A Personal Ad

A PERSONAL AD

Ginger gay Irish-American poet-bard seeks blushing friends with literary benefits. Must appreciate the eroticism of paper, and be willing to engage in clothing-optional story-song contests in library and bedroom alike. A taste for Bushmill’s goes a long way towards achieving détente. Even better if like me you practice the art of the literary personal ad, with a habit of posting erotic ecstatic poems, pastiches of Borgesian ficciones, odes to Whitman or Lorca or other queer bards, or essays about the Sacred Heart and what it means to a tantric gay muse-follower with a loaded word-horde. Has been known to write erotic haibun celebrating the joys of ginger-on-tan sex. Replies to this ad in tanka or sestina form will go to the front of the line.



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A new entry in the genre of "literary personal ads" that I occasionally like to write. It's a fun way to stretch the literary muscles while having a bit of fun as well.

An Anti Personal Ad

WARNING: Vitriolic, mean, and spiteful, written out in a moment of frustration and annoyance after yet another bit of online coitus interruptus thanks to Craigslist.org and the people who use them. Actually tried to post this, but CL's new log-in and password policy is so bloody opaque and hard to use, that I didn't get it out there. So, here it is. A bit of creative snark. Mind the gap.

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An Anti Personal Ad

Don't bother.

I'm tired of being accomodating towards others when they're not towards me. Guys only want to get together with me when they feel like it, not when I do. So when I don't feel like it, don't bother. Your timing and your schedule are not actually more important than mine.

Don't bother with those responses to Craigslist ads when you're married and want me to be "discreet." Even more so, don't bother when you didn't tell me that up front, but only revealed it later on. And don't expect a repeat visit. I don't play with married men. Even if you ARE the only men out here in the wilds of Wisconsin who bother to reply to personal ads, I'm sick of you.

I may be horny, but I'm not desperate. Certainly not as desperate as you are. Why did you ever get married in the first place, if you still want boyz on the side? Live honestly, or don't expect me to have anything to do with you. You need to grow up, be honest, and live with some shred of personal integrity about your sex lives—or I can't be bothered.

And if you haven't been out of the closet for at least a few years—long enough to have gotten through the "kid in a candy store" phase and the "finding myself" phase—then I don't want to date you. I don't want to be your teacher, your therapist, your guide, your guru, or your one-night stand. When you get past those early stages of coming out, when you've found some balance, when you've settled down a little—call me then, and we'll talk.

While I do indeed enjoy men who are exploring their gayness for the first time, while I do enjoy younger men, oh yes indeed I've had some great sex with younger men, I'm nobody's daddy or sugardaddy, nobody's guru, nobody's therapist. While indeed I've done my share of sexual healing while having sex—both mine, and yours—and had a good time opening up that way, I'm not your healer. I want to be your partner. It has to be mutual, and reciprocal, and it has to go both ways.

See, I have the same problem with most gay subcultures: most of them, with only a couple of rare exceptions, even now remain appearance-based. Even Bear culture is appearance-based, it's just a reversal of the usual buff or smooth gay stereotypes. Most of the worst aspects of gay culture—those ways which we beat each other up—remain shallow and appearance-based. Not liking what you see, and being too fucked up to be tolerant of it because of your own internalized homophobia, is the root of sissyphobia, of ageism, of looksism, of every little discriminatory snipe and snark with which you deride each other, mercilessly and without compassion. In a community supposed to be tolerant of diversity, intolerance is the rule. And it's alll very shallow.

It's ALL drag, whether it's boy drag, or girl drag, or businessman drag, or naked drag, it's ALL drag. That's the most profound truth of gay life: Everything is a performance. You can perform whoever you want to be, and you can change several times a day, and nobody has the right to tell you you're wrong. But neither do you have the right to tell others they are wrong—because if you demand respect for yourself, for just being who you are, then you must offer the same respect in return. Or it's ALL meaningless.

So if you don't like me because I don't look like your ideal fantasy image of what you want, fuck you. Or rather, UNfuck you. Who'd want to fuck you, anyway, if you're that shallow? So if you don't like the things I have to say, or how I say them, unfuck you. If you're so self-centered that you only want to nookie when it's convenient for YOU, and you can't be bothered caring about the feelings of your partner, then you're only in love with yourself, you narcissistic little wanker, so unfuck you.

The definition of love that works pragmatically and practically, all romantic and sentimental bullshit aside, is this: You love your partner if you care more about their feelings and their highest good then you do your own. Real love can even mean letting them go, so they can be free to be themselves. Yes, it hurts to let them go, and when will it ever be YOUR turn to be happy and fulfilled? Yes, that can suck. But that's what love is: The heart that is open to risk, and to being hurt, and to taking chances with your own feelings. take a chance! The closed fist can never hold onto anything anyway.

It may all be role-play, it may all be drag, but the drag that I want to role-play, and have done so for years, is to be the most authentically myself that I know how to be. I won't pretend to be anything other than myself for you, and I won't offer anything other than everything I have to give, honestly and totally and completely with full authenticity. I won't hold anything back, I'll give you everything that I am, and if that freaks you out or intimidates you or makes you run away, that's YOUR problem. Accept me as I am, just as I accept you as you are, and no games, no bullshit, no headgames of mindfucks, and we might make something magical between us. I give as good as I get, just you wait and see.

Lose the dirty talk during sex. It pulls me right out of my body and into my intellect, and shuts me right down sexually, when you're being verbal like that. Grunt, moan, tell me it feels good, tell me to keep going, but that dirty talk shit is major turn-off. I love hearing what pleasure I'm giving you. I love hearing the animal sounds that men make when their ecstasy has taken them past all words. You can roar, and moan, and sigh. But enough with the dirty talk. Enough with the narratives. Enough with the porn dialogue. It's all bad dialogue when it's porn dialogue. If you think what you see and hear in porn is real and not just some fantasy, I pity you.

If you're easy-going about most things in life but passionate about those things you really care about, and passionate in bed, then I want to hear from you. Because I'm an intense, passionate person myself. I've scared people with my intensity, I've intimidated them with my unintentional wacky Zen brilliance, I've freaked them out with my weird sense of humor. I don't care. Take me as I am, or don't expect the same in return. Make it mutual, or piss off.

If all this was too long for you to read, or get through to this far, you have the attention span of a gnat and I don't want to meet you anyway. If you DID make it this far, gimme a call, and we can take it from there.

Notes Towards a Personal Ad

Gathering thoughts into focus, scattered from months of being unsatisfied. Mostly settling on what doesn't work, and what I don't want to do anymore. Realizing that nobody's perfect, and nothing is likely to come of it—not saying that out of cynicism, but out of exhaustion. I've been sick and tired so long that I'm sick and tired of feeling sick and tired—I mean that literally, not metaphorically. All the poems in the world don't stand up to one long musical interlude.

Of All Things Most Yielding, the album

Have to be Taoist about it. Have to realize that going with the flow means letting go. I trust that which I already know to be trustworthy, and let go of the rest.

Of All Things Most Yielding

Tired of doing all the work. Tired of looking. Tired of waiting. Tired of being overlooked.

Tired of even the good encounters that lead to nothing enduring. And there have been good encounters. One time events, one time get-togethers that led to a few ecstatic hours, never to be repeated, no matter how often it's been tried. Schedules, desires, personal needs, narcissistic self-centered impatience. The good encounters never seem to want to come back. The ones I didn't get much satisfaction out of seem to want to.

Tired of driving a few hours to meet someone for unsatisfactory sex, then having to drive home. Or, worse, pick him up then drop him off again. I'm the older, sicker one, yet I still have to do all the work? Is it worth it? Not but rarely.

Tired of men who are constitutionally unable to be honest with themselves, and so spend most of their time and energy dancing around the volcano rather than leaping in. Tired of picking up the pieces. Tired of putting up with their dances of denial, plus seven veils. Let's cut right to the bottom line, since I can see through the veils, anyway, as though they weren't there. That probably scares some men away at the start, because they can sense it on some level.

Tired of living rural and isolated. Everybody wants to just be friends.

Well, when I was trying to hang out my shingle as a bodyworker and energy worker, I never had any repeat clients, either. Lots of clients came to me once, had an amazing experience on my table, sometimes life-changing, sometimes visionary, and never came back again. Not even for a follow-up when they needed it. So I'm used to one-time-only visits, on many levels.

And you tire of it. There's no satisfaction in things that never endure.

Tired of sex without love, even good sex without love. Not going to say No to good sex, anytime soon, because in truth I'm told I give great sex. Maybe it's the energy work skills, the Tantric experience and training, and I'm told I blow minds. Maybe it's too much. Maybe it blows fuses, and is more than they want to deal with. Maybe that's why they never come back.

The energy work clients never came back, either. Maybe it's because they really weren't ready to change their lives. No shame in that: most people aren't. Most people would rather cling to the bars of the hellhole cage they know rather than squarely face the Unknown. I used to be that way, too, till the bars got taken away and I started to live for real. But maybe not that many people are ready for that. So I blow minds, so I blow fuses, so I'm intense to be around—all things I've been told.

At the end of the say, the shaman doesn't live in the village. He has to live on the hill nest to the village, because he's too scary to be around, or so the villagers feel. Too much Weird Shit happens around him.

Still, it would be nice if the occasional young men came to visit.

Tired of feeling alone, for whatever reason. Maybe it's all your fault; maybe it's an energy thing; maybe it really is that you're too intense. It doesn't matter when the end result is the same: another night alone.

Tired of being hypersensitive and hypersensory. If you could turn it off, you would. Or maybe not. There's pleasure in the extra senses, not just Work, not just Professional encounters. There's joy in being of service to others.

Tired of attracting broken men for their healing (and not my own). Tired of being the sexual healer. Tired beyond belief of being put on whatever pedestal is in season this year. Tired of being everybody's guru and nobody's boyfriend. Tired of unequal relationships. Tired of being a magnet for men who need to be fixed, who once they're fixed fall out of love with me and vanish. Tired of being the Dragon Finishing School for Men's Sexual Healing & Personal Growth.

Tired of not being with peers, with equals, with someone you could talk to about mutual interests on the same level. Tired of meeting men who are frankly cute but dumb. Tired of the lack of dinner conversation that isn't about sex or other aspects of gay life.

Extremely well-educated, but living in Coventry is getting old. Extremely willing to go out of my way to be with the right man—but no longer willing to do so without some reciprocity. No longer willing to exhaust myself doing all the work of either meeting up or being in a relationship in general. You can come to me. I have a nice private place, which is warm, comfortable, and always clothing-optional.

Tired of the offensiveness of pit given by those who think it's all about the sex, and not about the companionship. Tired of men who don't want to grow old in a relationship with any other man mostly because they're terrified of growing old, period. Tired of the narcissism of youth culture, even when it's expressed by older men, or conversely damned by them. Older men who don't get younger men aren't showing their maturity when they demand an impossible perfection. They should know better. You can't force anyone to be what you want them to be, even if what you want them to be is good for all involved. You can't make people be better than they want to be; they have to want to, and it's their choice.

Tired of men repeating their same relationships mistakes because they lack the self-awareness to notice and break their own bad habits. Tired of people who prefer to live unconsciously because they think it's easier, even when it's not. Tired of the lack of personal responsibility that people take for their own lives.

I'm just tired.

I have a lot to offer. I like what I like. I like guys who are heart-smart as well as intellectually smart. Nothing bores me like insincerity. And I usually can read your mind, because most people are transparent to me, always have been. What interests me is someone who knows who he is already, is comfortable living in his skin, and doesn't need me or anyone else to complete his life or make him feel more like a whole person. Looking for a man who's already a whole person, who already likes himself. The poet Rilke once wrote that love is "two solitudes meeting," which means leaving space for each other. I love spending time with the people I love; and I also love my solitude. An hour of silence and solitude every morning is the best anti-depressant I know; I'm better off with it than without. As much as I would love spending time with you, even just sitting reading in the same room together, not talking, exchanging few words, the sense of your presence would anchor our lives into the bedrock of Home. There's no place like Home.