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Thursday, December 14, 2023
"The No Bull Briefing" - December 2023
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Hold The Line For The Man Who Can't Hold It Himself (It Takes Two To Tango).
A sizeable amount of my time each December goes to gifting clients with cookies and calendars out of appreciation for their patronage. And I hand deliver many of these whilst road-tripping my way through various regions of the state of Mississippi. It's an exhausting affair - both physically & emotionally, but an expected wrapping up of the year as a business owner (that was started by my parents, well in advance of me becoming affiliated with their company).
Northeast Mississippi is where I spent this past Thursday, (12/7). Whilst making my way through Starkville, I was reminded of my college friend, Perry, and the last time we spent any time together.
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I first met Perry in late summer of 1990 during my first summer (freshman year) of collegiate band camp. He was in my assigned clarinet squad within the Mississippi State University Maroon Band. Obviously, he too played a clarinet, and arguably, was far more adept at it than I was. Perry had an older brother who played tuba (from what I recall), and as such, he seemed to know and be known by most everybody within the massive 300+ instrumentalist / flag-bearing group. Perry was a brilliant guy who was one / two-year(s) my senior who always seemed distracted. Always. It was almost as if he were living a double-life (which he was).
It's important to know that Perry and I stayed within the same assigned clarinet squad throughout our college careers (he took an additional year to graduate, having changed majors midstream), therefore we spent an awful lot of time together (fall semesters) relative to that nerdy troupe.
Long after we'd both graduated from college (sometime around 2007), I awkwardly bumped into Perry in Clinton, MS at an (very poorly attended) ex-gay conference that a local church hosted one Saturday. I don't recall how I came to know of said conference, but nonetheless, I was absolutely stunned to bump into my old friend. Perry's countenance immediately reflected the explosion of emotions he was feeling therein. For on the one hand, he was exposed whilst on the other opportunistically intrigued.
Nonetheless, as this incident attests, I didn't know this guy well at all (nor did he know me with any clarity). And whilst looking back, I'm grateful that I didn't for such a time as that (college days). For Perry maintained a devout Christian identity that nary a moment hinted at deviancy, yet his true nature had him constantly on the prowl for male partners to bed who were fellow students or otherwise.
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A year or so after losing my job at Delta State University, I reached out to Perry, asking to stay the evening there within his humble Starkville abode in advance of a CEU class (related to maintaining my architecture license) being hosted by MSU's School of Architecture. Keep in mind that I'd only been involved in Samson Society for a short stint (I attended my first in-person meeting in August of 2014) with this overnighter having occurred sometime around 2015-2016.
He agreed to this, and it was during our short time together that I finally had him cornered long enough for me to get some answers as to who he truly was, how he got there and where he was headed.
Perry was hopeful we'd have sex that evening. It was so apparent to me that it was almost laughable. I vividly recall attempting to make conversation, suggest an activity like watching a DVD (he had an extensive film collection), 'till finally he agreed to openly dialogue about his past (which effectively extinguished his libido). I vividly recall us sitting in the tiny den of his 2/2, with one lamp burning in the corner of the room, as he allowed me to interrogate.
His answers didn't surprise me in the least except for his tales relative to cruising for gay sex during our parallel college careers. Me not picking up on any hint of this activity during our time together at MSU during the early '90s did effectively stun. For Perry never cussed, drank, and was always at church (with his parents who resided in Starkville, per my recollection) each and every Sunday.
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After we turned in that evening, sleeping through the night within separate bedrooms, Perry ferried me to a downtown cafe in anticipation of a sunrise men's breakfast Bible study that he regularly attended. Once we arrived, he quickly began messaging folks regarding their absenteeism. And it was then that he realized his error pertaining to which Saturday morning (of that particular month) had actually been calendared for this event.
So, we sat in awkward silence whilst methodically downing our scrambled eggs and toast.
For Perry had to have recalled that I hadn't had sex with another man ever, and in turn, that I'd not had any intentions of starting with him (relative to what had not gone down during the evening prior).
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There're an awful lot of men, Christian or otherwise, who categorize homosexual activity as discriminately sin-free. And I believe the root of this adjudication has to do with it involving two consenting genders pleasuring each other outside of the bounds of sexual mechanistic cohesion (in other words - to them, it's not genuine sex sans a vagina). And many, if not the majority of these dudes, had their first sexual experience (whether predatory or consensual) well before adulthood. Hence, as adults, there's a harkening back to experiences which categorically feel more childishly rebellious than they truly should.
Most therapists who subscribe to counseling men who actively have sex with other men (& who're looking to pivot away from those behaviors) attempt to anchor their commentary in the notion of masculine maturation via growing up and into a form of manhood that leaves behind these types of behaviors. The cultural blowback to this approach though is those select few men who radiate not one iota of masculine immaturity / pubescent reckless abandon yet who wholeheartedly embrace sex with other men as their preference.
What then?
It's a great question that I don't have an answer to.
I do know this though. After finally coming to a point of understanding Perry's complete story, to the degree that I was granted, I saw a complex human being versus the smart-ass jokester / transparency dodger I'd always known. And it was that complexity that I wanted to explore further versus his genitals or his ass or any other portion of his average Mississippi manbod. For even if Perry had been an Adonis (which he most certainly was not), I don't believe I would have felt differently.
Give me a man's story, warts & all, any day of the week. That's intimacy. White hot intimacy. For it's the one thing I've always longed to obtain from the gay porn models who boldly pose / perform under the watchful eye of the camera lens. Why? To instantaneously immunize myself from those seductive trappings.
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