I had just come back from a two-week return visit to east Asia. I appreciated the chance to step away from my stagnant social life and now, feeling refreshed, resolved to make more of an effort at relationships. I didn’t have anything I could call “my” circle of just plain friends to hang out with. And occasionally ducking into a dark, attitudey gay bar certainly wasn’t getting me anywhere or anyone nice. Months of meeting no one and going home alone, day or night, was getting me down.
And even those times when I found sex, it felt like nothing more than sex-for-sex’s sake. I still ended up alone, usually feeling like why do I even bother going out? It was all a part of my own ongoing confusion and hesitance, yes; but that didn’t make me feel any less empty. I was starting to want encounters that maybe had a chance of leading to something lasting. That was the idea, anyway.
One day I noticed in the Washington Blade, DC’s gay newspaper, an ad for ComQuest, a gay computer dating service. Interesting idea! It wouldn’t hurt to give it a try. (I wondered if someone there had really wanted to name it CumQuest.)
I rented a post office box near my apartment so my two straight roommates wouldn’t see any mail that might arrive screaming “GAY” and sent in my paper application (there was no World Wide Web yet). Of course, I carefully filled in the checkboxes about facial hair and chest hair, mine and theirs. I suppose by using this system, I kinda-sorta took another step in coming out, if in a round-about, paper sort-of way, at least in terms of finding sex.
I checked that post office box nearly every day and over the next a few weeks, I received several matches. It was exciting! Over what were essentially blind dinners, I met with each match-up guy and we broke the ice by talking about our reasons for using ComQuest. For example, one guy was a too-busy-for-dating business traveler. Another was simply tired of the gay bar scene (despite my relative newness, I could relate).
Most of these dinner dates didn’t lead to anything further, though I did learn how to say nicely, “This was nice, but not interested.” One dinner date was a really tall guy whom I thought was cute but he was “not interested” in me.
Ultimately, I had mostly “no” responses, but I felt ComQuest was a success in that I was getting out and meeting new men and not in a bar. I optimistically decided to count only the “yes” ones on my mental tally.
I did eventually hit it off with one ComQuest match. A guy named Lucas and I had dinner and then went back to his place. He apparently didn’t have sex often enough, for he was very eager to get naked and expended a lot of energy crawling all over me, seeming to not notice I just laid passively on my back at first. Lucas had a nice muscly chest and used way too much tongue when he kissed. And he had the absolute longest armpit hair I ever saw (could have cut it and sold it for wigs). We explored each other’s bodies, my dick leaking more pre-cum strands all over us both. (I was still learning that other men didn’t leak pre-cum anywhere near as much as me.)
He also had an erect dick like I had never seen before. It was bent when erect. Bent. Not gently curving but with a distinct angle in the middle that I could have measured with a protractor. I didn’t say anything, but I wondered how he could possibly fuck with that thing.
His beard was very stiff and bristly, and it scraped my face like a wire brush as he gripped my shoulders and ground his dick into my stomach (so this was frottage?) until he shot all over me. Maybe frottage was what he could manage instead of fucking (not that I was interested in fucking).
I was happy he got a good cum out of it but I really didn’t have all that much fun. It occurred to me this is how a woman must feel as some thoughtless dude is on top of her, humping away, oblivious to anything but his own thing. Yeah, I’d get tired of it, too. I forget now if or how I got off, but I spent the night at Lucas’ anyway. He certainly wasn’t a bad guy.
The next morning while chatting over orange juice I mentioned that I liked hiking and backpacking. (I was an avid backpacker, did I say?) Lucas suggested I find out about Adventuring, a DC group of gay men (and a few lesbians) that frequently organized outdoor activities. He showed me the group’s recent newsletter and I was amazed at the number of different things they did, such as canoeing or long bike rides in the countryside around DC.
I took down the Adventuring contact phone number and headed home. (Much later I learned that the journey to home or to work on the morning after a sleepover is the “walk of shame.” It made me laugh but eventually I came to call it the “walk of triumph,” as in, I got lucky and you didn’t!)
Lucas and I met up twice again. The following weekend we saw some art exhibit or other, though I declined when he asked me back to his place again for sex. Then about a year later by chance we were on the same Adventuring hike, but we didn’t speak much. I couldn’t tell if he had forgotten me or was just avoiding me, but I wasn’t interested anyway so I let it go.
Aside: I stuck with Adventuring for years. I loved the trips that members organized, and became a fixture on many outings. At first, I was barely out; but the hikes, bike rides, and canoe and camping trips (and once, skydiving! It was years before I told my mom I did that) served to get me out of my fearful head and out of the city doing fun, athletic things with nice, ordinary guys, like the biking—once a guy even came back to see if I needed help with my flat tire. I never forgot that moment of kindness, or that of many others in Adventuring.
But it was also because on these trips, I met “real” people. Not the hungry, uptight denizens—myself included—of a midnight gay bar, but people I could get to know and with whom I shared interests. These were gay men already comfortable with themselves, and early friends around campfires shared even “embarrassing” stories about errant cucumbers discovered down store drains. Many of them, I don’t think they ever knew it, were role models setting examples that helped me become comfortable with myself.
Some of those early friends moved on to new others, like nomads to the next pasture, and I learned a few painful lessons about trust and loyalty. But other, better friends lasted, and making friends beyond just finding sex was one of my goals. To this day I’m grateful how Adventuring helped with that time in my life.