Chapter 11 - Love & Sex part 2

Chapter 11 – Love & Sex part 2

Am I a romantic? I like to tell myself that I’m not but if I’m honest I’m really the worst type of romantic there is. The very idea of having someone who would slay dragons to protect me, or someone that I would slay the dragon to rescue, someone who could stare into my eyes and not need to say a word to express how they feel just makes my heart skip a beat. Images of being part of a couple fill my mind, strolling in each other’s arms, lying in each other’s arms on a lazy Sunday morning. Having coffee at our favourite café, he smiles at me over the brim of his cappuccino, his eyes expressing the joy of being together, simply having favourite places to go or things to do as a couple. 

Was Andrew a romantic? The answer is a simple yes. We’d send each other little love notes even if we were seeing each other that night. Notes left on pillows or placed in a jacket pocket to be discovered at some later time. Little snippets of poetry or quotes from our favourite authors. Because this was a regular feature of our lives, to make small romantic gestures to each other I don’t recall them all, which is heartbreaking as I sit here remembering the experience but not the details. It is this that makes my remembrance of that final note I was to receive from Andrew, the Longfellow quote I placed in part 1, all the more powerful to me. Why do I have to remember the end so clearly while the fine details of our time together fades?

I know what my problem is, I have always known what my problem is when it comes to romance and love. I’m a hopeless romantic. This seems like the perfect place to be, a hopeless romantic will see the romance in everything, will create romance even when none is present, will love the object of their affections unconditionally and forever. You only need to think about my discussion of Andrew to know the truth of that statement. My problem doesn’t lie in my ability to love, my ability to find joy and contentment in the arms of someone I love, my problem is sex.

I’m going to talk about sex a little later because it plays such a large part of my life experience, my past, present and future but I want to move back to the current topic of Love.

So as I said before, the end for Andrew and I occurred when he walked into my apartment to discover me entertaining two other guys. Who were they and what were we up to? Well the first to arrive was Daniel, he was an aboriginal boy who had moved into the apartment below me with another friend. Shortly after their arrival there was a knock on my door and when I opened it I discovered Daniels flat mate on my doorstep. “Hi, my flat mate thinks your cute and would like to get to know you.” Was his plain and to the point statement. “Great, tell him to come up and say hi.” This he promptly did and we soon began to spend the occasional afternoon rolling around my apartment satisfying our carnal lust for each other. There was never any thoughts of this relationship developing any further than spontaneous sex, Daniel knew I was in a relationship, he often ran into Andrew and I together in the building. This is the fault in me that I was talking about, I have always separated love and sex so seeing Daniel was never cheating in my mind because there was only physical attachment never emotional. The other guy who was present that fateful day was Jorge, our relationship was in much the same vein as that with Daniel although it was becoming dangerous because I was beginning to develop feelings towards him. But I will say in my defense that Andrew came into the apartment to find the 3 of us in my lounge room, fully clothed, sitting apart and not post coitus. I just felt that I needed to set the record straight so that no one thinks Andrew walked in to find me wrapped around two guys performing the pages of the Karma Sutra.

The problem was that both of the guys sitting in my lounge that day knew about Andrew, both were happy to play with me behind his back, I think that this was part of the thrill they received in playing with me. But when confronted by his presence their guilt shone through and it was this that Andrew picked up on that infamous day. The disappointing thing about that day, and I’m going to appear shallow but I didn’t get any sex that day both Daniel and Jorge left shortly after Andrew’s departure. I never got together with Daniel again after that day, Jorge on the other hand was a little more resilient, so let’s move on.

Jorge was very different from Andrew in many ways. To start with Andrew was a little shorter than me but only just, Jorge came up to my shoulders, he was heavy built compared to Andrew’s slim frame. Solid and muscular he was quite capable of lifting me up like a pebble and carrying me to wherever he wanted. He was dark and handsome, with his dark hair and olive skin a polar opposite to Andrew’s Anglo appearance. He was also endowed with the thickest largest Latin cock I have ever had to contend with. Nature had well and truly blessed his smaller stature with equipment that would put most other men to shame, which combined with his ingrained South American machismo made our love-making intense forceful and tonsil ticklingly satisfying, if I’d still had tonsils. I met Jorge in Centennial Park in Sydney, one lustful afternoon. As usual whenever I was out and about I was cruising. I don’t mean that I was constantly out specifically looking for sex but rather I was, and am, always checking guys out and where possible flirting, I can’t help it. I was just thinking that this ability to flirt even when in the company of others may have developed while I was working as a prostitute but that’s not true, I think it was a skill that allowed me to be reasonable successful in that role but one that I already had in my arsenal. Anyway Jorge and I got each other’s attention without a word being said and before you know it the karma sutra comes out and we lose the rest of the day. That should have been it, we should have gone our separate ways and most likely never seen each other again, but Jorge’s pillow talk. 

English was not Jorge’s first language and it showed, his errors in word choice or grammar simply made me laugh, his mistakes were endearing. He would revert to Spanish in frustration which made me laugh all the harder but at the same time was making my heart melt. If you have never had a South American boy lie beside you after frenzied love making talking to you in Spanish, I highly recommend it, it’s like strawberries and champagne, sunsets and moonlit nights and slow dancing until dawn. His Latin maleness, the ease and confidence with which he carried himself made me swoon, and so began our affair. So on the rare day that I wasn’t seeing Andrew I began to spend time with Jorge. They were polar opposites not just in appearance but in personalities, Andrew was gentle, soft and placid whereas Jorge was strong, forceful and in charge. Jorge was most definitely trapped in the Latin views regarding gender roles and he knew where he sat in regards to his and my roles in the relationship. We discussed machismo a lot because it oozed from every pore. He was always in charge and I was his, but he was so fucking hot! 

So I want to talk about machismo for a little bit because it was such a fundamental aspect of Jorge’s personality and, thinking about it, part of why we were together for almost four years. The idea of gender specific roles where the man is boss and the woman is subservient seems strange and outdated to most of us, but in Latin countries it’s still a dominant force. Jorge was influenced by this growing up in Chile like everyone else.

 I think when he discovered that he was gay it only reinforced his need to prove to himself that he still fitted into his societies construct, that he was a man, so his machismo simply grew stronger to the point that it was the dominant feature in all his decision making. I was automatically assigned the female role within this Latin relationship so decisions on where we were going, what we were doing, how and when we would make love were all controlled by him. To some this may sound like a dominating, abusive type of relationship but I want to show that it never was. The contrast between Andrew and Jorge was profound and it was this that drew me to Jorge. Andrew offered and gave me a relationship between to equal partners, mutual decisions and mutual choices and with all that there was always going to be those times when choices or preferences were in conflict. That was fine we discuss options, come to an agreement and proceed. With Jorge that process did not exist, once he had made a decision, or made plans it was assumed that I would be ready and prepared to accept the choices made for me. There were rare occasions where I was asked what I wanted to do and if I had something in mind he was happy to comply with my wishes, but I think that by the time this option was ever offered I had already been so encased in the choices he would make I would select something that would appeal to him anyway. It was a beautiful thing to be treated this way. Really who doesn’t want to be treated this way, loved, pampered, taken care of, protected and cherished?

This makes it sound like an abusive kind of relationship but it was nothing of the sort, I’m not stupid and could see what was happening around me and so could Jorge. He was fiery, yes, but never violent, forceful but never hurtful, dominant but never domineering. He allowed my nurturing traits to come out when it came to language. With English as a second language I was constantly correcting his word choice or syntax, it was inevitable that he would constantly revert to Spanish when trying to convey and idea and would usually attempt a straight word for word translation as best he could, sometimes with hilarious results. And that boy did he have hips, you have not been dancing until you have danced with a Latin man, the steam that would rise as the music took control, be still my beating heart. When we were on the dance floor there was no one else around, he would just draw me in, let me know that I was his partner and let the beat take control, I swear to any god you people used to give us space once we got going, which is quite an achievement in a gay nightclub.

His energy was contagious, he loved life, wanted to savor it all, constantly chasing excitement and thrills and as his partner I was along for the ride. Life with Jorge was exhausting, he lived like there was no tomorrow, never leave for tomorrow an experience that could be lived today. His energy was boundless and exuded from every pour being as close to him as I was it was impossible not to absorb the energy from him, and he had enough to feed everyone around. The reason for this boundless love of life became very clear the moment Australia allowed Chilean dictator Pinochet to step foot onto our shore. Jorge loved Chile, his cousin with whom he shared an apartment loved Chile, their families, what remained, loved Chile but everyone hated Pinochet. The only reason I met Jorge at all was the fact that escaped from Chile with his cousin, if he hadn’t escaped to Australia he may not have been around for me to meet and fall in love with at all. The Pinochet regime was brutal to the gay community in Chile, most of Jorge’s friend had been arrested and disappeared under the policies of Pinochet. Family had been arrested, imprisoned and killed. When we discovered that Pinochet was to be received at Sydney Town Hall I was to see the full force of the hatred Jorge had for this man, the anger, the ability to kill someone that rose to the surface at the very mention of his name. We went to Town Hall that day to protest his presence, how could we not. As far as I know ASIO still have Jorge and my pictures on file because we saw them there photographing events and us. I think that if I hadn’t been present beside Jorge that day I would have lost him forever because although we threw rocks and abuse tried to smash the windows of the car Jorge would not have been satisfied with that and would have sacrificed his life to get his hands onto Pinochet’s throat. Don’t think I held him back, there would have been no way for me to even try if the opportunity had arisen but I think my presence was enough to stem the rage a little. I saw a side of Jorge that day that I had never seen before. To watch someone’s blood boil so fiercely that it is like a nuclear bomb about to explode and is capable of wiping out anything in its path that was Jorge. How can we as a society allow someone into this country when we know what they are doing to their people at home? How can we as Australians accept our governments interacting with regimes that still persecute minorities and perform atrocities onto their own people? 

I get so angry when someone mentions that they are going to Bali for a holiday, does no one think about who they are giving their money to? Do we as Australians care more about a cheap holiday that the lives of our fellow man? How can it be acceptable for someone to travel to Bali, Indonesia and give their money and by their presence, support to a government that still thinks it’s okay to walk young men into a forest and shoot them through the heart for a drug offense, real or not, which did not harm anyone else? Why do we accept that it’s okay for a neighbor to break into the house of two young men  20 and 23 years old because he suspects that they are gay and for his testimony that he saw them having sex to be enough for both of them to receive 84 lashes in a public display of homophobia? Don’t tell me you are going to Indonesia because I have loved someone who has had to escape a society that would have murdered him for being gay, I have seen the damage done to someone because they have had to live through that experience. If we travel to countries that are still prepared to treat it’s population without humanity, that specifically are prepared to treat my fellow gay brothers like dogs that can be punished and put down then we are saying that we accept that nations choices and I for one DO NOT. 

So I learnt a lot from Jorge, my politics grew, my focus widened and my attitudes changed.

His energy stemmed from the fact that he survived, that he had found somewhere where he could be alive. He lived like there was no tomorrow because he had spent the majority of his life in a place where no tomorrow was always a possibility. He loved fiercely because the joy of being free to love let loose a desire to experience love with such a passion that at times it felt we would burst into flames.

Our love reminds me of a book and film that I could not recommend more strongly, “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel. If you haven’t read or seen it then please search and find it, if you have a romantic soul in your body it is going to be forever grateful for the experience. I didn’t see this film with Jorge but with Andrew and by the end we were both so on fire that there were two things on our minds that had to be satisfied, we needed something decadent to eat and we had to find a bed straight away. Luckily we saw the film in the evening because if we had passed a bedding store that would have been our destination and no one could possibly have stopped us. Thank god I didn’t see it with Jorge I think I would have ended up in a wheelchair once the passion the film creates had abated and he didn’t need the assistance, he never needed a spark for his flame to be at full roar.

So how did this romance end? Well his fiery passion knew no bounds, he was hungry and feasted. On Christmas morning I gathered my parcels and headed over to Jorge’s apartment to spend the afternoon with him, his cousin and flat mate as we had done for the previous 3 years. When I arrived his cousin answered the door and I could see her face drop at the sight of me. When I entered Jorge was on the balcony his arms around another guy, one that I had introduced him to through my volunteer work. Although this new guy was six foot something and solid when he saw me he actually cowered at the edge of the balcony, not a smart move to be so close to the edge I thought. Jorge’s cousin was furious that Jorge hadn’t spoken to me about the situation and offered for me to stay for lunch as I was already here. But that would have been uncomfortable for everyone so I left my gift and departed from Jorge’s life. I have always wondered what the trigger was and I keep coming back to the same moment. Over all the time we were together Jorge always took the dominant role in our love making, this was fine with me as I am what is generally referred to as a ‘versatile bottom’, but just before Christmas that year I forced Jorge into reversing roles for once. Was that my mistake? Had I broken the dynamic of our roles through his machismo eyes and made him less of a man by taking that dominant role? Was this just me being shown what it felt like for Andrew when he discovered Jorge and me together, it felt like it? Again there was no argument, no screaming or histrionics, simply a parting of the ways.

It is a bit like when I was writing about Andrew in the last page I am feeling emotions that I haven’t felt for a long time as I reminisce about Jorge and the live we had. I once again find my eyes welling up with the memories. I think with everything that has happened to me this year so far I am feeling sentimental about the past, and a little sad thinking about what I might not get the opportunity to live through again in the future.

 Love, it changes your life, you can feel your heart swell when it finds you, you can sense the glow that comes from someone in love and there is nothing more beautiful in the world. I have been blessed by finding love twice, with two very different but equally beautiful men. They influenced my thoughts, my values and my life. I know I wouldn’t be the man I am today if it wasn’t for them being in my life and I am so thankful that they were. 

Once again I find myself not wanting to continue with the subjects I listed in the title, so there needs to be a part 3 to this blog if I am going to discuss sex.