this day to ever end,” Luke sighed.

“I do, and don’t. I’m ready to move on. I don’t know to what. But it’s time to let go. At least for me.”

“The long buildups, maybe I can’t take that either. But I want to live in a place where I can make love with my whole tribe day by day.”

“The utopian dream, with a hardon,” I chuckled. “But it never lasts, does it? A few years, and the dreamers pack up and merge back into the crowd. The Summer of Love ends, and everybody buys hedge funds.”

“At least they’ve known the dream. Land’s cheap in central Florida, if you stay away from town. I can buy twenty acres and relocate my greenhouse for a fraction of what I’ll get for my house. Come with me. Give up winter. Grow orchids for a year. See who’ll join us.”

I couldn’t bring myself to answer. Just reached out to take his hand.

We still sat on the rocks above the pool, drying off in the last of the slanting sun, when the sound of the singing bowl called us back to the deck. The air was moist and warm, but a breeze blew from the west down the slope, pushing the bugs back into the woods below. A perfect night to be naked together under Father Sky well past sunset. A three-quarters moon gleamed to the south, intensifying as the light went down, as though it were as full to bursting with pent-up energy as we were.

A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Eight

8

I needed lube badly. I willed myself across the room to the table where Jake had laid out a smorgasbord of accessories–lubes, condoms, spare silicone cockrings in funky colours that he’d found at his favourite sex shop. Scooping out a glob of Albolene already liquifying in the heat of the afternoon, I slathered it on generously.

“You’re taking no chances anything’s going to get raw,” Luke offered in a gentle lilt behind my shoulder.

“Provisions for the journey,” I said, and reached into the jar again, scooping out enough to smear Luke’s half-hard shaft as it arched out from the curve of his thighs, much as I’d smeared my own. His eyes dilated with the pleasure of the touch. He nuzzled into the cleft of  my chest.

I kissed the top of his head, then took him by the hand back across the room to a pile of cushions we could have to ourselves. As we sank to the floor, we raised our right legs over one another’s left thighs. We settled, his balls grazing mine, the length of our cocks pressed against one another: the tip of his incongruously towering over my sporty compact model, tapering up to poke into my solar plexus.

Gazing intently into my eyes, he took my hand to lay it over his heart. His nostrils flared as his chest and belly expanded with a deep, conscious breath that pressed our cocks together more firmly between us. Then came the release as he exhaled through slightly parted lips, inviting me to match his slow, deliberate rhythm. I pressed my forehead to his, blissed out on the pressure of cock on cock, belly on belly, chest on chest as we breath-fucked each other.

We were perfectly sychronized, pausing long at the bottom of our out-breath. As though we toyed with the possibility of staying there, choosing it as our last breath on earth and drifting off together into whatever came next. Then saying yes to the pleasure of the next inhalation. His chest rising under my left hand, his heart pumping. The motion of his left hand barely perceptible as he leaned back to stroke up the length of his shaft, in synch with our breathing, then down again with the next breath out, up again. 

His right hand moved from my heart to my cheek, the heel of his hand massaging the side of my neck as his fingertips stroked against the grain of my beard. 

“I bet we’ll find what comes next without saying it.” He took his hand from my cheek and the other from his own cock, tucking his legs into lotus position. The crown of his head stretched up as he opened his hands palms-up on his knees. I could have sworn the tip of his erection strained a little further toward the sky to match his spine. His eyelids didn’t quite close; his nostrils flared as he inhaled; his throat visibly opened as he sent spent air back out into the world.

And I did know what came next. Three months of e-mails had steeped us all in one other’s fantasies. Now we could riff with each other like jazz musicians who’d been playing together on the road for months.

I crossed the room again to the basket of condoms by the window, negotiating the knot of men stretched out in their own bliss. 

Jim and Rajiv, oblivious to everything around them, lay curled into a sixty-nine, their cocks buried deep in each other’s throats, the gentle roll of muscles in their necks and the rise and fall of their ribs their only visible movements, except for the twitch of Jim’s foot as he moaned softly. 

Kurt sprawled across Hank’s lap, his chest still red from the kneading I’d given it, his knees slack and his thighs wide open, most of Billy’s obligingly compact hand inside him, only his thumb still visible, massaging Kurt’s perineum. Kurt repeatedly begged Hank to tug harder on his Prince Albert. 

Jake sat to the side on his own cushion watching them, stroking himself wildly, then stopping short with a gasp and clutching his scrotum, desperate to keep from spilling over the edge.

“You still with us?” I asked.

“Close call,” he giggled. “But I think I pulled it off.”

“Good boy.” I tousled his hair as I passed.

When I returned, Luke had drifted off into a trance. I’d seen him like this before when he settled into meditation in the midst of high erotic charge. I don’t think he even was aware of me rolling the condom down over him, slathering him with lube, gently moving his hands off his knees to the floor by his hips. He seemed barely to register my hands laid on his shoulders for balance as I straddled him, lowering myself. I pressed myself down onto the tip of his cock until I felt momentary discomfort, rose up a little, descended again a little further. And then, my thighs already exhausted and near to giving out, I inhaled once more and surrendered, allowing gravity to pull me toward the earth, his beautiful, improbably huge dick planted deep inside me.

I had to exhale in a long, focused stream to get through the pain of that first thrust. I’d thought I was ready, after what Jake had done to me down in the creek. But my imagination had gotten ahead of my body: the sheer length of him was a shock to my insides all in one plunge as much as was his girth suddenly spreading me open. I tried to settle myself with as little commotion as I could manage, wanting to leave him wherever he’d drifted off to, wherever he needed to be. But he opened his eyes, cradled my face between his palms, and matched his breath again to mine, coaching me through the discomfort.

I plunged into his eyes as he set up a gentle rocking motion. I was as turned on by the sensation of our chests and bellies against each other as I was by the feel of my erection rubbing against him. Picking up the lube, he said, “You need some of this too,” and poured it with abandon down his torso and over my erection, then spread his hands across my back and gathered my chest into him. As we rocked, we shifted into an alternating breath pattern. Leaning back into his arms, I blew out through barely opened lips and felt him thrust up into me a little further, if that was possible: I was already clenched around his root. Somewhere along his length, he was massaging my prostate as nobody had reached it before. My breath stirred the shock of hair that had fallen across his forehead. When I inhaled, rocking forward, and the base of his cock slid a fraction of an inch out of me,  I greedily sucked in the warmth of the air that had just left his lungs.

I have no idea how long I stayed impaled on him like that. Time dissolved, an illusion like fog dissipating from the surface of a river in the dawn breeze. Except that the shadows outside the windows had shifted by the time I became aware again of anything besides the pressure of his arms supporting me. I felt like I’d been born to take him up my hole.  I looked down in amazement at myself. For the first time in my life, precum ran freely out of me, replenishing the lube that would have long dried out without it, streams of living water welling up into life. I think it was the groan deep in his throat that brought me back, just before wide-eyed astonishment on his face and he gasped, ‘I’m incredibly close.”

“Just stop everything and focus,” I coached him. “You’re starting to hyperventilate. Slow it down.”

“No, it’s the pressure of you around me. I can feel your heartbeat pulsing even if we don’t move.”

“Ssshh,” I whispered, wondering how best to bring him back from the edge. But then I looked down again at the gleam of my own clear juice slick on my cock, and thought, Jesus, it’s been three fucking months. I want this. I want it here and now with Luke flooding up my ass. At that moment I wanted the condom to break, wanted his load shooting up through me all the way to my heart.

He read my mind. “Soon, baby,” he said. “Just hold on another hour or two. We’re almost home, all of us together. Not quite yet.” He hinged his torso forward from the hips, drawing a little out of me, reaching beneath me to hold the base of the condom around his shaft. I straightened my arms and leaned back, palms against the floor to help ease him out. He peeled the rubber off and he wrapped his arms around his knees, propping his head on his hands and smiling at me. “I wanted to go for it too.”

“I can’t take much more of this,” I said. “I’m about to explode.”

Laughing, he grabbed my hand to pull me to my feet. “I think we deserve a break. Before our hearts give out.”