Taking a Flying Trapeze lesson. Answering a Strictly Platonic Ad on Craigslist. Taking a helicopter tour of Manhattan. These are just three of the 20 fantastic BTS suggestions of dating gurus Em & Lo for me in New York City. Check them out and let me know what you think I should explore as I (attempt to) scale the heights of asexual ecstasy: Em & Lo’s Better Than Sex picks!
Prepping for my first-ever Cuddle Party (in New Jersey!)
Like chocolate truffles after a full course meal, nothing beats cuddling after some good ol’ fashioned fudge-packing. But with sex being a no-no for me for the next 65 days, I’m gonna have to start paying more attention to the dessert menu. The only problem is, while nearly every sexual position imaginable – from the trusty missionary to more pretzel-like bodily contortions – has been documented in, say, the Kama Sutra, it’s mostly slim pickings for cuddling connoiseurs. Case in point: Between two girls and one cup, spooning was ironically the farthest thing from their, er, buffet.
Stuck in the limbo of post-coital pleasures for the longest time– down there with having a smoke and playing video games – cuddling is finally getting some well-earned props. Sometime next week, I will be joining an army of devout cuddlers in New Jersey for a cuddle party. A cuddle party is described as “an event designed with the intention of allowing people to experience non-sexual group physical intimacy through cuddling. It’s a social event that gives adults an opportunity to “give and receive welcomed affectionate touch in a no-expectation, friendly setting, according to your needs, desires, interests, and boundaries.” Is that code for “hugging orgy where you keep your PJ’s on”? I can’t wait to find out. I’m a bit worried, though: It’s a slippery slope having warm bodies rub up against you; one strange arm wrapping around the wrong body part and it can all go downhill from there (no pun intended). If it actually goes well, it just might send me into throes of tantric ecstasy.
Cuddling is definitely an art and the cuddle party in Jersey my experiment to nail down the perfect cuddle position. Questions pop in my head: Where do I stick my other arm while spooning? What makes a good cuddling position better than a bad one – is it larger amount of skin contact, or ability to hold the position for a very long time? How do I keep a cuddling session from devolving into simply “feeling each other up”? I’ll have more than a week to think about these things. Meanwhile, here are the cuddle party rules:
WHAT TO WEAR: Pajamas – nothing too risqué. Think more comfy than sexy. (More drawstrings, less lace. No shorts.)
WHAT TO BRING: A pillow or stuffed animal if you like. Juice or sparkling cider is always welcome. Sorry, no liquor folks. Otherwise, just bring your smiling self.
STICK TO THE RULES:
Rule # 1 – Pajamas stay on the whole time.
Rule # 2 – You don’t have to cuddle anyone at a Cuddle Party, ever.
Rule # 3 – You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you touch anyone. (Be as specific in your request as you can.)
Rule # 4 – If you’re a Yes to a request, say YES. If you’re a No, say NO.
Rule # 5 – If you’re a Maybe, say NO.
Rule # 6 – You are encouraged to change your mind.
Rule # 7 – Respect your relationship boundaries and communicate with your partner.
Rule # 8 – Come get the Cuddle Caddy or ME if there’s a concern, problem, or should you feel unsafe or need assistance with anything today.
Rule # 9 – Tears and laughter are both welcome.
Rule # 10 – Respect people’s privacy when sharing about Cuddle Parties and do not gossip.
Rule #11 – Keep the Cuddle Space Tidy
Rule #12 – Thank you for arriving on time.
But what if something comes “up”?
Here’s what they said:
Erections. Erections. ERECTIONS. There, we said it.
Since Cuddle Parties are safe spaces for adults to explore and practice affectionate touch without sexualizing it, and since the state of arousal is natural for us human beings, it’s no surprise that erections sometimes do occur. Our goal is not to teach men how not to get erections. Instead, we want to make normal functions and needs of human beings seem, well, “normal.”
We strive not only to free people of the awkwardness surrounding arousal, but to allow them to develop some real coordination around it. At a Cuddle Party, erections become Mother Nature’s way of giving us the thumbs-up sign. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s dirty. Nothing’s suspect. And as long as you’re not dry humping anyone (Rule #7), it’s completely okay. Really.
Wow, guilt-free boners. If I don’t watch it, I might just end up becoming a cuddle whore. I’ll start by rehearsing these six spooning positions (the Post Modern being my favorite).
It happened while A.T. and I were having calamari at Pepe’s on the Wharf, one of P-Town’s many waterfront restaurants, visions of scallops, wellfleet oysters, and littleneck clams from the menu still swimming in my head. Our table was by the window overlooking the harbor and, when I looked up, there they were. Children, no older than five or six, playing on a boat by the shore. They were squealing in delight, far too engrossed in their late afternoon frolic to mind the cacophony of commerce a short distance away. Nothing remarkable about the scene, really, but there was a familiarity to it. I was viewing it through a window, framing the scene like a canvas, just enough shades of white and brown and blue brushed in to channel a different planet. It was the planet of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth and Winslow Homer. An hour earlier, A.T. and I had been in a couple of art galleries along Commercial Street looking at landscape paintings, thinly veiled homages to the idyllic coastlines and countrysides of the three masters. Those images and the sight of the children losing themselves in play at the beach, made me feel that I’d finally arrived – and not merely in the physical sense – in the New England. It’s a good feeling.
After dinner, we were back among the busy throng of vacationers walking or biking along Commercial Street: buff gay men in their muscle shirts (it was Circuit Week that week); college-age sweethearts; yuppies and straight families and their kids. P-Town was growing on me every minute. I knew very little about it before coming here; some friends have been here but said little other than being a gay resort town. I had imagined a Fire Island with its flashy pieces of real estate and underwear parties but quainter, less drugs, more low-key. While I can imagine the Pines boys itching to flaunt their tight asses at High Tea, Low Tea and a smattering of circuit parties, there was frankly little there that piqued my interest (save for the minor scandal involving local massage therapists slandering each other by way of lamppost announcements).
While I’m walking beside A.T., the revelry and flurry of Commercial Street, P-Town’s Broadway, make it hard to believe I’m in just one town. It’s a happy confusion of towns – of borders and vernaculars and sensibilities overlapping into each other – but never one town too many. Within a block, you can find a dive bar, high-end art galleries, jewelry and antique shops, a bike rental outlet and a fancy seafood resto. All the same, P-Town’s heritage as a hub of artists and writers dating back to the 1890s is intact., Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock have at one point called P-Town home; to this day, art galleries and theatre houses are strewn all over the main avenue. I know this sketch tries too hard, but I’ll make it anyway: gay men partying in Fire Island, sweat dripping down their sinewy bodies; P-Town a massive canvas for a drip painting, the frenzied, electric energy behind the random streaks and splotches of city folks, drag queens, lobsters, ice cream, leather and children playing in boats oblivious to the rest of these things, making for a dynamic, inspired, oddly Gestalt work of art. Just like Pollock’s action paintings, P-Town is pretty much all over the place.
It was getting late and A.T. and I decided to stay overnight at a place called Pilgrim House; it was lucky that we got ourselves a room on a Fourth of July weekend. We spend the rest of the evening checking out the different shops and having drinks; I spotted John Waters at least three times that evening. Back at Pilgrim House, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. At around four in the morning, I woke up to the loud sound of skin slapping hard against skin. Panicked, I looked down: “Chastity belt still in place, thank God”. I turned around to face A.T. who was wide awake and listening intently to something: “Shhhh. The guys in the next room are having a foursome. Somebody just took a shower and they’re now in the second round.” Ah, how could I have forgotten about P-Town also being the mecca of hormonally-driven party boys? Within the next twenty minutes, A.T. and I became acquainted with the erotic adventures of Justin (who got asked about the soap in the shower), Josh, Kevin and the unnamed fourth person who kept saying “Harder! Harder!” to alternate with the slapping and grunting sounds. I heard Kevin talk animatedly about something that “tastes like shit and yogurt”. When everyone – in the next room, let me be clear — has had their fill of the bacchanalia and two of the gentlemen left to go back to their own lodgings, the sky outside the window was starting to turn light. Before dozing off again, I remember thinking, “Isn’t it just lovely to wake up in a town that can make everybody happy!”
This morning I woke up to the sun beating down mercilessly, the prickly July air begging for a change of plans. A.T., who had been keeping busy with chores for two hours downstairs, promptly stepped forward as its emissary, asking, “Do we really want to spend all day today inside a museum?” By the time he finished the (rhetorical) question, I had already pictured us baking lazily on the beach and sauntering down the streets of Provincetown, just A.T. and I (and my chastity belt and Laszlo). With that, the matter was settled; my date with El Greco and Diego Velazquez at the MFA would have to wait till Sunday.
An hour later, we were on Route 6 in his Trofeo Oldsmobile, beach towels, sandwiches and cans of tomato juice (another of my requests) stocked in the trunk, headed for Cape Cod. The drive took nearly three hours; we spent most of the time talking about random things like the fiasco in A.T.’s town involving a mailman who had been dumping letters for months in the lake before he was found out; A.T.’s next-door neighbor who had six young kids and decorated the front of their house on every major holiday without fail (including the Fourth of July celebration); and whether there was a nude section at Herring Cove Beach, where we would be going to. A couple of times I was lulled to sleep by the steady motion of the car and the dull humming of its engine and doing a bad job at pretending that I wasn’t. Really, moving to New York has made car rides (excepting cabs) such a novelty for me that I find myself having trouble telling a car seat from a hammock.
Around noon, we crossed the Sagamore Bridge to the Cape, an arm-shaped peninsula located on the Easternmost portion of Massachusetts. At its very tip lies P-Town, a resort town where the Pilgrims first landed in 1620 and modern-day urban pilgrims flock to every summer for the beach, art galleries and “Bear Week” (Note: not the hairy mammals National Geographic would typically be interested in). When we caught glimpses of the tip of a tall structure – I later found out it was the Pilgrim Monument in downtown P-Town – through rooftops, A.T. said that we should get to Herring Cove Beach in no time.
When we drove into the beach parking lot, the temperature was in the high 80s and I realized that I was one ill-prepared pilgrim. Cute underwear I brought but not cute swimwear (not that I was planning to swim). As if that weren’t enough, we both forgot to bring sunscreen. After lunching on turkey sandwich and egg salad, we headed for the right side of the beach with our towels; straight families and their kids were on the left side. I did my best to walk tall in my denim shorts and small-sized shirt as we passed by sparse groups of mostly beefy men in flower-print beach shorts.
The beach wasn’t too crowded as it was still the Third of July and, as soon as A.T. and I found a spot, I asked, “Do you mind if I strip down to my cute Speedo-inspired undies?” What a relief that he didn’t! I lay on my stomach to get some sun on my back and opened my copy of The New Yorker. It opened to a short story by Alice Munro called “Deep Holes”. I then read A.T. excerpts of a second piece, “Annals of Medicine: The Itch”, about people plagued by severe itching problems while he counted the number of gay couples who held hands while walking along the beach (his count came to 3). At one point, we noticed a man, probably in his fifties, stopped by two rangers; as far as A.T. and I could tell, he was the only one in the beach who had a gut.
By 4:30 PM, A.T. and I packed up, confident that we would be tan enough for tomorrow’s Fourth of July festivities. While changing, I pulled back my low-rise briefs ever so slightly and there it was, my first underwear tan line for the summer! We drove to downtown P-Town whose zip and bustle was a pleasant surprise to me (more on P-Town in an upcoming entry), checked out a couple of art galleries and found the perfect swimsuit at a shop, a light blue square cut trunk number with an orange vertical band on the right side (which A.T. gave both thumbs up to). Walking along the district’s main street, Commercial Street, in my new sleeveless shirt and swimwear, I turned to A.T. with an expression half-imploring and half the seductive look of the prepubescent Kirsten Dunst in “Interview With The Vampire” as she licked her lips and meowed to Tom Cruise, “I want some more.”
And just like that, A.T. penciled in another day at P-Town on Saturday. Ah, the things that underwear tan lines make guys do.
I have a confession to make: Until two months ago, I did not know how to ride a bike. Going through a terrible childhood is no joke, let me tell you. Picture me at age four, a jumper-clad puppy gazing forlornly out the window as my carefree, mud-caked kid neighbors rode around in their bikes. The sight of their happy bottoms cushioned by the hard, protruding bike seats haunts me to this day. I was an only child and my mom had forbidden me from getting on a bike thinking I’d run myself into traffic. Looking back now, the last few years may have been nothing more than an ambivalent rebellion against maternal authority: I’ve ridden means of transport of various shapes and sizes but, on the off-chance that she might actually be right about the running-into-traffic part, I prudently avoided mounting anything with wheels.
On the random occasion that I tried maneuvering something with wheels, I made sure I was with a professional. Last summer, I set my sights on speed racing and somehow found myself on a weekend date with a corporate exec type who’s a racing instructor on the weekends. Since we had to get to the NASCAR racetrack at the Poconos at 7 AM, I had to be up at 3AM and haul my sleep-deprived self downtown to Battery Park before sunrise. Anyone who’s been to these things would tell you that a racing event is not much different from the Folsom Street Fair: their adherents have a fervor beyond irony and an authentic sense of identification with their hobby that allows them to sniff out impostors. I had to do something. By Sunday afternoon, not only did I get to ride a sports car running at 220 mph, I had become my date’s junior colleague at the bank he works for, gotten recently engaged to Sally May (a sophomore medical student at Columbia) whom I met at a baseball game in Chicago a few years back. The closet is bursting with such rich, colorful details, especially when one imparts them in a voice an octave or two lower than his normal register, no?
This past April, however, I’m afraid my transgression finally became absolute and unequivocal. My hot German biker friend, who shall be referred to as “Lehrer”, offered to teach me how to ride a bike. Before our first lesson on an unusually sunny Saturday morning, I saw that he had done his homework and printed out an online article on “Teaching Kids How To Ride A Bike”, ensuring a meticulously planned training program. He got me started by learning to maintain my balance while on a bike moving down a slope, which I mastered in an hour and a half tops. After that, I did the same while pedaling and maneuvering the steer and, after nailing that down as well, I moved on to biking on flat surfaces, adjusting the gears and going up inclined surfaces. The only problem in the first few sessions was that I’d get extremely self-conscious and stiffen when there are people around in the park but my Lehrer put up with it so graciously. To no one’s surprise, five Saturdays later, I became a “hot biker dude” myself, all thanks to Lehrer.
When I decided to go for a hundred days without sex, my note to self was that the experience shouldn’t simply be a passive, banal one. I have to say I couldn’t resist romaticizing this sabbatical a bit. Maybe I’ll pick up a life-changing nugget or two about sex and dating at the end of it. Maybe by leaving my comfort zone and trying out new things, I’ll get to know and appreciate myself better. Maybe, sometime during the one hundred days, I’ll fall in love. There’s nothing extraordinary about how I learned how to bike but somehow those Saturday mornings riding around in the park and avoiding puddles makes me feel like that four-year-old again, looking expectantly out my window: he and I think that, despite being told that you’re out of your mind, when you set your heart on something and go for it, something’s bound to happen eventually, whether in love or biking.
Since I don’t know what’s in store for me at summer’s end, I thought I’d send the universe some feelers by pulling off a crazy antic: Bike thirty miles in support of something that helps other people. I just signed up to join the New York City Bike Tour of the National Multiple Scleroris Society sometime in the next few months. While I almost had a panic attack after signing up – the hypochondriac in me recalling vividly the article that said that my psycho-motor coordination will suffer because I’m not having sex – I’m sure the support of my friends will help me pull through. At any rate, I’m sure my fiancée Sally May will be very proud.
Civilization, Freud would have you believe, would not exist without the sublimation of our erotic impulses into more productive realms. Had our forebears simply decided to bang like rabbits 24/7, we would still be cave-dwelling barbarians stuck in hunting-and-gathering mode. Although they celebrated sex and sexuality in a frank, voracious way, the ancient Greeks did manage to skip an orgy or two to pen The Odyssey, mount the world’s first Olympic games and erect architectural marvels like The Parthenon. Reportedly a virgin his whole life, Antoni Gaudi – whose art nouveau masterpieces are sprinkled all over Barcelona — would not have been able to conceive a Sagrada Familia half as extraordinary if he did so in the missionary position.
Then there’s Isaac Newton, mathematician, scientist and bona fide virgin, who had his apple – and could have eaten it, too, but knew better. Although he didn’t take a bite like Eve did, he was certainly fixated on it and came upon “a mode of proving that the earth turned round in a most natural whirl, called ‘gravitation’; And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.”
It is said that civilization has since advanced; apples can now either be a product of genetic engineering or a technology-savvy cult presided over by Steve Jobs. To this day, however, the human libido continues to be far more indomitable than the human spirit and is a headache to drive away. But when one happens to be at Bryant Park on a weekday noon this summer, one might just find the perfect outlet: Pétanque. It’s a type of game where the goal is, while standing with the feet together in a small circle, to throw large, heavy metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden target ball (jack). Most games are played in teams, and are staged on the gravel area near the Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street corner. I felt right at home with the pétanque players and their balls, who were evidently the Rat Pack when pitted against the Driving-Miss-Daisy-ish crowd of chess and backgammon players only thirty feet away. (Apparently, pétanque is big in France; I can imagine my Parisian man-friend playing the sport when he’s not preoccupied with his baguette.)
You can up the ante with game strategies like “pointing” when a player throws his ball to have it roll as close to the jack as possible, and “shooting” when a player aims for the ball of an opponent, hoping to move him out of a favorable spot. Now you ask in exasperation, “Why all this fuss about balls?” It’s not just about balls, my dear. When you think about it, pétanque is a metaphor for the pursuit of Mr. Right when you first encounter him in a social situation – whether a party, benefit dinner or an orgy – and he’s being preyed on by other admirers (all of whom inferior to you, of course). Let’s say Mr. Right belongs to a secret society of one. Play your balls right and you might very well end up with a member — for one night or, if it’s the jackpot you hit, possibly a lifetime.
Better Than Sex 