About a Minute or an Hour

It was another time for sex and the internet. Cams weren't on every computer yet, and it wasn't necessarily a thing in chatrooms. It took a long time for even a picture to load, so imagination was key. People talked in sexually charged chatrooms, some using present-tense narrative structures to play-act sex (it was called "cybering"), and some just talked to each other, whether to arrange to meet or to just excite each other with each other's fantasies or sexual history. We'd ask all about one another's bodies and fetishes so we could indulge ourselves in a momentary daydream of having sex together. For the first time for many of us, our diverse bodies found people who actually sought those out. There were entire spaces for people who loved chubby bellies, or older men. I was still technically the most popular demographic: an inexperienced young man with a regular looking body.

I don't think I'd meet a stranger to fuck -- while I could be turned on watching porn, to me the act of getting excited by someone and pleasuring another person's body (and letting them pleasure mine) was all about knowing that person and caring whether they were having fun. Watching arousal and pleasure on another's face is the most exciting thing for me, and it's the reason I often cum right before or at the same time as my lover.

I didn't have a cam, and wasn't sure I'd be one of the people who used them even if I did. But I carefully took a face-blurred angle-posing photograph of myself in the nude and erect, to showcase that I was anonymous, young, reasonably well-endowed, and interested in discussing sex in particular.

I had been frequenting gay chatrooms for a while now, to flirt with my irrepressible itch to try sex with a man. Although I was a romantic in relationships with women, here there was something more direct and visceral. I started as a late teenager, and now I was the sort of age where I should be gearing up to move out of my parents' home. I never needed as much sleep as other people, and I exploited this by stealthily immersing myself in pictures of (and the company of) horny men late in the evening. Sometimes it was a far older horn-dog of a man, sometimes it was a player who enjoyed one-night stands, every now and then it was a curious or excited teenager, and sometimes it was another closeted fellow releasing his need however he could.

I had just a string of characters allowed for a profile. I had to get to get to the point:

[[21M, 8.5uc, horny gay-curious. Here to chat/experiment/masturbate, any age very welcome!]]

There were themed chat rooms to choose from (all gay of course). I tended to select the Main one, as it was the fullest, and the Mature Men one, as they tended to appreciate the company of a horny and willing young fellow.

Chats happened not by request but by popup, and in quick succession:

"HI"

"WISH I COULD FUCK YOU"

"NICK COCK LET'S CHAT"

"HEY"

"DO YOU LIKE ASSPLAY?"

"HI"

"HEY"

"ME TOO"

"CAN I PHONE YOU? I WANT TO HEAR YOUR HOT VOICE"

"HEY"

I had little time for those who didn't share the initiative in a chat, or those who just had truly creepy things to say, though sometimes something I said impressed someone who talked about their needs and fantasies.

This was my own little world, completely separate, like a secret identity, and so I normally shied away from speaking directly to people in my city, as it made it feel a little more real... But every now and then, I'd be speaking to a local, and especially early on, their encouragements about how within the hour I could hypothetically be having real sex with him made my knees shake as I massaged my penis and balls at the thought of someone else touching me, considering the raw possibility of it, that it didn't have to be hypothetical, that it was potentially within my grasp to touch a man's penis and have him touch mine that very day. This relaxed a little after I was no longer a virgin, after my first sexual relationship with a woman, but the need to trade orgasms with a man in particular, to DRINK an orgasm, was one of the most wonderful things I could imagine when I entered that "mode". It was a little meme in my head that consumed me when I was aroused.

I came to revere the idea of the "regular guy", a guy who didn't brag about any particular muscle mass or hyper-masculine lifestyle, just a horny guy who wanted to reach out to another horny guy. Maybe that was my low self esteem or my threat/risk estimate of a big muscular man, or my expression of masculinity projected out to who I wanted to be intimate with. Someone with a soft body, or unassuming like me, sounded really arousing to me. Am I just the only guy like that? Or is that a thing?

[HI NICE PIC.] A new one had popped up. This one's description was young.

[Thanks!]

[I LIKED WHAT YOU SAID IN YOUR PROFILE. ME TOO.]

[Yeah? Cool, what part?]

[I ALWAYS WANTED TO FUCK AROUND WITH A GUY.]

[Yeah, every now and then I just have this amazing big desire to be with a man. I'm straight except during those nights, and then I just get drop-dead horny for sex with men. It's weird.]

[HAVE YOU EVER HAD SEX WITH A MAN?]

[Once. A while back. I didn't really know how to choose someone who cared about making me feel good, so it wasn't great, but I've been longing again. Have you? Ever been with a man?]

[NO NEVER. I'M GAY BUT NO ONE CAN KNOW. MY DAD ESPECIALLY.]

[Well you're 19, you're allowed to be sexual.]

[HE WOULD CUT ME OFF FROM MY UNIVERSITY FUND AND KICK ME OUT.]

Holy shit. When I thought of that garbage I thought of Tennessee, Texas, not here.

[That Sounds scary. But he's not watching you all the time is he?]

[YES HE IS. HE TELLS ME TO STUDY AND TO NOT HAVE FRIENDS.]

[Why does he care?]

[IN MY FAMILY, FAMILY IS EVERYTHING. I EVEN HAVE TO MARRY WHO THEY SAY.]

I was completely naïve about other parts of the world, I wasn't sure whether this actually happened or whether this was a prank, but he sounded serious.

[That really sucks. Well you're here now, you have this chat room! And porn. I hope you get to have the sex you want, or boyfriend, or whatever! I have high hopes, you'll cum in a beautiful man's mouth one day!]

[THANKS. YOU SOUND COOL.]

[You too! I won't lie, I'm here because I need to cum, but it's good talking to you right now.]

[COOL]

Awkward pause.

[SO WHAT KIND OF PORN DO YOU WATCH?]

I had never shared porn with anyone, it was just something done as a secret. It was strange, the idea of showing another person what sex videos I watched. I thought "fuck it" and browsed online and showed him my currently favourite treasure-trove, featuring first-time men on men. That was my favourite genre: somehow, when porn was about introducing someone to a sexual act they had never explored, there was tenderness there, a slow and beautiful eroticism that I found overwhelmingly arousing. This was at its most intense when the two people were of the same gender, if it was an introduction into queer sex. It may have been the coding endemic of the genre or something I felt excited about, or likely what algorithms correlated (do people who like queer sex want to see more altruistic and pleasurable sex? There's a study in there somewhere waiting to be written...) but anyhow, that's what truly turned me on. They were themed galleries, pictures in series each depicting a scene between two or three men, of various body types and ages, slowly shifting shyness into arousal, tentative touch into elaborate acts. Usually they ended in anal, a blowjob merely as a momentary teaser, but my favourites were ones just of blowjobs -- they just looked more sensual, more about giving someone pleasure with your movements, not just taking pleasure from someone. But hell, maybe the ass feels good, I didn't know (back then).

[WOW THANKS! HERE'S SOMETHING BACK.] What this mysterious peer sent me was a 5-second video of two toned young men in a 69, from a perspective that showed one of their faces, and above him the ass of the man at the top of their formation, as well as his long thick penis sliding rapidly in and out of the bottom's delighted and delirious face. It was high res, not blurry at all, so it took a whole minute to load, but it was worth it.

[Jeez, nice. I love oral. I mean I think I would. Need more experience to know whether I like giving it too, but when I think about it I get very, very horny.]

As a fast typist I can write in full grammar in real-time, mid-handjob or not. This guy was briefer, but he sounded genuine. And said the same stuff I felt.

[MAYBE ONE DAY I CAN DO THAT FOR REAL. BUT THERE'S CREEPS HERE.]

[Totally. Totally about the creeps, and totally about the want to make it really happen. But I chicken out. I live with my parents still, and what if some creep outed me, right? I just want to know how it feels and whether I just want to experiment so I know I've done it or whether... y'know, whether I need to do this again and again, a lot. I don't think I want a boyfriend, I don't see guys that way, but I have this feeling I'd love to make a man cum.]

[I'D LOVE TO HAVE A BOYFRIEND. BUT THAT WOULD JUST NEVER HAPPEN. I'M JUST STUCK HERE.]

[I wish I could give you some sex, I might not be talented yet but I'd give you my best just to spite your household! That's the least you deserve."

[I WISH WE COULD TOO. WHAT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO?]

[Suck each other, definitely. You?]

[SUCKING IS GOOD. AND I'D LIKE TO FUCK A GUY IN THE ASS. AND I'M DYING TO MAKE OUT. YOU LIKE KISSING?]

[I don't know if I'd like kissing a guy, but I'd try!]

[I'M HARD JUST THINKING ABOUT IT.]

[Same. I've been saving this cum up for a while, so finally touching myself right now feels amazing. I really, really wish I was inside your mouth.] I indicated his mouth in particular to bring it into a full in daydream.

[I'D LOVE NO5HING MORE.] I took it as a compliment that typos were manifesting.

I had considered many times in the past two years crossing that chat room line and revealing my neighbourhood... ascertaining the feasibility with a stranger of turning cyber-sex into full-on fluid-bonding sex. Obviously that wasn't the safest concept. Anything from STIs to fundamentalist Trojan horses was possible here. Was this the time?

[Just out of curiosity, and maybe I'm being crazy here... I'm beside Federation park...... you?] That description still cast a wide net, so I wasn't quite outing myself to this stranger.

[I LIVE ON BOUNDARY AND WILLIAMS STREET]

That.... represented a 10-minute walk. I thought for a full 60 seconds about whether to make this real. I'm sure I risked him leaving, by going radio silent, but this was huge. This horny man is in my neighbourhood. He's very real. (Okay back then, that felt more weird... Before more people were out, to many neighbourhoods some would theoretically be okay with "gay people" in theory but not know they knew them. That change was very sudden and very recent. In the white-liberal neighbourhood I was living in, anyways.) But I wasn't a kid anymore, and inhaling deeply, I told myself I had the right to act like a sexual being, it didn't have to be a secret. I'm not going to blab about it, but maybe -- maybe -- it's okay that I want to have sex.

[Holy cow. Juan? You're like six blocks from me. Like the short end of the blocks. Okay, question time. Do you live on the ground floor?]

[YES?]

[Okay. Do you have a window you think you can crawl out of?]

[UM YES]

[Okay. Juan, here's a what-if, because I'm horny and everything but even more than that I want to give you the sex that you deserve. Okay, I still live with my parents, my brothers have moved out, which means my basement is empty and my parents are two floors up. I can hear everything that happens over me but hearing what's downstairs is harder to hear from upstairs. Juan, what if, like past midnight some night, you crept out of your window, walked up to my block, I snuck you in, and we were all alone with a floor to ourselves?]

[OMG THAT WOULD BE AWESOME BUT WHAT IF I'M CAUGHT]

[Totally. You have to take the steps you think you need to take to be safe. If you'd like, I could meet you at the bottom of my block. I'd take you into the house from the front yard, where my parents' windows don't face, and sneak around the back to the basement entrance. This is still just an idea, would you really like this?]

[YES. YOU SHOULD KNOW I WON'T KNOW A LOT, I DON'T KNOW HOW KISSING WORKS. HOW DO THE LIPS GO TOGETHER?]

Holy cow. For one moment I found myself waffling on whether this person really was this innocent or whether this was some sort of catfish. I'd stay in hiding on the street until I saw him, I decided.

[Well you can find out. It's not about instructions, it's about doing what your body tells you and listening to the person you're touching. You'll know what to do. Hey, I'm not that experienced either, so let's be clumsy together!]

[THIS SOUNDS COOL. DO YOU REALLY THINK THIS WILL WORK?]

[I know this feels like a fantasy, like one of the videos you watch, but this can be real, and you deserve it to be if you want it. [When would you like this to happen?]

[I DON'T KNOW. MY DAD GOES TO BED EARLY ON WEEKNIGHTS, AND HE'S A HEAVY SLEEPER. IT'S REALLY LATE, LET'S TALK MORE TOMORROW. WANT TO CUM TOGETHER BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP?]

Cybering doesn't have the best dialogue, the hands are busy and the minds are low-maintenance, but suffice it to say we talked about specific ways of touching each other in worse and worse grammar, checked periodically on each other's building orgasms, and once we were both at 95% we went silent, making ourselves cum in the comforting feeling that six blocks away the other was cumming too, thinking of our sex.

We were both nervous, though I was a little lower-key as a person. We took things slow, and we talked again and again, having added each other to ICQ. (It was sort of the first or second modern chat platform.) We learned more about each other, though only the very impersonal and the deeply personal, nothing in between: I knew he had an undisclosed start-up job and that he wanted to have sex with men so much he'd risk his livelihood. He knew I lived with my parents and that I liked my orgasms to come very slowly. Every now and then, we'd see each other online and talk for a while, sometimes to laugh at some funny joke online, or sometimes to daydream about gay sex (or plan our little plot in unnecessarily complicated detail) while we idly touched ourselves. It was a strange feeling for me: I'd had friends and I'd cybered, but it was strange to have a buddy that sometimes masturbated with you. But I had to admit: Juan was my friend. We hadn't even met yet, but for the first time, my secret life remotely getting naked with other men had overlapped with regular daily life.

I only remember extreme moments from our later online conversations:

[So I have a car, maybe we could hide in my car during lunch some day?]

[No that actually sounds riskier. And more hurried. And technically illegal so we could get in actual trouble.]

[So do you really have to do what they want even after you move out? Maybe get your education and then come out?]

[Theres a girl, our families are close, and they expect me to marry her.]

[That's insane. How does she feel about this?]

[I don't know. Maybe I'll be lucky and she doesn't want this either and we can have an arrangement.]

[So that's what you're hoping for? An unhappy fake marriage with stealthy one night stands?]

[If my Dad cuts me off my family won't talk to me anymore.]

[I'm so sorry. I don't have an answer about this, but I'm really glad we're nearby each other. I think some things will feel clearer once you've actually had sex with a man..]

[So maybe if I blow you I could fuck you after? Would you be into that?]

[I don't know if I'm ready for that, and I think oral is way sexier as an act. Is that okay?]

[Hell yea.]

I don't know how we both managed to have a brave night on the same day, but neither of us could say "some day" anymore. Our respective 11pm elections were begging us, and when we saw each other online in "Free to Chat" mode on ICQ (our code to one another), our resolve to actually met each other and have actual sex would last until our next ejaculations. And our orgasms wouldn't be wasted alone and embarrassed this time. We had caught each other in time and resolved to halt our masturbation right away, that we would save our cocks for each other. Holy shit is this happening?

It was a hot summer night. It may have been 12:45 a.m., but I felt too warm even in my T-shirt and shorts. Shorts always made me feel shabby, and I thought I'd mind looking like crap, as though I was on a date, but it felt kind of right this time. I wasn't meeting someone to romance; the message I was giving to this guy was more, "We're just a couple of guys, right? We can relax around each other." I was a normal guy inviting a normal guy in. He must feel like he was doing something wrong now, and he needs to feel normal. I can't look like I'm selling something to him, or influencing him, because I'm not. I'm a guy and I'm nervous too but we both want sex and we want it from each other.

As I crept down the gravelly lane of my block I began shuddering at the thought. Like the last / first time I took this illicit-feeling walk, I was again walking towards someone I had never spoken to in person, someone who would soon see me naked and touch me there. I was in my 20s now but it still felt weird. I didn't know whether this was solace for something that was denied of me, I didn't know what my real bliss was, what the idealized version of this was, what I really wanted... I just knew that I was lost in my sexual desires, that I found someone who felt like me, and we both deserved to choose our orgasms that night.

Unless he's some sort of creep. I peered stealthily from my lane around the corner. And I kept peering. There were even sounds of crickets from beyond the road to complete the cliché. Beyond that, the sound of 10,000 cars alive in the city that night, like the sound of a wind tunnel; but none of those cars were here. The street was still except for holy shit that's a skunk. It's fine, it's far away, and in the other direction than my friend.

And, 9 minutes late, there came a slender man in a T-shirt and shorts. He was a bit shorter than me, a little young-looking, nervous-looking. He looked bashful, and because he wore shiny electric blue shorts, as he passed a street light two houses down the contours of an erection were already pretty apparent. This was my guy and he looks like the real deal!

Just as I was nervous about what I'd meet at the bottom of my block, I was sure he was nervous too. He was shifty-eyed. He wasn't as good at sneaking as me, his shoes made scuffing sounds on the sidewalk. He would probably feel suspicious about any one-liner I came up with, any air I tried to depict, and I realized that he hoped for what I hoped for: a regular but scared guy. He probably wanted the real me.

"Pst hi. I'm Kevin."

He had a practiced hand-in-pocket casual "Hey Man."

"Would you like to go for this? You can still back out, no big deal."

"Uh, no sure man, let's go." I asked him to follow me, exactly step for step. We kept to the left side of the lane, where there was less gravel.

As we walked on I heard plodding footsteps from my sneaking partner and knew from many nights up how audible street sounds were from inside houses. I courteously shushed him with a friendly smile, and coached him in how to sneak and how to truly whisper. I showed him the carefully learned sneak of a boy who had always woken up early to watch Saturday Morning cartoons, avoiding every memorized creek on the floor and turning the TV to the blue screen of home video mode as soon as it was on so I could turn the volume down when it was already silent; of a teenage boy who once crept out of the house to gleefully streak in the park at night and who snuck back in to silently but vigorously masturbate; of a boy who learned silent orgasms because he shared his room. I knew what I was doing.