cock block

When I first started writing this blog, a rather prurient friend of mine said that he found it boring because there wasn't enough sex. Well, Chris Bradley, this one's for you.

I can't get laid. And it's not for lack of trying. In the past month and a half I have been to the seediest of East Village gay bars, sometimes twice in one weekend, staying out 'til closing time (4 am) in hopes of finding someone to bed. With no luck. It's become a Friday night/Saturday morning ritual to totter drunkenly up Second Avenue, slapping my hands in frustration against lampposts and cursing under my breath, then climbing up four flights of stairs (and one loft bed ladder) so that I can slump into my too-long empty bed.

This has happened before, of course. I don't keep track of my success rate, but I would say that I tended to return home solo from these late-night trawlings at least 50% of the time, probably more. What makes this feel different is the doggedness with which I've been pursuing my goal of late and the complete lack of results.

It's a truth commonly acknowledged that the more sex someone is having, the sexier one appears to others. You're confident, you move with an unconscious sensuality, you don't have anything to prove. Well, from January to June I was doing pretty well in the sex department. My pick-up technique was improving. I didn't need to go out to The Cock, where little in the way of finesse is required to find willing partners; I was, in fact, employing my voice and mind and body in social situations to identify, flirt with, and "seal the deal" with a string of desired partners. I'd become consistently proficient at a skill I once thought I would never master. After one successful night last spring (the night of my first date with Helmut) Kyle expressed his unqualified awe at my goal-oriented dating strategy. I identified what I wanted and damned if I didn't get it most of the time.

This past month or so, I seem to have regressed. I'm wildly more sexually experienced than I was a mere year ago (when I first started going out full-force), I have a much better haircut, and I don't mean to brag but in the past couple of weeks an absurd number of people (male and female, straight and gay) have been commenting on how hot I look. So what gives? Since the Helmutgate debacle, I have turned to my old East Village haunts for solace and have found nothing -- on some nights, not even a good grope or any snogging.

I'm tempted to chalk it up to the vagaries of Feng Shui. As all horny young homos know, The Cock has moved into the Hole (that is, New York City's sleaziest gay bar lost it's lease on Ave. A and had to move two avenues over). The old Cock is a space that will probably remain forever etched on my mind in the way that one's childhood playroom typically is. It was sleazy, smoky, and sweaty to be sure, but in one year's time of exploring its nooks and crannies (and believe me, it had more of them than a Thomas' English Muffin), I'd found my own favorite spots, my own strategies for soliciting attention. There was the long "runway" leading from the door to the lav, the hip area near the DJ booth, the murky shadows in the corner, the stage where go-go boys and exhibitionists could display themselves, and the cramped dance floor near the "back room"-turned-coat-check-area.

The new Cock, however, is essentially a bland rectangular space, lit more darkly than its predecessor in hopes, perhaps, that we won't notice what a shoe box it is. People are packed in even tighter and instead of sinuously bumping and gliding between bodies like a sexually promiscuous pinball, one finds oneself more often than not grimacing in frustration as you get shoved around by people trying to make their way throught the fray. There are no longer any curves and eddies, just a mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. I've in fact vowed two or three times that I will never go to the new Cock again and broken that vow at least as many times. But the thing is that even as I break that vow, I don't do it with a feeling of guilty pleasure because, frankly, I no longer enjoy going there. I enter with a sinking feeling in my stomach. There are no incidental pleasures there, just pursuit of the goal.

And that situation is something I've felt elsewhere in the past couple of months, leading me to believe that it's more than the re-configured Cock that has cursed my sex life. When I'm out most nights I am just not seeing that many exciting partners. Probably only two or three over the course of eight of nine recent trips. It was not always thus. Have my standards raised? Is everyone out at Fire Island to escape the heat? Whatever the reason, the result is doubly frustrating: I go out looking for something that doesn't seem to even been out there to get. I wear out the heels of my shoes wandering up and down the bar, eyeing men left and right but finding no one remarkable, or even especially desirable. The paucity of hotness ought to make me stay home but perversely it tends to prompt me to stay out even later, thinking "Somebody's gotta come in, right?"

It may be that my heart's not in it anymore. I can't very well expect to succeed at something I no longer have any faith in. My Cock-going days ended when I started getting into semi-serious dating situations, the type where you actually talk to people and see them multiple times, and go to their apartments during normal daylight hours. I thought I could return to bars like the Cock as if they were Blockbuster outlets, but I seem to have discovered that my membership has expired. Or something. I need to move on to a different stage in the development of my sex life. I've been thinking recently that the type of boy I need to find will probably not be met at a cruisy bar. If only there were a pick-up scene at Barnes & Nobles or the Film Anthology Archive! (Perhaps there is? Anybody, anybody?) I've outgrown the playroom.

As much as I am starting to accept that fact of evolution, I still don't see why I shouldn't be able to get in a couple of pokes or two just to make myself feel better. I really need to bring somebody else to my bed before I leave Menno House, just to wrap things up. I will probably be much better off in Brooklyn, where the gay bars are fewer and farther between, where I can't be lured at a moment's notice to dens of vice within walking distance of my hacienda. But before I enter that period of burgher-like maturity, I'd like to prove to myself that I've still got it. In order to succeed at that, I need to stop trying so hard and find the fun in it all over again.

So there you go. Sex, sex, sex. Remember when I used to write about things like welfare reform?