The perverse tricks of St Valentine.

I've never celebrated Valentine's Day. I've never had a card, or flowers, or chocolate, or some schmucky poem. This year was the closest I've come to observing it, albeit rather unusually.

On Valentine's night I went to see some fringe theatre with KCG and his boyfriend, HD and his boyfriend, and, at the last minute, a guy I'd met on Scruff with whom I'd had coffee on Sunday. He'd expressed an interest in the theatre I was seeing, and asked if he could come along too. I told him that was fine, and he met us there.

He's bald and more than a little overweight, but strong and confident and fun and full of life. As soon as his back was turned HD and his boyfriend expressed, unprompted and with a little too much alacrity, that they liked him a lot more than Mr Singular. I like him too, although I wonder if I'm not too boring for him to be willing to sustain a relationship with me in the long term.

But I get ahead of myself. The late night show was an extremely edgy caberet, filled with full frontal nudity, magic tricks involving vaginas, and some audience participation that I'm pretty sure left the participants completely traumatised. But we knew what to expect, and the weird stuff was leavened with humour, song and dance numbers, and kitschy vaudeville tricks.

Following the aforementioned traumatic audience participation act, the performers told all of us in the audience that, in honour of Valentine's Day, they wanted us to turn to the person next to us and kiss them, for ten seconds. They didn't say it directly, but there was an ominous implication that non-compliance would be noted. The audience giggled nervously. As they counted down 3.. 2... 1... my date looked at me and said, "Do you want to?", and I looked at him, shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure," so when the performers cried "Go!" we kissed.

Not just a liplock-and-hold for ten seconds, but a genuine, ardent kiss, with just a hint of tongue on each others' lips.

Being forced into your first kiss by a naked, sweaty, beer-drenched man (don't ask) is an unusual way to reach a milestone in a relationship, but hey, it's something to blog about. And it definitley broke the ice. When the show got out at midnight, he walked me back to my car and he kissed me again, twice, in the street.

The good things that come from having low expectations.

I had a date last night with someone I'll call UAM, or Unexpectedly Appealing Man. It's not much of a nom de blog, but they can't all be gems.

On paper poor UAM didn't have a lot going for him. He's a Pakistani muslim with mediocre English skills, a hand-to-mouth existence, and a barely semi-legal status in this country. I had to pick him up to go on our date because his Pakistani drivers' license had expired.

But in person he was good looking, well-educated, friendly and charming. Not to mention sexy - there was an instant chemistry. We got in my car and drove to a local bar for a drink. By halfway there he was rubbing my stomach, ostensibly to feel the quality of the cloth of my shirt. By three quarters of the way there he was holding my hand between gear changes. By the time we'd parked, he was kissing me.

We went into the bar and had a drink and chatted. He told me many things about himself, 90% of which I consider apocraphal. But I didn't see the harm even if they weren't true.

When we got back to the car, he said, "What shall we do now?"

"I'd like to take you back to my place so I can kiss you properly," I replied.

"Okay. Perfect."

And so I did. When we got in the front door I offered him another drink, but it was five minutes before I could get to the liquor cabinet because he grabbed me and kissed me. He was a sublime kisser - sensitive, erotic and passionate. Soon we were kissing and caressing on the couch. Soon after that, we were in the bedroom and naked.

I hadn't known what to expect from this date, but there was a welcome sign of good things to come when I pulled off his shorts.

He was amazing. His technique was fair to good, but his sensuality made everything more erotic. Unlike the last guy I had sex with, who treated it almost as a process, UAM did it right: as if sex was simply a byproduct of enjoying each other, body and spirit, to the fullest extent.

The other thing that made an unexpected difference was the fact that UAM is 29 years old. From an aesthetic standpoint this meant strong muscles, soft smooth skin and an ass that felt as if it had been carved from granite. But from a practical standpoint, it meant that his body just worked. When I've slept with older men, there's a sense of urgency once he's hard to get him sheathed and lubed and in before things start to wilt. When UAM got hard, he rolled off the bed, found the condoms box, dug one out, tore it open, put the wrapper in the bin, found the lube... all while his cock continued to jut out as hard and erect as a flagpole.

And this was for our second round. That's the other great thing about younger men: stamina. Later, when I nuzzled against him and suggested Round Three, he just smiled and nodded and plunged back into it.

Around midnight I drove him home, not particularly because I didn't want him to spend the night, but because it would have been even less convenient to drive him home in the morning, and I didn't think it right to make him take a taxi. This morning he sent me a text once I'd arrived at work: Good morning gorgeous. Hope u slept well last night. It was so amazing and I enjoyed alot. Happy valentines day. Am missing u xox

And then late this evening: Sweet dreams gorgeous... cant wait to hold u in my arms again... missing u alot... sleep well sexy...

We're never going to be serious boyfriends - for a variety of reasons that I'll go into in later posts - but it could be that we'll make great fuckbuddies.

From rainbow robber to ass bandit.

So that's how it happens!



And here I was blaming my mother.

Silence isn't golden.

A little followup to this post: on Wednesday night HD's ex contacted me on my Gaydar profile, in a message full of charm and interest. It took me a moment to realise that he had no idea who I was - my OKCupid profile and my Gaydar profile don't have a username or photos in common.

So I wrote back, responding to his questions and jokes with some of my own, and adding at the end, "By the way, just in case you haven't realised, I'm GTR (your ex HD's good friend). But if that doesn't bother you then it doesn't bother me." I didn't want to spoil the mood, but it's the sort of thing I needed to say at the outset, because it would have been weird not to mention it straight away.

Clearly it did bother him, because his response was... silence.

I am actually rather irritated. As far as I'm concerned, there were two acceptable responses to my message.

The first is: "Oh hey, wow, it's an embarassingly small world! No, I don't have a problem with that. Althought I worry about what HD might have told you about me..." and so on.

The second is: "Oh crap, really? Um... sorry, but I really don't feel comfortable with that. Too close to home, you know? I hope you don't mind."

Because although our paths haven't crossed in the real world, it's inevitable that they will one day, and having received the silent treatment online, let's just say that I'm not going to feel disposed to be particularly polite.

Me love your kitchen long time

On Saturday afternoon I had a brief date with a guy who contacted me on Manhunt. He's a recently graduated student and part time chef, only 25 years old, and another Chinese Malaysian - it seems I'm a magnet for them.

It was interesting that I was only the second guy he'd ever met from online dating, and the first he'd seen on a proper, meeting-each-in-a-bar kind of date. He was very nervous at first, but he quickly relaxed and we chatted over drinks for an hour or so before I had to go to another appointment.

It's also interesting that all of the Chinese Malaysian guys I've met have been into older caucasian men. The Virtuoso admitted that it's a subconscious cultural thing - bagging an older white man to be your sugar daddy is a potent status symbol. Even if you earn more than he does and expect nothing monetary from him, it still has an image of prestige.

But while it was subconscious with The Virtuoso, with the 25 year old it was explicit. He admitted that he'd be absolutely fine with being a mail order bride. Give me a big gourmet kitchen, he said, and I'm yours. I laughed... but he stressed that he was serious.

I'm not interested in him - he's a total bottom, he uses more drugs than I'm comfortable with, and he's not terribly attractive - but I'm planning to invite him along to some gay social things I'm involved in because he doesn't have many gay outlets. And hey, these things are usually full of older white men who lick their lips at the thought of an eager 25 year old. I'll be doing both parties a favour.

A big fat fish in a small gay pond

It's a little odd that although I've known the Human Dynamo for more than a year now - attending his parties, giving and receiving personal advice and support, going on holiday together - I've never met his ex, despite the fact that they're both still prominent in each others' lives. Neither has KCG, for that matter. There's now even a running gag between us that his ex is a figment of his imagination, created to make him less lonely during the many years of their so-called "relationship". There is, after all, nothing other than his anecdotes to prove that this man exists.

HD and his ex were together for eight years (which is the equivalent of about four and a half centuries in gay relationship years). From what little I know about their eventual parting of ways, it was somewhat mutual but more driven by the ex. And although HD swears that there was nothing going on prior to the breakup, it seems a little odd that within two months his ex was living with a piece of fluff half his age.

In a cosmic irony, the piece of fluff recently dumped the ex just as HD took up with his new boyfriend. The ex is thus gone from being a partnered man on good terms with his single ex to being a single man on good terms with his partnered ex. The shoe is, as they say, on the other foot.

The reason why I am mentioning this now is because OKCupid, in its infinite algorythmic wisdom, has decided that HD's ex and I are a great match, and told us both so with the eagerness of a meddling aunt matchmaking as if her life depended on it.

Beyond the fact that it made this match while HD was showing his ex how to use OKCupid - and so he knows all about it - it's also shown me some flaws in OKCupid's idea of matching. HD's ex is a militant atheist, a strict vegetarian, and a Greens voter... three things I am decidedly not. I mean, kudos to OKCupid for trying to keep my hopes up in a small, shallow pool of possible men, but that's just ridiculous.

And now a ruling on human sexuality from those who don't live in the real world.

The internet (or at least the pink, sequined, Liza-worshipping portions of the internet) has been atwitter over the last few days about Cynthia Nixon, and comments she has made about her decision to become gay.

Cynthia doesn't understand why her "choosing" to be gay is an issue. Which suggests that she is living in a rather privileged bubble.

There are at least four problems with her position:

1. If one can choose to be gay, then logically one must also be able to choose NOT to be gay. If this were true, with so many people desperately wanting not to be gay - to the point of suicide - you'd think that at least some of them might have noticed.

2. She doesn't seem to realise that she is trivialising a factor in some people's lives that has made them the brunt of hatred and rejection.

3. In making this statement, she is siding with the Marcus Bachmanns of this world. If sexuality is a choice, it stands to reason that "praying the gay away" is a valid course of action, if one wishes to do it.

4. She's also playing right into the mindset that homosexuality is something that people DO, not something that people just ARE.

Her counter-argument, and that of her enablers, is that we should be "allowed" to "have" whatever sexuality we want. The idea that we are biological victims of our sexuality allows us to function, to an extent, within existing moral frameworks, whereas she argues that those moral frameworks should be dismantled entirely. But let's face it, outside of her elite NYC and LA enclaves, that ain't gonna happen. Besides which, traditional moral frameworks exist for a reason, and dismantling them on a society-wide scale will have unwelcome and harmful outcomes that I guarantee Cynthia and her supporters haven't considered.

But beyond all of that, the simple truth, of course, is that she is wrong. She can no more become gay than she can become black. If she started listening to gangsta rap, got hair extensions and talon-like acrylic nails, subscribed to the Black Entertainment Television Network and started speaking Ebonics... that wouldn't make her black. She'd simply be living a (rather offensively stereotyped) black lifestyle. Similarly if she has sex with women, goes to Pride marches, buys a motorbike and starts baking her own organic bread, that won't make her a lesbian. It'll just make her more annoying.