A Gay In The Life: The Birds & The Birds

We would love to deny it, but too much porn makes all of us dull boys, and then the men just begin to look identical. To introduce breathers into your QC browsing experience, we're kicking off QColumn this week with "A Gay In The Life" by Steve Prince. This will be a weekly series which runs on every Friday. Stay tuned for other columns coming your way!

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A Gay In The Life: The Birds & The Birds
By Steve Prince

"Felching? What does felching mean?" My friend Carrie looked at me like I had just spoken a different language. What? I was in the middle of a good story about one of our mutual gay friends and I was a bit surprised that she interrupted me.

"Sugar", I replied, my Southern drawl adding a few more syllables than necessary. "You mean to tell me you're thirty-four years old and you don't know what felching is?"

"No!" she smirked. "What is it?" I didn't want to say it too loud because we were in a small pizza restaurant, however Carrie is impatient as hell. Soon she was tugging on my sleeve like a little gay boy asking his mother if he can hold her purse while she tries on pretty shoes that Mommy will buy and then make you swear you won't tell Daddy about it when he gets home.

"Oh fine!" I exclaimed. In my annoyance I think I retorted a little too loudly. "Well for gay men, it's when a guy shoots his load up your ass, and then you cumfart it out on his face until his lips look like a fat girl who just binged on ring-dings."

At that moment several things happened at once. I will try to describe them to the best of my ability, but I make no promises. As with most moments of chaos, I find explaining the series of events from the beginning is best. Here goes...

Carrie's eyes widened. Then I hear an old man behind me slam down his fork and yell, "Christ!", and out of the corner of my eye I see a woman hug her young daughter to her side like televangelist on a tirade clutching his Bible. The owner of the pizza shop leans over the glass counter glaring at me, while the cute pizza boy behind him smirks with triumph. The worst part of this story is that I gave Carrie this explanation as she was taking a huge drink of her soda.

"Pffphsssssss!" Her Diet Coke goes all over my face.

"Well," I calmly add while wiping off my chin. "It does sound a little like that, but it usually isn't as explosive as Diet Coke."

After we quickly left the pizza shop, Carrie began questioning me all about the ins-and-outs of gay sex. It was like I gave her permission to talk about sex. Still, I was a bit surprised she didn't know what felching was. I mean, my friend Carrie is a straight-woman (although she has SUCH an inner drag queen that it's unreal), and she has sex quite frequently. I thought that this was just a weird fluke that an adult woman didn't know this. Straight people felch...right?

Three days later, I was on the phone with my best friend, who is straight. After his first divorce, Eric had sex with any girl with two legs and a pair of lips. Even though he was remarried and settled now, I thought he would know for sure.

"Hey", I interrupted his story that I wasn't listening to anyway. "Do you know what felching is?" As I asked, the inflection of my voice went so high that I sounded like a four-year-old asking Daddy why he drinks every night.

"What the fuck is that, a sport?" He responded. Well, actually it could be if you think about it.

"No," I laughed. Hmm, I thought I would use a straight version of the definition. "It's when you cum in a girls who-who and then she quifs it on your face until you look like everyone at the end of Ghostbusters when the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man explodes."

Subtle right?

"Oh..." Eric pauses. "Jesus, dude. I never even THOUGHT of that." He remains quite on the phone as if he is weighing an option. Finally he emerged from his fantasy. "Look, uh, I gotta go. One of the kids is...uh..yeah...something. Talk to you later."

"All right, uh, bye." I totally knew what he's up to and I wasn't surprised to hear him excitedly yell as he hung up the phone, "Hey honey. Come here!"

First Carrie, now Eric? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? By the next day, my desire to be validated was so overwhelming that I purposefully scheduled a lunch with one of my friends. Carlos, who is gay, has had a lot of sex and I know he loves watching all types of porn--surely he would know.

I waited until after we finished eating; I had learned my lesson from lunch with Carrie. As he was taking a drag from his cigarette, I pounced.

"Do you know what felching is?" I ask sedately.

Shhh!", Carlos coughs out his exhale. "Steve, you can't just talk about stuff like that in public!"

"Why not?"

"Man, you just can't". He looks around regaining his composure. "But yeah, I know what it is. I don't do it though. Not safe and totally disgusting. That's for pigs."

I was put off. This is Carlos. My friends and I call Carlos the fisting queen of Los Angeles. I mean he's had more gay sex than an archbishop in the Vatican. He's told me stories about threesomes, glory holes, orgies, leather, plushy--you name it, he's done it. And I never have thought of him as any less of a person. Actually I admire how sexually free he is. But why is he drawing the line at felching?

"Why is it gross?" I ask.

"Well, I mean..." He searches for an explanation. "It's your own nut dude."

"And? I mean if you're playing safe, what's the problem?" I waited. I did not make the connection. Come on we have all tasted our own jamba juice some time or another. If fact, one of my friends says his cum tastes so good that a fuck buddy once told him he would eat it on top of ice cream. I'm more of a hot fudge fan, but hey.

"Well it's still gross.", Carlos began. "It's that....that...It's supposed to be shot out but not put in. Let's talk about something else."

This was a ridiculous opinion, at least I thought. I'm not a therapist but obviously Carlos had issues that weren't for me to decipher. On to Plan B--I needed to call in the troops for a collective opinion.

A lot of my friends are gay men, so over the next week I asked them all if they knew about felching. Most of them gave me the same negative responses as Carlos, and they really didn't want the subject brought up again. One friend said it was hot but he wouldn't do it--he was too scared. That's great that he is concerned about safe sex, but the way he said he was scared seemed to come from somewhere deeper--like a shame or guilt that he might actually enjoy it.

I thought it was so ironic that as gay men we are thought of as being more open-minded, yet we are censoring ourselves all the time. They might not want to talk about it, but I know my gay friends know good and well what felching is. All of my gay friends watch porn. All of them. I talk about sex graphically with a lot of my gay friends, as they do to me. So it eluded me why this was so taboo. It's not like I was asking these people for a demonstration; I just wanted to talk about it.

The way felching came up was innocent enough. I was actually telling a story about a friend's experience with his boyfriend of five years. I didn't think anything sexual between a monogamous couple of that long was "wrong" or "unspeakable". In fact the more I think about it, I don't think any sexual activity is wrong as long as all parties involved are in agreement.

So I have to wonder, why all the secrecy about sex?

Carrie didn't know what felching was, but as soon as I gave her the safe feeling to talk about sex, she was Miss Twenty Questions. And why couldn't Eric admit that he wanted to try something when he obviously was turned on. And Carlos--ugh--his response was just so lame.

We are sexual beings. Sex is part of the core of our existence, our soul, our heart--whatever way you wanna put it, sex is a fundamental part of humanity. There is one problem. We live in a straight world. Everyday I get to see a magazine ad or a commercial promoting heterosexual sex. Not that THAT is a bad thing. Hey, heterosexual sex got me here. It is just that for as much as straight people show and commercialize sex, they sure as hell don't want to talk about it. They just stick to the birds and the bees.

That's a problem for me. I want to talk about the birds and the birds. As a gay man, I want to see gay sex. And I don't want it pushed away into a closet. I want others to know that I want to see it, smell it, feel it--and most importantly talk about it. You know why, because I am it. I am gay sex. As gay men we all are; it forms our identity and drives our most intimate desires. To not talk about gay sex, is to not talk about the gay experience--which for me has best thing I have discovered about myself.

So get ready to take a trip with me. Every week I want to explore something hot and fantastic about the heavenly world of gay sex. It might be a story. It might be my opinion. It might be my ranting over an ex-boyfriend. It might be about falling in love. It might be graphic or embarrassing. It might be about terrible sex that would even gross out Graham Norton or it could be about passionate sex that is hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock. It might be about sex with a group or sex with myself. It might be hilarious or just down right weird. No matter what...

It will be honest, and it will be gay. Real gay.

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Years after moving from Oklahoma, Steve Prince is still acclimating to the gay scene in Los Angeles-he's a slow learner. By trial and error and a lot of sex, his mission is to make the uncomfortable, comfortable. Also let it should be known that he is gayer than butt sex.