OVERVIEW:

What does it mean to bear witness to pleasure? In this episode, I sit down with Sister T’Aint A Virgin from the legendary Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. From the radical origins of the Sisters’ activism during the AIDS epidemic to their modern mission of expiating shame and spreading joy, we explore how witnessing sex can be transformative, educational, and liberating.

Sister T’Aint A Virgin shares her journey from curious voyeur to symbiosexual, finding profound meaning in observing the intimacy of others and embracing the diversity of queer bodies and sexualities. Along the way, she opens up about navigating consent, cultivating intergenerational mentorship, and her most adventurous sexual experiences. Whether you’ve ever been curious about watching, engaging, or just learning from the beauty of connection, this episode invites you to reconsider how bearing witness can enrich your own sexual liberation.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to the best gay sex podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is about bearing witness. Now I know the word witness probably conjures up images of someone testifying in a court of law, but today we’re talking about the radical pleasure of watching. Witnessing sex can be transformative, not just for the person that’s doing the watching, but

also for those who are being watched. And that’s because the act itself shatters all that stigma and shame that tells us as queer men to keep our sex behind closed doors, out of sight, out of mind. And for today’s guests, witnessing can also be a form of sex education. Sister Tana Virgin is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

nonprofit group of queer nuns that began in San Francisco all the way back in 1979. And you may recognize their kind of campy irreverent style with those nun habits that you’ll see if you’re watching the episode. They work to quote promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt. Through their ministry of presence, community service,

and groundbreaking efforts like creating the first ever safer sex pamphlet targeting gay men. The sisters have become icons globally when it comes to queer activism and sex positivity. In this episode, Sister Tana Virgin explains how watching has shaped her understanding of pleasure, connection, and queer liberation. Let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (02:00)
Sister T’Aint A Virgin, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (02:04)
Hello

Trevor Hoppe (02:04)
It’s a pleasure to have you, and tell listeners and viewers a little bit about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence because they’re going to be looking at you and some will be familiar but some won’t be, so let’s just start there.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (02:11)
Yeah, of course.

course.

Great. Yeah. So this is sort of perpetual indulgence as a nonprofit organization that started here in San Francisco in 1979. We just celebrated our 45th anniversary. As sisters, we take vows to the community to promulgate universal joy and to expiate stigmatic guilt. We do that through various forms of community service, social fundraising, engagement with the community.

Trevor Hoppe (02:29)
awesome.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (02:45)
Our main thing is our ministry of presence, which is just kind of putting on these fabulous habits and then going out into the community and kind of being ministers within the community. We’re non-denominational and each sister kind of has their own ministry that they feel called to do, that we also kind of interlap in a lot of different ways.

Trevor Hoppe (03:08)
And there’s kind of a sex-positive origin story to that, right?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (03:11)
Yes, absolutely. The sisters, again, kind of founded and really rallied together, primarily as initially some gay men who were kind of tired with the fact that the government really wasn’t stepping up in any capacity for the early stages of the AIDS epidemic. And so we kind of started helping ourselves out and we did that through our kind of social activism.

Trevor Hoppe (03:33)
you

Sister T’aint A Virgin (03:40)
The Sisters put together the first ever Safer Sex pamphlet that was really tailored towards gay men, that was meant in a sense that was more positive and pleasure focused, while also providing kind of important health information. We call that Playfair. And then we’ve kind of done other kind of fundraising efforts throughout the decades, largely related to AIDS organizations, but we’ve now kind of expanded into all forms of sex positivity.

Trevor Hoppe (04:10)
I love that. And how long have you been a member of the Sisters?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (04:14)
I’ve been a member for about 14 years now. Yeah, I initially joined back in 2010 and became fully professed in 2011.

Trevor Hoppe (04:25)
Professed: I assume that’s the initiation word, right? You become Professed is that right? Yeah. Fabulous.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (04:28)
Yes, exactly. Yes, we have a very rigorous initiation

process. And then you become fully professed after kind of demonstrating your commitment to the community at large.

Trevor Hoppe (04:39)
I love that. remember living in San Francisco doing the Easter celebrations and the sisters would always be there. And I think it plays on this, obviously, the religious overtones, but what’s so fabulous about it is that it’s so campy and over the top and sexy. I mean, a lot of times it can be quite sexy. I love that.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (04:56)
Yeah. yeah. Yeah. I mean, so Easter

is our anniversary. it’s the first day that, four sisters put on habits and kind of went out to the street. they had done other forms of street theater up until that point. it was really kind of these numbs habits that really polarized the community in a way that kind of got people excited. And I think a lot of that’s going back to kind of some forms of religious trauma, or just religious affinity. but again, kind of.

Trevor Hoppe (05:18)
Mm-hmm.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (05:25)
tailoring it and filtering it through this lens of kind of being the holy fool and bringing in kind of tongue and cheekness. But Easter is our claim to fame. We host the Hunky G this and the Foxy Mary contest as well. And we encourage people to be as fun and creative and sexy and flirtatious as they want to be. And it’s always fun seeing what people interpret that to be in again, a very kind of positive and affirming way.

Trevor Hoppe (05:30)
Mm-hmm.

That’s fabulous.

I love that so much. And did you grow up in a religious household? You mentioned trauma. I’m just curious.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (06:00)
No. Yeah.

My dad’s side of the family is Jewish. My mom’s side of the family was more Protestant, but it was never an issue within me growing up. Neither of my parents were super religious. My mom was more spiritual, and so I was able to dabble around and figure out what it is that excited me. And I’ve always had an affinity for

kind of the structure and the ritual related to a lot of kind of organized religion, but specifically the dogma and a lot of the kind of shame based approach is never something that’s resonated with me. And seeing growing up being gay and seeing kind of a lot of my peers and kind of generations ahead of me who are kind of processing a lot of that. I knew that this was something that I could do that kind of helps reclaim

a way that kind of feels holistic and loving and joyful and pleasure-based.

Trevor Hoppe (07:06)
How did you first encounter the sisters?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (07:10)
I think I first encountered them at Easter. Again, not really even knowing that it was their actual gig, but it was just kind of Easter in the park. Everyone goes, you go for the contests. But it wasn’t until several years later that I met a sister outside of habit at the work-based training that both of us were going to called the San Francisco Sex Information.

Trevor Hoppe (07:36)
and sleep.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (07:36)
which was

kind of tailored towards sex educators to be better sex educators and be able to sit on talk on phone lines and chats in order to answer questions. And so we kind of instantly clicked because we were just these two kind of queer weirdos within this sea of already fabulous queer people. But we just instantly meshed. so at that time,

they were explaining kind of what they were going through, because they were one of a few sisters that went and took communion at one of the Catholic churches here in the city in habit. And that got national attention. And so they were in the process of processing that. And so it was fun kind of being on the reflexive end of that and just holding space for a sister to be able to kind of have their own form of a confessional instead of the sister hearing the confessional.

Trevor Hoppe (08:08)
Mm-hmm.

I bet.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (08:34)
which is usually what we do throughout their community.

Trevor Hoppe (08:37)
Mm-hmm. And before the sisters, where did you grow up? Situate me in that, because you’re in San Francisco now. Are you from there?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (08:43)
Yeah.

From the Bay Area, I grew up down on the peninsula and then went to undergrad down in Santa Cruz and then immediately moved up to San Francisco after that. My undergrad degree was in something called Community Studies, which was unique to our campus, but it allowed you to kind of go into a pre-determined kind of community at large, working with a nonprofit. He did a

six month full-time internship and you pretty much audited that organization to see if they were kind of truly meeting the needs of their mission statement as well as kind of the community that they were focused to serve. And so my focus was on sex, gender and sexuality. And I came up to San Francisco to intern with the center for sex and culture with Dr. Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence. Yes. Yeah. And so,

Trevor Hoppe (09:26)
Mm-hmm.

with Carol Queen. I love her.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (09:40)
It was like immediately new to the city and immediately diving into like kind of the wealth of different sexual communities here in San Francisco. And it was amazing experience to really kind of see and be exposed to a lot of different communities that I hadn’t already been part of. As much of my personal experience was largely kind of in the gay male experience and the center for sex and culture was everything. And so it was lovely to kind of get that exposure.

Trevor Hoppe (10:05)
Mm-hmm, you ran the gamut. Yeah.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (10:09)
and kind of learn the ins and outs of San Francisco sexuality.

Trevor Hoppe (10:14)
Yeah, there’s really no place like it in the United States, at least, when it comes to sex. It’s kind of the hub of so much cultural, political activism when it comes to sex. What was it like growing up in that environment? As a queer person, it must be like a treasure trove.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (10:20)
Right?

You know, you would think so. I think as soon as you get outside of San Francisco and kind of down on the peninsula, I think the general pulse is still more liberal than not. growing up, it was kind of in the suburbs and it was definitely much more of a kind of quasi conservative. I grew up in the kind of late 80s, early 90s and didn’t really hit my sexual maturity until kind of the early 2000s.

and my uncle, passed away about a few months before I was born from AIDS related complications. And he was my mom’s best friend and she was super supportive and loved the fact that he was out and gay and lived in San Francisco for long periods of time. But the kind of trauma of losing her brother in such a kind of traumatic way, definitely kind of filtered down to my experience growing up and kind of feeling like.

Trevor Hoppe (11:07)
god.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (11:29)
being gay meant you were going to get HIV, meaning you’re going to kind of die from AIDS related complications. And even though I was maturing at a time where we had kind of medications and like it was no longer seen as this death sentence, there was still kind of generations of kind of personal trauma that was happening there that I still had to kind of navigate, which I think kind of turned me off to wanting to be explicitly sexual in a lot of ways.

I turned that into wanting to learn everything I could about it. And so that’s what kind of drove me to being more of an activist and being more of a sex educator was really to kind of like take control of this so that I felt more comfortable kind of navigating it myself.

Trevor Hoppe (12:15)
I can relate to that so much. remember going to the gay bar early days in the 90s and I remember the song came on, I’m horny, horny, horny, horny. And I remember my little 17 year old self or whatever thinking, why is everything about sex? And just feeling some kind of way about it. And then really discovering the wonder and beauty of sex and not just the sort of negative things that come with it. And what was that exploration like for you of turning from

Sister T’aint A Virgin (12:23)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Trevor Hoppe (12:44)
you know, that kind of traumatic origin to having great, hopefully the best sex.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (12:46)
Yeah.

Right?

I think I, for me, like trying to, again, being a little bit of a control freak and a little bit of a Virgo, I like wanted to kind of dip my toes in in ways I felt comfortable with it. And so my early explorations were mostly as a voyeur and really just kind of like watching other couples.

Um, and I loved that. Um, it was able to kind of see and learn all the different kinds of ins and outs of how to pleasuring a partner, how to receive pleasure, uh, without having to kind of technically be involved in it beyond just watching. Um, and that

Trevor Hoppe (13:15)
Yeah.

How did you find

those experiences?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (13:32)
largely online. You know, these were back in the days before the apps. So this was kind of like a gay.com. I think manhunt was around at that point. Craigslist. Craigslist was a big one for sure. You know, and was like Craigslist was great, like if you were able to put up the specific ad and the posting that you were looking for. And so you’re able to kind of set those terms in a way that was much easier to navigate than I think we’ve kind of

Trevor Hoppe (13:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm. Craigslist.

You

Sister T’aint A Virgin (14:02)
evolved into with the apps and things like that. The apps are great for just kind of listing the yes, yes and nos, but it’s not the same as kind of crafting the whole scene, which I felt was kind of more tailored to what I was able to find on Craigslist.

Trevor Hoppe (14:19)
Yeah, there’s kind of a fantasy aspect of Craigslist where you really lay it out in clear terms. It’s creative in a way that Grindr and Manhunt or whatever, it’s not the same, it’s static.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (14:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, it’s, feel like, you know, there’s much more of an instant gratification that can happen with Grindr and Scruff and Sniffy’s and all the rest, which is wonderful and great. And I love that in a lot of ways, but there is something about the kind of the mystery and the buildup that I felt like happened more with Craigslist and some of our other apps and, you know, well before that. yes. For sure.

Trevor Hoppe (14:55)
there was a lot of mystery. Always mystery.

So,

you’re watching, you’re learning. Are these gay couples that you’re watching?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (15:11)
Um, yes, at least in the early days. Yeah, earlier years, it was only gay couples. And eventually, I started kind of seeing a couple that I would kind of go and watch every so often, and it became kind of a more of a routine thing. And eventually kind of got invited into the actual scene. And that’s where I kind of had felt like I had

already established a little bit of a connection there, and then felt comfortable kind of dipping my toes into it more. And that then led to me finally kind of feeling more comfortable kind of engaging with other people. And early on, it was almost exclusively men. And then when I moved up to San Francisco and started again interning with the Center for Sex and Culture, they were hosting much more kind of these like

Trevor Hoppe (15:42)
Yeah.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (16:01)
pansexual parties and you’re seeing a lot of different kind of bodies and genders and expressions and all of that. And that I loved even more because again, it like exposed me to things that I wouldn’t naively have gravitated towards or thinking that’s kind of what it is that I’m one or interested in. And it allowed me to kind of continue to be that voyeur when I needed.

So they were able to see and witness and kind of participate in that capacity, which then led to me kind of more engaging in a variety of different sexual activities with different partners, different bodies, different genitals, all of it. And that’s what I… Yeah. yes.

Trevor Hoppe (16:42)
Mm-hmm. I love all the possible combinations of the world. What?

How did you find- I’m just curious, like that first experience, like, watching… How did you arrange- you arranged that online, but like, what was the experience like for you? Did you know that you were just gonna watch going in?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (16:55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yes, I knew that I was just going to watch going in. And there was that level of comfort that was there. At the same time, it still going over to a stranger’s house. They, the couple had a very, very young child who was obviously not part of the scene. They were not there at the time.

But I went to their house and they gave me instructions to like come through the backyard because they had like their bedroom had a patio, which then had like full glass windows. And so they were able to sit on the patio on outside and just kind of watch them. But I remember walking in. Oh, well, from a distance in that like, yeah, there was like the glass screen door was there, but it was still

Trevor Hoppe (17:48)
from a distance.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (17:59)
very close in proximity. But it was kind of like watching a window show. And so it was nice because I felt like then if I needed to, I could leave at any time. But I do remember walking in and immediately tripping over one of the kids’ toys in the backyard.

and stumbling my way in and of course making a huge noise as I’m doing so. I’m like, well, there goes the fantasy. yeah, exactly. But yeah, I loved it. mean, they had a red light on, so that kind of added to it. it was just, yeah, like growing up, I of course had seen porn.

Trevor Hoppe (18:31)
That’s the real- that’s reality though, it’s always- it’s never quite the fantasy.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (18:50)
I had kind of plenty of material that way, but nothing compares to seeing it in person and seeing a couple that’s like knows each other’s bodies in a way that like is already super pleasurable and are excited about having someone else watch them. So there was kind of these extra layers from an early experience that was really quite lovely.

Trevor Hoppe (18:58)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think a lot of young people would benefit from watching. And old people too. We would all benefit from watching because you can learn something. Is that something you fantasized specifically about beforehand? I’m just, did you know that’s what you wanted to do?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (19:20)
All right. Yeah.

I would say,

yeah. I mean, I have always considered myself more of like an introvert in general. And so I think early on, kind of the key things of kind of getting better at sex and having a rich and fulfilling sex life has been able to navigate and communicate my wants and my needs. And early on being super introverted, being kind of very fear based, like communication was one of the hardest things for me.

And so I was like, I’m not going to be able to communicate my needs and my boundaries or any of that. And so I think doing this in a way that I’ve already pre set up everything, which is mostly just watching was a really the helpful step of kind of like, again, slowly dipping my toe in things that finally felt comfortable and enriching. And that’s when I really realized that I do enjoy watching. mean, I love actual activity and kind of getting involved as well, but

Trevor Hoppe (20:25)
Mm-hmm.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (20:30)
There’s something so beautiful about just bearing witness.

Trevor Hoppe (20:33)
Mm-hmm. What is it about bearing witness? I don’t have a lot of experience. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of sex myself, but it never occurred to me as a young person. Like, that just was not something that I thought was possible when I was learning about sex.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (20:48)
Yeah.

I mean, I think again, it kind of connects back to this whole ministry of presence with sisters as well. I think again, growing up, a lot of us had to specifically within kind of a larger queer community, we had to kind of blunt ourselves and we had to like kind of hide ourselves. so bearing witness and kind of being present and like seeing someone, seeing someone expressing themselves in the way that they’re super excited about and probably haven’t been able to or

are finally able to as a sexual adult. There’s some things just so fun and enriching. And, you know, obviously finding exhibitionists who are equally as excited about showing off. Yeah, for me, there’s just something something so beautiful about that kind of that level of dynamic and interaction. Yeah, I’m not sure I can put it into words beyond it’s Yeah, I just love it.

Trevor Hoppe (21:52)
No, I that. It’s something that’s beyond words. It’s like transcendental or some mystical. It’s something magical. I don’t know, but I definitely get that aspect of sex is hard to describe. What were your first forays into like actually having sex like? What was that like for you?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (22:12)
Yeah,

um, I, all of my partners were much older than me. Um, that was another thing for me that just felt more comfortable and safe. Um, there was something, some level of a mentorship there as well. Um, and, uh, through that, again, just kind of met up with, I had two or three guys that I would kind of see on a somewhat routine basis. Um,

And it started off with, you know, mostly just heavy petting, making out, hand jobs, all the rest, massage, kind of exploring each other’s body. And then kind of finally kind of developed into more kind of penetrative activities and whatnot. You know, early on, I didn’t really use any terms of top or bottom or anything like that, and was mostly just kind of there to kind of

experiment and explore and try things out. There was always the kind of overwhelming or kind of hanging over your head, this kind of fear of HIV. And so I think that kind of pushed me away from doing a lot of kind of penetrative sex for long periods of time. And then prep kind of completely revolutionized that and kind of beautiful, beautiful ways as Demon has already talked about exactly, right?

Trevor Hoppe (23:20)
Mm-hmm.

Blew the lid off it, yeah.

I remember in San Francisco back in the day, there was a lot of oral play and non-penetrative play, and I think that was part of that legacy of that now there’s so much, it’s just like, bam, fucking all the time, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, it almost feels like we’ve lost a little bit of something. I don’t know, do you feel that way?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (23:46)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I do. Though I have been quite, you know, I think people are really polarized about the term side or kind of the role of side. But I personally have loved seeing that kind of take its time in the spotlight. Because I think it right, like so much of it is focused on penetration. And don’t get me wrong, I love it as well. But

there is something equally as beautiful and equally as pleasurable and kind of fun and kind of like then mystical about exploring other ways of being sexually active together that doesn’t always require penetration.

Trevor Hoppe (24:42)
Yeah, I remember years ago I met up with a guy who had never watched porn and did not engage in penetrative sex. And at first I was like, I don’t know, this is probably not going to be great. And then it was this just mind-blowing experience, I think because there were no scripts in place. It was just our bodies. I don’t know.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (24:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (25:09)
Again, I can’t really describe it in words, but I appreciated the reminder and the power of non-penetrative sex.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (25:14)
Totally.

I think there’s something else that that’s kind of reminding me of is that, you know, in being in these kind of pansexual play spaces, there were plenty of kind of people that I was watching and kind of bearing witness to, who I personally probably wouldn’t want to actively engage with beyond kind of just watching.

But a lot of that then meant that there was like a lots of just kind of mutual masturbation that was happening throughout these spaces. And being able to masturbate with a partner who you’re not exactly kind of interested in kind of penetrative sex with, but also kind of loving and exploring them kind of pleasuring themselves or kind of watching them do something else was also equally as fun and engaging. And especially, you know, at the time, like seeing kind of other genders.

Trevor Hoppe (26:03)
Mmm.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (26:07)
kind of exploring themselves and seeing how other genders are kind of doing sex that’s not exactly penetrative was this kind of wealth of San Francisco underbelly that I just love and it’s through San Francisco.

Trevor Hoppe (26:23)
huh. I remember it well. That was a fun two years when I lived there, for sure. A lot of times I feel like, at least, that I’ve learned some of most valuable lessons about sex from having bad sex. Are there experiences like that that you can remember that were like, god, it went bad, but you walked away feeling like, you know, a little enlightened?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (26:25)
Hehehehehe

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. think the thing that comes most pertinent to me is kind of early on in coming up to San Francisco, I was living in a kind of queer collective household that was known for throwing lots of sex parties and being the host of the parties. You were always there, which was fine. I love that. But I still hadn’t kind of fully come to owning

Trevor Hoppe (27:02)
Mm.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (27:13)
my boundaries. And so I still remember kind of early on kind of being engaged with people who were probably a little bit more aggressive and a little bit more either under the influence of certain substances, where it just made it harder for me to kind of truly feel comfortable voicing my, no, this is passing the boundary. Let’s let’s pause here. And I found myself just kind of remaining quiet and a lot of those times.

and kind of just going through with something in order to kind of get it done. And it, of course, didn’t feel great in the moment. Of course, afterwards, it felt even worse because there’s like levels of kind of shame and guilt there. But it did eventually kind of lead to me to being like, like, no, body autonomy is an important aspect of what I view as sexuality, as is consent, as is kind of pleasure. And so

All of that needs to happen through communication. And I just need to kind of develop my communication skills and saying what I do want and what I don’t want and hearing what my partner wants and hearing what my partner doesn’t want. Still something I’m learning and kind of developing, but it is one of the aspects that I think it’s hard.

Trevor Hoppe (28:29)
Yeah, it’s a skill and a muscle you have to strengthen, which is… People think that saying yes or no is like easy peasy, and then the reality of it is, of course, much more intense when you’re face to face with another human being who’s desiring you, and you want to be desired, obviously, but you have to be able to set that boundary for yourself. Do you have any tips for… Because really…

Sister T’aint A Virgin (28:43)
Totally.

Mm-hmm.

Trevor Hoppe (28:56)
My dream for this podcast is to help young people who are like little yous and little me’s who are trying to figure out how to set those boundaries for themselves. What do you think helps?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (29:02)
Alright.

I think finding your community, which I know is a very broad and kind of general overarching term, but like finding the people that are interested in exploring the same ways. and ideally you can find that your mentors within that, cause that’s largely what I did. And I feel like the mentors can.

were the ones that helped ushered me through being more comfortable, being more sexual, being more engaged. And I feel like within the subsets of our communities, there’s pretty rigorous mentors out there and these little networks. And it does take time to find that group that you really resonate with or connect with. Again, I’d always say,

personally going back and then enjoying just watching or going to someplace that you can kind of activities that don’t exactly or immediately need to be kind of hands-on, but kind of collectively pleasuring yourselves in a way that feels wonderful.

Trevor Hoppe (30:26)
Daddies are having a moment, obviously, but back in our day, there was so much stigma around AIDS that I think intergenerational stuff really got a bad rap. Today we’re in a different place around that, but I still think obviously there’s some intense stigma around intergenerational sex and relationships generally.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (30:28)
Yes.

Okay.

Trevor Hoppe (30:48)
What would you say to a young person, like you should have sex with an older person, but like what, how do you counsel someone who is kind of feeling icky maybe about that?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (30:54)
Yeah.

I always think of like, we don’t want history to repeat itself, but we don’t know the history. like, I think a lot of older men have decades worth of lived experience. And that lived experience is so important and so critical in kind of helping pass along kind of the ins and outs and exactly what does work for you, what doesn’t work for you.

You know, I think that intergenerational partners really kind of bring new flavor to the scene. it kind of inherently has some level of a mentorship involved with it. You know, granted, there’s can be different forms of, power dynamics that come into play there. But, my richest and most wonderful relationships, both as friends and as sexual partners, have always been with people that are probably about.

15, 20, 30 years older than me. And now that I’m kind of moving into my, moving towards my forties, I find myself also kind of mentoring some of our younger generations. And so that’s been an interesting kind of shift of kind of being the younger one in the room to now being the one kind of solidly in the middle. And so

Trevor Hoppe (32:24)
Yeah, I feel that deeply. The moment all the twinks start messaging you saying, hey daddy or whatever, you’re like, oh my God, daddy, is it time yet? But it is time. And I have come to appreciate that role. I resisted and resented it for a while. But I think, I just think about little game me and how he really could.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (32:26)
BLEH

Yup.

Mm-hmm.

Trevor Hoppe (32:52)
It did benefit and could have even more benefited from that kind of mentorship that you’re talking about. Do you remember any lessons specifically that older guys taught you?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (32:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

Um, I mean, I think I was super lucky in that the first partners that I had were not so focused on penetration. Um, and so I think kind of early on learning that penetration is not the end all be all for sex. Um, and to kind of like, slow your role, take your time, really explore, um, that, uh,

was something that was super helpful for me. Just because, right, like I think so much of it was focused on like, all right, who’s gonna be the top, who’s gonna be the bottom, let’s get this done. You know, everything leading up to it is just kind of like quick little steps along the way, but the main goal is to penetration. And I think early on kind of seeing other forms of sexuality and really kind of seeing how to receive pleasure and be pleasured.

that doesn’t revolve around penetration.

Trevor Hoppe (34:07)
Mm-hmm.

That’s great. My memory, I have a specific memory, is living in San Francisco, actually. I was hooking up with this guy who was much older than me at the time, and he taught me, this sounds so stupid, but I really value it. He taught me to put lotion on my body after I take a shower, and it has left my skin supple into my 40s, and I’m grateful.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (34:25)
Yeah.

Love that!

Trevor Hoppe (34:32)
But yeah, I so I have started to really appreciate that daddies and older guys generally in our community do have wisdom. I am now one of those people. So I’m trying to appreciate what that can look like in a healthy way because there is a lot of potential for unhealthiness in those relationships. How do you navigate that?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (34:52)
Of course, of course.

I mean, personally, I’ve usually met up with partners outside of sexual setting first, whether it’s just like a quick, simple little coffee break or somewhere out in the community, somewhere that doesn’t feel kind of immediately charged and kind of setting up intentions and or expectations. and as long as there’s kind of a vibe and there’s good chemistry, then we kind of like quickly pivot more towards the bedroom. but

Trevor Hoppe (35:23)
Mm-hmm.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (35:25)
because I’ve definitely, you know, you know, when you’re crafting this fantasy, when you’re chatting and you’re flirting online for long periods of time and you build up these expectations and then you show up at their house and it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, that’s always harder to navigate and harder to kind of get yourself out of versus if you like kind of initially just do a little kind of quicker touch base, let’s get meet out in the community, let’s do something that feels more comfortable.

Trevor Hoppe (35:39)
You

Sister T’aint A Virgin (35:54)
to really kind of suss out if this is actually going to be a good connection. Because our online personas are not always the same as our in-person personas.

Trevor Hoppe (35:59)
Yeah, that’s really smart advice.

Yeah, yeah, just the idea of meeting up with someone at a bar or something. I used to do that a lot more than I do these days. Maybe schedules are tough sometimes, but I like that ideal a lot. I really found it valuable as well.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (36:11)
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Right.

Trevor Hoppe (36:21)
What does really amazing sex look like for you today?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (36:27)
Um, really amazing sex for me today. Um, I have recently discovered the term symbiosexual, um, which is kind of receiving or enjoying kind of watching the dynamic of someone else and specifically other couples, um, which kind of gets rooted back to my early days as a mostly a voyeur. Um, and so.

Trevor Hoppe (36:37)
Mmm.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (36:55)
that’s mostly led to like my best sex has always been in group settings. Whether it’s with another couple, I mean, the absolute best sex I’ve ever had was with a throuple where everyone was averse and everyone was like both fun and playful as well as super into each other, which I know the sooner I as a minute as.

When you add more people in, it’s harder to make sure that there’s like sexual chemistry across all partners. But for whatever reason, it worked. And it was fun to be able to kind of pair off into individual pairs and come back together, switch partners, do more of a group scene. But yeah, I love kind of being in the midst of larger group dynamics because it allows me to continue to be that lawyer, to bear witness, but also be engaged.

And it’s just fun seeing how other people receive pleasure from other people to me.

Trevor Hoppe (37:56)
Are these regular groups that happen, you know, with the same people?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (38:01)
Sometimes.

Usually if they’re couples or people that I know, then yes, I would say kind of ongoing. But if it’s more of like, kind of either play parties or sometimes I’ll go to this kind of gay men’s sketching group where it’s two hours of sketching and most of the people that sketch, we take turns modeling as well.

And then after two hours of lovely sketching, usually devolves into a lovely social hour, which is Sans clothes and very enjoyable. And so that changes the dynamic because every week there’s different guys that show up and sometimes it’s regulars and you’ll kind of see them on recurrent days. And sometimes it’s people’s first time. And so it’s nice to kind of welcome people into that group and kind of

and get matched with someone, you can kind of go back and play with them on a recurring basis. And if it didn’t work out that one time, you can maybe try some different partners. So it’s nice to kind of mix it up in that regards.

Trevor Hoppe (39:11)
Do ever find that there’s someone that you thought, I’m not gonna get along with them at all, and then you just have this amazing encounter?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (39:18)
Yeah. Um, and I find like that the group settings has really been helpful for me for that. Um, I’ll definitely like go into some of these sketch groups. I’m just like, all right, there’s the one person that I definitely am excited about. And we’ll like, are really all of us will be without our clothes on and we’ll be kind of starting to play and they’ll like immediately be aligned to someone else. Uh, and then you’re just like, all right, well, that’s not going to work out there. So let’s kind of pivot and navigate. And so

Again, it’s kind of these group settings, it kind of exposes me to people that I probably once have gravitated to online or kind of sought out individually. And then, you know, you’re in the dynamics of sex and you’re realizing that they’re quite skilled at certain things. And you kind of take beauty in that and kind of realize that, you know, your instant kind of viewing of them might not have been the most reliable in terms of

Trevor Hoppe (40:06)
You

Sister T’aint A Virgin (40:17)
really enjoyable sexual partners.

Trevor Hoppe (40:20)
Yeah, there’s something that can happen where you just realize sexual attraction to someone, you didn’t see it at first, but then they smile a certain way or they unbutton a button or whatever and it’s like, oh, I see you now.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (40:32)
Right,

right. my early, I mean, I think my kind of early experiences playing with trans men was a lot of that as well. Where, like I knew that like my attraction was mostly to kind of like masculine identified individuals. And kind of being in play spaces that were kind of gender explorative and gender inclusive.

Trevor Hoppe (41:02)
So one of the beautiful things about the in-person kind of drawing class thing is that you can kind of see people visually in different… in ways that they would not present themselves online, if that makes sense.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (41:15)
Exactly.

Exactly. You know, and like when you’re drawing them, you’re kind of enjoying the beauty of like this specific curve in their body. And it’s like not always focused just on the genitals. And you can kind of like really appreciate you know, the way that the light is hitting their clavicle or, you know, the little dimple on their backside. And I think that you can kind of find the beauty in those little things that you wouldn’t normally kind of gravitate towards that really

makes me excited to explore them their bodies more fully after drawing sessions. And yeah, it’s not always focused just around the genitals.

Trevor Hoppe (41:58)
Yeah. Do you have any tips for… because online, obviously, you lose that ability. I know you said you meet people beforehand, but before you even made up, are there ways that you try to assess people’s…

Vibe? Is that word? I’m not sure exactly.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (42:17)
Yeah, mean, I usually like I know some people and you know, no shame to it. Like they want to just like, they use the apps to get in get out. They want you know, they don’t want the banter. They don’t want the chat. They just want to know what you want. They want to set it up and they want to get going. And for me, like I actually enjoy getting to know them and kind of enjoy kind of flushing out the personality behind the body.

because that’s gonna be more key and that’s gonna be more sexy and more engaging to me than, you know, just the standard body itself. And, you know, of course, every so often that’s actually just what I want. It’s just a quick hug up. And so that’s lovely too. But that always comes with some level of, you know, is the actual dynamic gonna be there? Is the actual dynamic gonna be comfortable? So I just have to kind of be willing to roll the dice sometimes and

you know, maybe not have the best of connections initially and just hope that the sexual attraction will kind of push me through it. But usually I like to kind of, you know, get to know them on some level before kind of immediately jumping into the sheets.

Trevor Hoppe (43:31)
And you mentioned the symbiose… symbiosexual? Is that… this… Yeah, this is a term I’m actually not familiar with. What… what is that term, doofyur, that’s different from voyeur?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (43:34)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Um, I think it’s more specific about enjoying the dynamic of another couple. Um, and so like a voyeur can just be like, it could just be one single person. And the symbiote sexual is like really loving the like loving dynamic between a predetermined couple and kind of getting sexual gratification from that. And so I think it’s to me, it’s just like another layer onto voyeur or voyeur is kind of this broad term of watching anything.

versus kind of the symbiosexual, which is like really enjoying the watching the dynamic of this other couple. And you’re getting specific pleasure from that. And kind of engaging with that too.

Trevor Hoppe (44:28)
And it sounds like you’re also watching couples that are not gay men now.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (44:33)
Yes. Yeah. Again, largely through kind of these play parties that are kind of welcoming of everyone and everybody. Really seeing kind of ways that not all gay men, but kind of, kind of the larger trans umbrella, straight couples, queer couples within the kind of, you know, gender nonconforming, non-binary, all of that.

Trevor Hoppe (45:03)
that change your attraction?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (45:05)
Yes, I think so. I’m still mostly attracted to displays of masculinity or masculine characteristics, but I have a lot of loving and wonderful trans masculine partners. For me, the attraction in the sex is not specifically to a cock or to a penis. It’s the display of masculinity and that’s…

Exploring that through having partners who are trans has been amazing and wonderful. I lived in a larger queer household separate from the one that I mentioned earlier that was largely female. long stretches of time, I was the only male identified individual in the house. It was all queer. was being immersed in largely femme-focused sexuality.

made me love and appreciate a lot of kind of femme identified bodies as well. And see how sex is navigated and explored in different contexts outside of just the gay male experience. So I always have a little strong affinity for that too.

Trevor Hoppe (46:26)
Yeah, I remember going to the bar on Castro with my friend who was a trans guy. This is back in the early 2000s and there would always be like, he would be making out with someone within 30 seconds instantly. He was so handsome and is so handsome to this day. And I remember, know, time would go on and then there would be the moment where the disclosure would happen.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (46:36)
Huh?

Trevor Hoppe (46:45)
And it was interesting, even back in the early 2000s, I would say most times it was fine. Guys were like, fuck yeah, let’s do it. And I loved that. I think he was…

Sister T’aint A Virgin (46:49)
Hmm? Hmm?

Yeah. at a.

Trevor Hoppe (46:56)
systematically educating the Castro about trans bodies back.

Sister T’aint A Virgin (46:59)
totally. Totally. Totally.

Yeah, I worked at a sex club here in San Francisco for several years. And I’d say at least half of my coworkers are trans men. And it was amazing seeing this like, sex club that is tailored towards men, who was like, all inclusive of kind of the kind of larger umbrella of male bodies, including kind of trans men. And so

that was just fun kind of being part of that network. and we would post, occasional workshops, tailored towards like cis men, pleasuring trans bodies and trans men, pleasuring cis bodies. and it was really fun kind of being in these safer spaces where people could ask questions that they don’t always feel comfortable doing with an individual partner. and not feeling judged for it.

and really kind of hoping to expand their idea of what it means to be sexually attracted to kind of the larger umbrella of men.

Trevor Hoppe (48:08)
That’s fabulous. I love that. I always like to end on a fun segment I call Sorted Lives and Untold Tales or SLUT for short. What’s the sluttiest thing you ever did?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (48:16)
Huh? Uh-huh.

You know, I think it’s, you know, probably the recurrent sex parties that I’ve gone to and hosted at my house over the years. that seems kind of the obvious or the easiest answer. I think outside of that, more recently, I had my very first kind of, fisting experience, with again, someone who was older than me, very, very experienced in fisting.

And it was fun to just kind of explore that in a way that felt that I wasn’t being judged, that I could kind of make some mistakes and feel comfortable with it. I really, really loved and learned that I enjoy being a fisting top. So, you know, I think that’s going to be a new foray into other experiences that I’m hopefully pursuing. So yeah.

I’d say that was my other kind of sluttier moment as of most recently.

Trevor Hoppe (49:19)
I love that.

Yes, absolutely. think fisting is, in the post-prep world, it’s one of those things that’s become more popularized, I think it’s fair to say, and people have become open to this experience in a new way. I’d love to hear that. If people want to learn more about you and the work that you do, where could they find you?

Sister T’aint A Virgin (49:37)
Right.

Um, so the first thing would be going to the sisters website, which is the sisters.org. Um, and that’s for the San Francisco chapter. Uh, but that gives a good overview of kind of our history. Um, you get to see who our individual members are. Um, my personal social media, um, on Instagram is sister underscore taint underscore a underscore Virgin.

But the website is probably the easiest way to kind of get a general understanding of who we are and how to get involved.

Trevor Hoppe (50:19)
Thank you so much sister

Sister T’aint A Virgin (50:21)
Thank you.

Trevor Hoppe (50:23)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much for listening as always. And remember, if you aren’t having your best sex, I can help. My services as a sex coach are designed to help you identify and overcome the barriers that are standing between you and your best sex life. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Till next time.

OVERVIEW:

What if being a slut was something to celebrate? Join me, Dr. Trevor Hoppe, on this episode of The Best Gay Sex Podcast as I chat with Charles Sanchez, actor, writer, director, and Contributing Editor at TheBody.com, about reclaiming the word “slut” as a source of pride and liberation. From his musical web series Merce to navigating slutty adventures (and the occasional mishap, hello Mpox), Charles shares his journey of embracing sexual agency, dismantling shame, and finding joy in authentic connections. Whether you’re a self-proclaimed slut or just curious, this episode will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about desire.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is about slut pride. Pride? Come again? I know, I know. Most of us use the word slut as a weapon.

as a way to try to tar and feather someone else with the stigma of sex. We use the word slut to try to check someone whose sexuality we think is maybe a little too furry, especially women and gay men. And like tar, the label slut is sticky. It tends to follow you for life. But today’s guest thinks we’ve gotten it all wrong.

that it’s time to reclaim slut not as a source of shame but as a source of pride. Charles Sanchez has been working for over two decades as a writer, director, and actor to try to shake up American norms around sex and sexuality. His original web series titled MERS follows the life of a gay man living with HIV in New York City. And it features an original song called The More You Can Ho.

It really is amazing. Please check it out on YouTube. I’ll let Charles describe his work a little bit better than I can. Let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (01:29)
Charles Sanchez, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast.

Charles Sanchez (01:32)
Thank you, thank you.

Trevor Hoppe (01:34)
It’s a pleasure to have you and hear you talk about your work, but before we get to today, tell me and people listening a little bit about kind of where you grew up and became a sexual being.

Charles Sanchez (01:46)
Okay, I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. I am the youngest of four, very Catholic, very Mexican, very, my oldest brother and my sister are, are board again Christians. And so that was also a big, like, you know, Jesus, sinners in the hands of an angry God. That’s kind of what I feel like that that whole thing was. So that colored a lot of my

Trevor Hoppe (02:04)
Huh.

Right? Okay. Fire and brimstone.

Charles Sanchez (02:15)
of a lot of my sexual awakening. remember, wow, okay. I remember there were some boys in my neighborhood that we were all kind of discovering sex things at the same time, like looking at Playboy and things like that. Penthouse, which you can see into tomorrow’s future by looking at the pages of Penthouse.

Trevor Hoppe (02:33)
Mm -hmm.

Charles Sanchez (02:42)
And you know that didn’t really interest me except that everybody was naked in it So there was that and then I discovered the the pool jets on my penis That was exciting. That was that was probably around 13 or 14 So does that count as sex? And my first like

Trevor Hoppe (02:53)
Yes!

huh.

It’s definitely getting there.

Charles Sanchez (03:07)
first real encounter was probably not until I was about 18. I had some like petting things with boys and stuff and certainly had some petting things with girls. Squishy. Squishy. Girls are too squishy. That was part of it. They’re just squishy. But my first like real sexual encounter, was 18 and I remember I was so excited afterwards.

I didn’t eat for two days. was just excited. Yeah. 18.

Trevor Hoppe (03:39)
Wow.

What was it like?

Where did you meet this person?

Charles Sanchez (03:44)
I met this person at an adult bookstore. because there was they didn’t ever no one ever checked your ID at the adult bookstore. And looking back, I can’t believe they ever let me in. I looked like I was 16 until I was about 35.

Trevor Hoppe (04:06)
-huh.

Charles Sanchez (04:14)
so when I was 16 or, you know, must’ve looked 12, but they let me in anyways. and so that’s where I met this guy and like, we went back to his hotel room and, cause he was staying — he was, I was living in Phoenix — he was in from New York, ironically. And, so, so that was that. And we had like this little on again, off again thing, like whenever he was in the city.

Trevor Hoppe (04:33)
Mm

Charles Sanchez (04:41)
Or like when I finally moved to New York, he was the first person to take me to gay bars in New York City when I moved here when I was 19. So we had like a little something for a while, but.

Trevor Hoppe (04:48)
Wow.

That’s really tender. A kind of a like a gay mentor.

Charles Sanchez (04:56)
Yeah, yeah. The first night he took me out in New York City, we went to the Monster, which is like, there’s a piano bar on the top floor, then you go to the basement and there’s a disco. So it’s two bars in one. And we went to a couple different other places, then we ended at what I think was this sex club that was called J’s at the time. But I’d never been in anything like that before. And I remember looking over and thinking,

like, wow, that guy looks like he has a hand inside him. my God, that guy has a hand inside him. So yeah, that was one of my first New York experiences.

Trevor Hoppe (05:35)
That’s a brave initiation, you know, going straight to New York City sex club.

Charles Sanchez (05:36)
Right? Well, I didn’t know, brave schmabe.

I was just taking that. Like, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like, okay.

Trevor Hoppe (05:45)
How did you figure out what to do with people?

Charles Sanchez (05:48)
I’m still trying to figure that out. Because I think it was a lot of this, you know? And people asking me to do certain things and stuff like that. I remember one of my first experiences with a man when I was still, was like 17, 18, around that same time.

Trevor Hoppe (05:52)
Ha

Huh?

Charles Sanchez (06:17)
because then I was like experimenting. I remember at one point going home with this guy and afterwards thinking, if that’s gay sex, I’m not gay. Because it was so just like nothing and boring and like it wasn’t hot at all. And when you’re 18, everything’s hot. So for it to not be was, I really was like, well, maybe I’m not gay. I was wrong.

Trevor Hoppe (06:25)
Wow.

Wow. Yeah, yeah, turns out, spoiler alert. What was so, was just boring? There wasn’t chemistry?

Charles Sanchez (06:47)
It was boring.

There wasn’t any chemistry. At least I didn’t feel any chemistry. I mean, it seemed like the other guy did. Because he wanted to see me more afterwards. And I was like, sure, I’ll call you. But it was it was just like there was nothing. There was no excitement. I mean, the excitement part for me was just like having sex was like, and it wasn’t

Trevor Hoppe (07:03)
Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (07:18)
I didn’t, I wasn’t fulfilled. didn’t feel like it was this great time. And I didn’t know what I was doing. so, yeah, I think that that’s why that time was just so disappointing. And opposite of the time with the other guy when I was so excited I couldn’t eat for two days.

Trevor Hoppe (07:39)
Yeah, the eating thing is fascinating. I’ve never heard that response. That must have been pretty good because that’s kind of…

Charles Sanchez (07:44)
Yeah, it was fun. And well, I think

part of it too was feeling that I was attractive. It was one of the first times I felt because, you know, the boys in high school, the boys that grew up, even if they were gay, they weren’t gonna show it in 1985, 86, you know, like they, so I had very little feeling that I was attractive in any way. And so I think that was part of that time with this guy’s name was Scott.

was so excited because I knew that he thought I was attractive. And I think that’s part of what got me excited.

Trevor Hoppe (08:20)
Yeah, no, it’s nice to be wanted for sure. That can feel amazing. When did you, so did you move to New York City after Arizona or how did that?

Charles Sanchez (08:22)
Hahaha

Yeah, I

grew up in Arizona and I moved to New York the first time when I was 19 to go to acting school. And then I’m, know I can’t believe my parents let me do that at 19, but they did. And then at around 30, I moved to Los Angeles for a few years. And then I lived in Little Rock, Arkansas for about seven years, eight years. And then I moved back to New York in 2007.

Trevor Hoppe (08:36)
Wow.

Yeah.

Okay, so you have bopped all over. When do you feel like you, what was the, where did your kind of, it sounds like maybe New York is where your sexual awakening happened, where you became a like sexual being.

Charles Sanchez (09:00)
I have.

Yeah, I feel like, you know, when I was growing up at home, I was so limited by family and by, you know, what I felt like. And I didn’t know what being gay was going to be like for, because it was all in my head as being this abomination and you know, know, burn in hell and all those kinds of things that I was taught and that I believed, you know, that I had not only was taught that, but I went, that matches my own self -hatred. So I might as well stick with that.

So yeah, wasn’t until I moved to New York that I really felt free enough away from my family and away from those limitations to experiment. But I didn’t really come out to my family until I was 30. So I was really still scared and that was a real, think judgment and abomination and those kinds of things really affected my sex life and my wellbeing until I was probably about 50.

Trevor Hoppe (09:55)
Mm

Charles Sanchez (10:09)
I finally started getting rid of shame around that.

Trevor Hoppe (10:10)
Wow.

That is a journey. what was the process like to relinquish that shame? How did you get through that?

Charles Sanchez (10:19)
It was a long journey from whatever coming out, starting to realize it myself in my late teens and late 20s, and then starting to come out to friends and then finally coming out to my family. But the shame was so ingrained. Before I knew what gay was, I was told it was an abomination. Before I even could realize that that was me. So I was…

it was so easy for me to just hate myself and feel like the sex that I enjoyed was demonic or was satanic or evil. And I think it just took all those years of therapy and self -love and getting rid of chemicals out of my life and things like that that I was using to cope before I went like, wow, there is no reason for me to be ashamed of my sex.

I was created this way. I was made this way. And people who think otherwise, that’s the abomination is if your church is teaching you how to not love certain people, then that’s not a good church.

Trevor Hoppe (11:30)
Amen to that preach. mean, that’s real. And I feel like for so many gay men, that shame is a fundamental like aspect of their sexuality. I know so many gay men who struggle with that. what would you tell a young queer person who’s living in that shame? Like how do you, how do you push beyond it?

Charles Sanchez (11:52)
I know. I I think that shame is built into sex in America across the board. You know, we were founded by these religious zealots, people who got kicked out of their own country because of their religion came here to start a country. So I think that shame and shame about sex is something that’s just American, that certainly they don’t have it in the same way in other countries in Europe. But when you realize that

Trevor Hoppe (11:59)
Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (12:19)
You know, everybody has a sex life, hopefully, right? Everybody has their own sex journey. And to judge yourself for it is just not helpful. know, embrace those parts of yourself because they’re fun. I think that’s the… You just have to go through the journey yourself, unfortunately. I think that everybody has to find it for themselves. But anytime you start feeling shame and it’s not fun,

Because you know, could be part of a fantasy, shame could be part of a thing, part of a kink. But when it’s not fun, that’s when you need to do some self -examination. Maybe find a therapist or at least talk to some friends to get you out of that mindset because there is no reason. If you’re having sex that is not hurting anybody else, then there’s no need for shame.

Trevor Hoppe (13:12)
Would shame fuel the sex you were having?

Charles Sanchez (13:15)
I certainly think that it informed how I felt about myself. And so then it did inform like hiding and secrecy. even from other gay friends, like I didn’t want to talk about the experiences I was having or the experiences that I wanted to have. That was something that I was like, ooh, I don’t know about these certain experiences that I’m interested in, but I don’t know how to even go about.

getting them, like how do I express to someone that I want to feel it feels like to be tied up or I want to experience these sort of taboo subjects. So it took me a long time to even get there myself to even feel like I could try certain things or express certain things.

Trevor Hoppe (14:04)
And I guess with the shame, I know many friends who’ve struggled with the shame, often the substances come with that. And I heard you mention chemicals. was that a link for you, the shame and substances?

Charles Sanchez (14:22)
I think so. couldn’t have told you that at the time. I didn’t have that much awareness. But I think they went hand in hand. I think it made a lot of things easier, especially alcohol. Because alcohol is so prevalent and it’s so part of American culture and part of gay culture. I used to have a joke about when you go to a regular bar and order gin and tonic, it’s gin.

and tonic. And when you go to a bar, it’s gin tonic. There you go. It’s like that they know that you need a little help.

Trevor Hoppe (14:58)
ha ha ha ha ha ha

It’s so true, gay bars are known for having strong pours and I hadn’t really connected that in my head, but you’re right, there could be something kind of secret messaging going on there. Do you think it’s like, when do you, I guess when I’m thinking about like people listening, like the not fun thing I think is such good advice and it’s sometimes like, how do you know?

Charles Sanchez (15:11)
What?

Trevor Hoppe (15:26)
It sounds so stupid, right? How do you know it’s not fun? You like know, obviously, but like, how do you know that it’s not just normal kind of sexual exploration, but it’s actually kind of self -destructive or harmful behavior?

Charles Sanchez (15:39)
Ooh, it’s rough. Because I think, you know, we’re not given any kind of sex education as gay men, or as anybody in the queer community. Even regular sex ed for cis straight people is very rare, you know? We still hope that our families are gonna tell us, and most of us just have to learn on the street. And gay men, not given any, all we have is like,

Trevor Hoppe (15:48)
Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (16:06)
and talking to friends. So I think it’s really, really rough to figure out what kind of sex do you like? What kind of sex do you find pleasurable? What are your boundaries? Where is it okay to extend those boundaries for yourself? So I think that’s why it’s taken me so long to get to a place where I can…

at least talk about the kind of sex that I like and the kinds of sex that I want, which are varied from day to day, which sometimes I want more cuddly, more romantic, more, and sometimes I want to be slapped around.

Trevor Hoppe (16:46)
Yeah. Amen. It varies indeed. And for me, I guess I think a lot about how I’ve learned to be a sexual person has been framed in part by having kind of by kissing a lot of frogs, by having some bad experiences. Have there been bad experiences that you think of that even if they were bad, kind of were instructive that helped you grow and have better sex in the future?

Charles Sanchez (16:49)
Hahaha

I certainly have had, you know, bad experiences. and it’s not about like what you, like, you know, the people will say, you know, the size, size queens, size matters and stuff like that. I’ve had incredible sex with guys who were not big at all, who actually, when I, when I figured it out, I was like, Ooh, this is going to be a disappointment. How do I get out of this? And then, my gosh, it ended up being like, this was really fun. You were really terrific.

Trevor Hoppe (17:41)
Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (17:41)
So it has nothing to do with those kinds of things. think even like, he’s too fat or he’s too whatever. For me, I’m attracted to a lot of different kinds of people. So those limitations, that has nothing to do with it. It’s all about what’s going on in your brain and what’s going on, what we like together and who we are as a couple, or as a, not even a couple, it might be three, it might be four.

but who we are in this situation.

I think the bad experiences mostly are times when I felt unsafe. so my advice is if there is ever a time when you feel unsafe, get out of there. And sometimes it’s hard. I’ve been in situations, especially when I was younger, and I didn’t, when you don’t know what’s appropriate or what’s normal, what you want even.

when I had to like fight somebody to get out the door. I’m like, no, this is yeah, yeah. And because it’s because, especially when you’re young and maybe if you’re vulnerable, if you’re using chemicals to loosen yourself up, then you’re not thinking clearly and you’re able to distinguish what this person’s saying, what I really want, or even gauge fear, gauge your own feelings. So those kinds of things I think did inform

Trevor Hoppe (18:47)
Really? Ugh, that’s all.

Charles Sanchez (19:13)
my safety, what I consider safe, who I consider that I’m gonna let this boundary down for this person in this situation because I feel safe or because we have set up a boundary that I feel comfortable with. And those do take a lot of trial and error. I mean, if there’s a book about it, I don’t have it. If there’s a how -to book, I probably should have gotten.

Trevor Hoppe (19:40)
do you identify as a top or a bottom? Is that a word, labels that you kind of, yeah.

Charles Sanchez (19:44)
Yeah, I’m a bottom, which

it’s so funny. I hear a lot of people say like, everybody’s a bottom and I have such, well, I never have a problem finding a top. So I don’t know what those other bottoms are doing or looking for, but yeah, that’s, it took me a while to acknowledge that and to feel that’s another thing that even in the gay community, we’re kind of shamed for being a bottom and most of us are bottoms, but

Trevor Hoppe (20:12)
huh. Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (20:14)
but

there is a shame level. I’m like, and tops are guilty of it, of shaming us. Well, without us, where would you be? You’d be, you know.

So it’s a weird thing that we do to ourselves.

Trevor Hoppe (20:22)
Yeah, up Schitt’s Creek without a paddle.

It is and it’s internalized too, right? We literally do it to ourselves like in our own brains and it’s really hard to kind of break through it. when you actually like as a social scientist, I’ve actually looked at top bottom like.

label identification and like there are just as many tops as bottoms like at least self -identified. But there is this mythology that’s kind of fueled by bottom stigma. It’s just like, bottoms, ee, you know, it’s like, come on. yeah, yeah. And like also we are, bottoms say this too, you know, it’s like, but we are like have some pride. Like, you know, it’s hard to.

Charles Sanchez (20:55)
Yeah, but you need us. You want us.

Trevor Hoppe (21:08)
to feel proud about that label, even though in the face of all this like, ugh, negative energy. So I feel that, that just owning that. And especially in those experiences where you’re confronted with another human being and saying, no, as a bottom, think, in my experience, I don’t know, what about you? Do you feel like that’s especially challenging or differently challenging as a bottom?

Charles Sanchez (21:33)
I don’t know. I have come to feel like my own power as a bottom. I’ve had a lot of different kinds of experiences. I was in a big relationship where I was as a sub with the master for about a year and a half. that informed a lot of where I realized my agency and when you’re in that kind of a situation where the power structure is set up,

Trevor Hoppe (21:58)
Mm

Charles Sanchez (22:03)
He’s the master, I’m the not. But I found like, where my power really was even in that dynamic, where it looked like, you know, he had the power, but I always had the power to say like, no, or stop, or I need a break, or any of those kinds of things for the most part. But you have to learn it. And you have to learn what you feel comfortable doing, saying. But yeah, I just don’t feel, I don’t feel the shame that I used to about being a bottom because

I’m not the only one. I’m not alone in my bottomness. like I said, I’ve not had a problem finding the sex that I want when I want it, you know? So.

Trevor Hoppe (22:33)
Yeah.

In the context of that Dom -Sub relationship, How do you, how do you create?

either by setting boundaries or through other means, like create the situation in which you can feel comfortable in that role where you can feel like you have that power.

Charles Sanchez (23:03)
Well, I had never been in that kind of relationship before, before I got into it. So I, looking back, I agreed to a lot of things that I had no idea what I was agreeing to. But I kept saying to myself through the process, even when I was like, not knowing what was happening, always going like, okay, here’s my choice. My choice is I can leave. Like that’s, he can ask me to do whatever. And…

Trevor Hoppe (23:15)
Mm.

Charles Sanchez (23:31)
And my choice is to go, okay, either I accommodate this situation and stay here, or I go, no, I’m out. And that was my big power move is realizing that that’s where I say no. If I say no, and then the situation’s over, right? But that’s where my power really was, is I can end this right now. And knowing that I think really helped me make…

more informed decisions about, what I was really willing to do and why. And with this person that I was feeling increasingly more comfortable with and more trust, I trusted him more and more. And of all the relationships I’ve been in in my life, he was the person who invited me into his life the most. And I had been in long -term relationships with boyfriends and more traditional kinds of things. But this man,

Trevor Hoppe (24:13)
Mm -hmm, yeah, the trust is key.

Charles Sanchez (24:29)
like really invited me into his life, his world. The advantages of this situation were that, well, he had a husband who I knew and who I got along with really well. like he said to me, I’m never gonna be your husband. I’m never gonna be your boyfriend. That’s not what this is. Okay, that’s the rule and I get that. But because of the sexual situation that we were all in, there were no lies. There was no cheating.

And that was so freeing to be like, wow, there’s zero reason to lie about anything in this relationship. Also, because he had a husband, we never had the rent stew or the light bill didn’t get paid or any of those kinds of couple things that you might go through. We didn’t have because he had a husband that he did that with. So there were so many things about the relationship that I felt really that I would have had no idea about except being in it.

that were like that, that were like, wow, we don’t lie. We don’t cheat. We don’t, because there’s none. It’s just, there isn’t any of that. And I found that really, really refreshing and great.

Trevor Hoppe (25:43)
Do you think that like, did their primary partner, do you think that ever caused friction with them? Having your your dom sub relationship alongside that?

Charles Sanchez (25:56)
No, think because they already had boundaries set up for themselves. their sex life had evolved to where they weren’t really having sex with each other that much, unless they had a boy in common that they both wanted to be with. So that was just, they’d been together for a long time and that was what they decided, that worked for them.

Trevor Hoppe (26:16)
huh.

Charles Sanchez (26:26)
The master, my master, he has more sex with more hot guys than anyone I’ve ever met. Like he is, he likes variety, he has a revolving door. So there were the guys who were always coming in and out and new guys always coming in. And there was like me and he had another boy that was a regular, you that was his other main regular. And then there ended up being like a third for a while. And then, and then when things changed and like right now I am outside of that relationship.

And it’s quite sad to me, but it’s just the way things happened. It was nobody’s fault. It was just the way of the world. I don’t think that there was any jealousy within his marriage with that because, and certainly his husband and I got along really well. I was there every weekend. I cooked for them. For that part of it, it was kind of…

run -of -the -mill. was kind of very regular in that it was groceries and cooking and watching movies and SNL on Saturday nights, you know. was quite, yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (27:36)
That’s cute.

So it was beyond the bedroom. This was a relationship that definitely extended. fascinating. What do you think you learned? having not been in a dom -sub relationship like that, what do you think you learned about yourself through that experience?

Charles Sanchez (27:53)
One of the things that was really valuable to me was I had never been or maybe I’d never felt valued as a sexual person in a relationship. I always felt like sex was a part of it or whatever, but I never felt sexy. And that’s more on me than on anybody I was with. That’s just my own feelings about myself. And so to be in this relationship where the primary reason I was there was because he thought I was hot.

Trevor Hoppe (28:12)
yeah.

Charles Sanchez (28:22)
reason that he wanted me to stay around was because he saw I was hot. Whenever I was there, I was in a thong only. That was my uniform when I was at their house. So that was really valuable to me, was to really feel like I am not just a sexual being, but I am a sexy being. I am desirable.

That was really, really valuable to me. I think everybody needs to, everybody should feel that in their relationship, that they are desired. So that was really important for me to realize is that I am, you know, even at my rapidly aging body, I’m still, no, I’m a sexy person. I’m attractive person. So that was probably the most

Trevor Hoppe (29:15)
Yes.

Charles Sanchez (29:19)
valuable thing I got out of it was realizing my own sexual potency.

and, and the things that I thought maybe that I would never have done. I’ll never do that. That’s just disgusting. I did. And then was able to go like, okay, well, that I don’t like that I don’t want to do again. but I experienced more things in the sexual catalog than I ever thought I would and enjoyed more than I ever thought I would. Like things like being denied or things like being having

three -somes or four -somes or group situations that maybe would have made me feel a little bit more uncomfortable in an environment where I knew like, okay, I know these people now. It’s one thing to be in a sex party situation where you’re just, everybody’s anonymous and so you can kind of be put on a character or something or be whoever you want to be. But when people know you, that’s a little bit different level of comfort and a different level of agency.

So that was just something else too, is to be like, wow, this is someone who I know likes me and I know who likes this.

Trevor Hoppe (30:31)
Amen. How do you find guys… Because I hear that message, you want to feel sexy. How do you find guys who make you feel sexy?

Charles Sanchez (30:38)
Mmm. I mean, there is no other way to, you know, it’s all kind of trial and error. mean, one of the things that happened to me kind of recently about that is, I think, like my own desirability, you know, it goes up and down. How you feel about yourself. I gained five pounds and now I’m just gay obese. And, you know, like…

Trevor Hoppe (31:05)
I know.

Charles Sanchez (31:05)
You gain five

pounds and it’s over. I’m never going to have sex again. And I had someone recently say to me, like I was saying like, I’m not really getting together with anybody right now because I just feel so bad. And he was like, well, you know, I want you to do whatever you need to do to feel sexy. I’m on board with you feeling sexy. But our connection is more than what you look like. And that was really valuable for me to hear because I so

can just be like, I have to have muscles, I have to have washboard abs or else I’m not viable. And that’s not true. And that’s something I’m learning still every day. That’s something I’m battling all the time being like, no, maybe if you do, maybe the least attractive thing about me is that I beat myself up so much. It has nothing to with what I look like.

Trevor Hoppe (31:55)
Ain’t that the f***ing rub, right? It’s like, that’s the

worst part about it is people, that’s the thing that turns people off sometimes. You’re like, gosh darn it. Like, you’re, it’s like, you’re damned if you do, damned if you do. It feels impossible, you know? And if you project too much confidence, then people of course think you’re, you know, cocky or arrogant. Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (32:11)
Right. Then you’re stuck out. Remember saying that was my favorite thing in

grade school. You’re so stuck out.

Trevor Hoppe (32:18)
Or a brat to use the term everyone’s using right now.

Charles Sanchez (32:20)
breath. Conceit ad. That was the other one we used to say when

we were in junior high. She still could say that.

Trevor Hoppe (32:26)
Yeah, exactly.

my god. I love it. Is there an experience that you could think of or multiple perhaps that jump out at you as like, this was the best sex, this is like the best sex of my life?

Charles Sanchez (32:41)
There are two that I think of. One was with the master early in our relationship. Because I was so inexperienced about sub, I didn’t know what to do. And so I was relying heavily on him telling me what to do. I would get so excited. I remember this a couple of times when I couldn’t speak. I was so concentrating on trying to do the right thing and trying to be pleasing.

and tried to listen to what he was telling me to do. And I remember him saying like, boy, you have to answer me. You have to use your words and me just being so turned on and everything that I couldn’t speak. So that, I can’t tell you what was happening. You know, I couldn’t tell you what he said to me. I just was, I just remember that feeling of being so overcome. And the second one I think you have is.

Trevor Hoppe (33:26)
Yeah.

Mm -mm.

Mm -hmm. Verklempt.

Charles Sanchez (33:37)
The best sex party I ever went to, I went to this sex party, it like two years ago. I haven’t actually, haven’t been to one since and here’s why. I went to this sex party and I was like the belle of the ball. I don’t know why, but yeah, I was like very, very popular that day. And I had a great time until two days later, Monkeypox. was the sex party that gave me Monkeypox. it was, Monkeypox was painful.

It was awful, it was embarrassing. mean, Monkey Punks was more, for me, I felt more embarrassed than Chlamydia or Gonorrhea. Like, what’s a little Chlamydia between trends? But Monkey Punks was, that was a time when I felt like a little bit of shame about how I got it and knowing that it was that. But you know, I’m easing up. I’m having sex party ideas popping into my head. So that might be.

coming up in the fall is my return. I try up the return. We’ll see.

Trevor Hoppe (34:40)
the bell of the ball returns. -huh. Down the steps

of the parasol, ready for the party. I love it. And I don’t want to dwell too much on MPox because, you know, it’s just one of those things, but I know a lot of people probably don’t know anyone who ever had it. Like, what was that experience like for you?

Charles Sanchez (34:47)
Alright.

It was awful. I wrote about it for the body .com. You can find it at the article. Partly too because of where it, because of the kind of sex I like, it was a lot, it was in my rectum. And so my, was having such pain and I had to get, I was on like two different kinds of painkillers because I was in such pain about it. At the same time, a friend of mine,

Trevor Hoppe (35:04)
Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (35:25)
whose a top was going through it. his junk was all messed up and mine was opposite. But it was helpful to have a friend who was going through it at the same time. And because it made me feel a little bit less shame -filled and less alone about it. And this was right when it was all happening. This was two years ago when the outbreak happened before they hadn’t even, I think they were…

doing limited vaccines and stuff like that because they didn’t have enough of it and all those kinds of things. But yeah, it affected me a lot and it was very painful. One of the most painful things that I’ve had like two hip replacements. I’ve had a lot of different surgeries and this was incredibly, incredibly painful.

Trevor Hoppe (36:16)
I’m so sorry that that happened. I’m glad you got through it. I had a good friend who had it at the same time as you and he was texting me updates regularly because I think he didn’t have anyone to talk to. So he really needed somebody to sound off who he could trust to not judge him. Cause the judgment was insane at the time. It was like, I mean, as someone who lived through the eighties, do you feel like did you, we’re seeing parallels with HIV?

Charles Sanchez (36:35)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. When I went to the emergency room, because my doctor said, go to the emergency room. And I went to the emergency room at Bellevue because he recommended, he goes, that’s where they first started finding cases of pox. Go there. The doctor came in in a hazmat suit. And I hadn’t seen that since, I mean, I had never experienced that before, but I had certainly seen it in movies and stuff when they talked about early in the AIDS crisis. And I had, I was shocked.

Trevor Hoppe (37:00)
yeah.

Charles Sanchez (37:12)
It made sense because they didn’t know what they didn’t know. was like COVID. But I just never experienced that before and it was shocking and it did feel like the shame, that also doubled up the shame. It’s like, wow, a doctor doesn’t even feel safe.

Trevor Hoppe (37:29)
Yeah, I can only imagine the, ooh, the feelings in the body as that is happening. That is wild. Well, I’m glad you’re on the other side of that. I hope you make your return to the ball. Just, definitely. If you had to, even the power, like the Thanos glove of sex, to just like snap your fingers and like fantasy becomes reality, like what would that fantasy look like for you?

Charles Sanchez (37:39)
I’ll let you know.

It’s, I don’t know, it’s kind of changed a lot. I, since the sort of dissolving of the relationship with the master, which I didn’t expect to have the feelings that I would, that I have still even about him. Cause that’s not something that you think about when you’re going into like this sex relationship that you can end up having feelings. And I have,

big feelings. So I think that when I realized that relationship was kind of over, it was like, wow, you know, one of the things I liked about it was knowing that I was liked. And that it was like for multiple reasons, you know, that it was, yeah, it was partly about what I looked like, partly about, you know, that I have, I’ve got guns, but.

I didn’t always, I’m the fat guy. So I’ve always been like, I’m the fat kid. So that’s why I’m like, no, look, look, I’m not anymore. But to be valued in several different ways was really eye -opening because I never had felt that in other relationships. So I think that being desired and feeling that you’re desired and also honored outside of, as a whole person.

Trevor Hoppe (38:54)
Me too.

Charles Sanchez (39:20)
That’s what I’m kind of looking for now. And it almost sounds romantic, which makes me wanna throw up. Because I don’t know if I believe in marriage for myself. I don’t know if that’s in my cards. I kind of don’t think so. But I look for relationships now, or I look for experiences now that where I feel that it’s more than just my sex.

So right now, one of the questions you add on the thing is like your sluttiest moment. I’m like, I have so many, I, the sluttiest thing you’ve ever done. But right now, and as someone who is a self -proclaimed slut and that like, I like to have sex with a lot of people, right now I’m not. I’m really, seeing two people, really only one. And it’s just sex, but I know that he…

knows me outside of our sex and that we have had other experiences and I feel like I’m a whole person. And so I’m not just this superficial thing, but I feel like he likes me in more ways than one.

Trevor Hoppe (40:31)
Do you think over time you’ve been able to reveal more of yourself in these sex relationships?

Charles Sanchez (40:38)
it depends on the person. Yeah, I do. and, and on what the person like, you know, some people you finished with sex and they’re out the door or they’re kicking you out the door, depending on where you are. But, and those, like I have realized too, like even those moments of those connections with people sexually where that’s all it is. I can really feel a measure of connection and.

I hate to use love, that’s a weird word, I think it’s so loaded, but a real connection and affection and caring, even in a situation that is fleeting and I’ll never see this person again. I’ve been able to find that and find it very valuable and this is how I’m connecting with humanity. And I think it’s as valid as anything else.

Trevor Hoppe (41:34)
Yes.

Charles Sanchez (41:35)
So, and with the people that I’m seeing right now that I do have a bigger, broader connection with, that know me in ways outside of just, you my ass, I think that I’ve gotten a much more richer experience from that because I can, don’t have to leave right away. We can have connections outside. I can run into them on the street and it’s not awkward.

Trevor Hoppe (42:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I feel like that’s that some of that just comes with age, like remembering myself and I was as younger and you think about what was best sex when you were 22 and it probably you would I don’t know if you probably answer that question differently than.

Charles Sanchez (42:19)
Partly just because of experience, not having had… And I was so insecure. I was incredibly insecure. And partly it’s our own… Sometimes as gay men, we’re mean to each other. I’m looking for anybody to have sex with but you. Right? No fat.

Trevor Hoppe (42:40)
Yeah, right? It feels that way sometimes.

Charles Sanchez (42:44)
No Femmes,

no, you know, like I’m looking for a swimmer, straight acting, swimmer’s build, you know. You know, we can’t all date Greg Louganis, know. Come on. And yeah, like, but and also I think like I’ve had washboard apps. I don’t right now. And it’s hard to go like, OK, but am I still am I still sexy even though I’ve got a little gut, you know?

Trevor Hoppe (42:50)
The swimmer build, I cannot with that. Like, what does that even mean?

Hahaha

Charles Sanchez (43:13)
It’s really, we’re so mean to each other, I think about it. And I try to, I down myself before someone else does, but then I’m beating myself up out of this weird way of trying to protect myself. So I don’t know that I like, good sex when you’re 22 is so fleeting, you know, cause you’re so horny all the damn time at 22. You know, the wind blows and you’re like, where can I find somebody? And so it’s kind of,

Trevor Hoppe (43:37)
Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (43:43)
It’s kind of nice to be able to make choices when you’re a little bit older and be like, you know what, I don’t need to have sex with this person because he’s there and offering it. And I can decide who I want to have sex with now. think that’s the experience I want. If I want a sex party experience or if I want a threesome experience or if I just want to connect with this one person.

Trevor Hoppe (44:08)
Choosiness is a virtue and it’s hard to practice sometimes when you’re horny.

Charles Sanchez (44:09)
Yeah.

Right, when you’re

horny and you don’t feel good about yourself, you know? So then you’re gonna make choices that maybe aren’t the best for you. Or for that person even, you know, really. But yeah, I’ve done that a lot too.

Trevor Hoppe (44:18)
Ugh, even worse, yeah. Yes.

Well, you already sort of gave a preview, but I always like to end with my favorite question, Sorted Lives and Untold Tales, which is short for S.L.U.T. What is the sluttiest thing you’ve ever done?

Charles Sanchez (44:43)
Ugh,

ugh, there’s a top 10 probably list. I mean, mean, somewhat, sex parties are certainly a slutty thing by definition when you’re, when there’s a place you’re going in and there’s clothes check. That’s a pretty slutty situation. But I think once I realized that I like to have sex and that was okay.

Trevor Hoppe (44:48)
Ha

Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (45:13)
Some people might think that that’s slutty just because I’m having agency about the sex that I want and the sex that I have and that it’s okay to want to have wanton sex. I think that’s probably the sluttiest thing I’ve ever done is realizing that it’s okay to be a slut. And I’m not a slut alone, right? Like you can’t be a slut by yourself.

By definition, you have to include other people. And I think that that’s probably the sluttiest thing I’ve done is that realizing that it’s okay to be a slut and to not feel shame about it. Like, no, guess what? Yeah, I’m wearing my shirt unbuttoned. Do you know why? Because I’m a gay man. And I’ve got a nice chest and I’m going to show it off while I got it.

Trevor Hoppe (45:44)
Amen, that’s so true.

Mm

Charles Sanchez (46:09)
So that’s probably the sluttiest thing. It’s not an action, but more of an attitude.

Trevor Hoppe (46:15)
I live. I live. That is fabulous.

Charles Sanchez (46:17)
Yes, I

slept there 4 a

Trevor Hoppe (46:21)
Aha! I slept there for a hour. Well, that is a fabulous place to wrap it up. Thank you, Charles. If people want to know more about, of course, if people want to know more about you and where can they find you on the internet?

Charles Sanchez (46:27)
Thank you for having me.

Well, I’m a contributing editor for the body .com. So I do a lot of content for them, including hosting a twice monthly Instagram live, where I talk to people from the LGBTQ and HIV communities from across the country and various different. So I’ve talked to Greg Louganis several times. I’ve talked to other kind of HIV celebrities like Mondo Guerra and Andre De Shields and Javier Muñoz. But I’ve also talked to people who are working.

Trevor Hoppe (46:55)
That’s awesome.

Charles Sanchez (47:03)
on the boots on the ground at Planned Parenthood in Colorado or or an HIV organizations across the country. I also write for POZ Magazine. So you can find me on the Instagrams and on the Facebooks. I am FabulousSanchez on Instagram. I’m also on X but I’m not really on X because I think it’s gross. Yeah, yeah, and I just like that dude is weird and

Trevor Hoppe (47:24)
Yeah. We’re all piecing out. Yeah.

Charles Sanchez (47:31)
So that’s where you can find me is on Facebook and on Instagram mostly. I’m on threads too, but I’m not really on threads. also I have a web series that’s still out there in the world called Merce. It’s a musical comedy about a guy living with HIV who isn’t sad, sick or dying. And we did two seasons of it. So that’s out there, M-E -R -C -E. You can find it on YouTube or on Vimeo or on our website, merceseries .com.

Trevor Hoppe (47:51)
Live for that.

Charles Sanchez (48:01)
there anything else? I think that’s about it. But yeah, you can find out more about me online and you can Google me and you’ll find out other crazy stuff.

Trevor Hoppe (48:07)
Okay.

huh. Fabulous. But thank you so much, Charles. I really appreciate it. And thanks for being a slut.

Charles Sanchez (48:16)
Thank you Trevor.

Trevor Hoppe (48:19)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much for listening, as always. And remember, if you aren’t having the best sex of your life, I can help. My services as a sex coach can help you identify and overcome obstacles that are standing between you and your best sex life. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Till next time.

OVERVIEW:

What’s the opposite of jealousy? Enter compersion—a radical concept that could transform the way we experience love, sex, and intimacy. In this episode, Dr. Trevor Hoppe sits down with TT Baum, a sacred intimate with over 20 years of experience in sex work, sex education, and tantric practice. Together, they dive into the art of connected sex, the healing power of touch, and how compersion can bring more joy into our relationships. Along the way, TT shares stories of sexual exploration, the importance of vulnerability, and what it really means to have FUN in bed.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is about compersion. Compersion? Never heard of it? You would not be alone. Little bit of a GRE or SAT level kind of word there, but I’ll explain it using my husband’s trick, which I think helps for clarity’s sake. What’s the opposite of up?

down, right? Yeah, exactly. Now imagine the opposite of let’s say good.

Bad. Yea, exactly. Two for two. Now what’s the opposite of jealousy? Uh… jealousy? What do you mean? Like, kind of the math lady look in your head, like, “Uh… opposite of jealousy? I don’t know.” Do we have a word for that? It turns out we do and it is compersion. I’ll explain it this way. Imagine

the love of your life is telling you a story that last night, guess what? They had the best sex of their life. my God. They did this position, that position. It was so hot and they were so hot. We live in a society where our knee jerk reaction or impulse might be to feel some kind of way about that, right? A little bit of negativity, maybe a little possessiveness. Why wasn’t it me that you were experiencing that with, right? That’s jealousy, that dark impulse. Compersion is the opposite of that.

Imagine feeling joy, positivity, love for that person when they tell you that story instead of feeling possessive, you feel like, my God, that’s great. Good for you. I’m really happy for you. I love that journey for you. That’s compersion And today’s guest wants to live in a world with a lot more of that and a lot less jealousy. And TT Baum comes to that perspective from over two decades of experience, not just as a sex educator,

not just as a practitioner, but a kind of fusion hybrid role of both that he calls being a sacred intimate. Yes, it’s a little bit of sex work. Sometimes it’s a little bit of massage. Sometimes it’s a little bit of therapy, kind of all rolled into one. And I will let Titi explain it, because he will surely do a better job than me. So let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (02:27)
T .T. Baum, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast.

TT (02:31)
Thank you. Happy to be here, Trevor.

Trevor Hoppe (02:33)
I am so excited to have you on. I have so many questions and so many directions because your work is so rich and fabulous and interesting to me. But before we get to the current state of affairs in your work and your life, I like to sort of take a trip down memory lane and kind of connect readers to your upbringing. So for folks who don’t know, kind of tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what was that like as a young queer person?

TT (02:50)
Mm -hmm.

so I was born and raised like half time in the Northwestern quadrant of Pennsylvania and the Allegheny mountains. what my, some of my family who escaped affectionately referred to as little Appalachia. and, then when I was eight or nine, we moved to, Northeastern Ohio. So that whole kind of like.

like Allegheny Mountains, Great Lakes region is where I grew up and mostly small towns. The town that we ended up landing in as a kid had 10 ,000 people, I think had a population of 10 ,000, which isn’t huge. It’s much bigger than where my parents came from, but it’s definitely by no means of what I’m familiar with now. Was it was it any kind of big city? The closest big city to where I grew up was Cleveland, Ohio.

Trevor Hoppe (03:42)
Wow. Yeah.

TT (03:57)
And keep in mind it was so it was rural it was You know mountain folks it was the 80s 70s and 80s and I was also raised Catholic so the combination of all of that kind of small -town mentality and

Trevor Hoppe (03:57)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

TT (04:20)
the weird schizophrenic bipolar nature of what it means to grow up Catholic or be raised Catholic really messed me up a lot as a kid. I thought I had a I thought I had a vocation. I thought I was going to be a priest until I was 13. Even

Trevor Hoppe (04:35)
my gosh, wow.

TT (04:37)
Even after I knew what was going on, I really thought, okay, I’m gonna be a priest and that’s gonna take care of it. Because those were the tracks, right? If you weren’t gonna get married and have kids, which I didn’t think I was going to do, then you were gonna become a priest or a nun. Yeah, those are your options, get over it. In hindsight, I probably should have done that because I would have gotten a great education for free and then I could have just quit like a lot of my friends did.

Trevor Hoppe (04:52)
There are two options, I like it.

Hahaha.

Ha ha ha.

TT (05:06)
But being a queer kid in that time

and in that region was really confusing, particularly as somebody who was also really embodied. Like if I look back, like I really enjoyed my body from a very young age. I liked to explore it, I liked to use it, I liked to feel the pleasure of it. I was in this, I was also in a family that for,

for where they grew up and how they were raised, wanted very badly to be very progressive. So there was a lot of freedom in our household to ask questions and to try to have dialogue about things. And as hard as they tried, there were still elements and components of shaming and phobias that came out about.

what different things meant to different people in the household. So I remember asking my first question about sex to my mom when I was five. And she was really good about encapsulating what happens with your body into a context that a five -year -old would understand.

Trevor Hoppe (06:12)
Five.

Wow, that’s impressive.

TT (06:28)
So

yeah, I was very precocious.

Trevor Hoppe (06:31)
And you were asking this, I assume, just generically, not as like a queer person asking about sex, I assume.

TT (06:40)
no, yeah, just generically curiosity of a kid. I mean, one of the, one of the, so the specific story, we were in a small house. We had one bathroom. everybody shared the bathroom and, I went into the bathroom to get ready for school one morning and I saw a pair of underwear draped over the side of the bathtub.

Trevor Hoppe (06:51)
Mmm. Mm -hmm.

TT (07:03)
with blood on it. And I didn’t know what was going on and I was freaked out because I thought somebody had gotten hurt. And I remember asking my mom, why is there blood on that underwear? And she explained to me about menstruation. She explained to me about what happens if people, I knew what intercourse was by that time. She explained to me what happened if people, you know, touched.

Trevor Hoppe (07:05)
Got it.

Yeah.

TT (07:29)
each other while one of them was menstruating. It was just like really, it was very straightforward and very, very matter of fact. But I think because of the environment that I was raised in, in that particular, you know, in that microcosm of a household in our, in our family unit, there was a lot of permission to, to kind of explore and ask questions and be curious up to a point.

Trevor Hoppe (07:32)
Wow, that’s pretty advanced.

Mm -hmm.

TT (07:57)
And then,

you know, if we started, if we started going down the road of queer, or if we started going down the road of like, admitting that I was attracted to other boys or that I liked men or masculinity or, or the spectrum of different things, of what I was attracted to. I remember also like being really fascinated by the idea of gender fluidity when I was a little kid and.

Trevor Hoppe (08:22)
-hmm.

TT (08:23)
oftentimes would role play as a girl. And it made it drove my father insane. So as permissive as they were on one side and as curious as we are allowed to be about some things, when it came to gender expression and gender roles, those things were really rigid. Like this is what boys do, this is what girls do. And I think to this day, my dad is still a little bit like,

Trevor Hoppe (08:27)
Hmm.

Mm -hmm.

TT (08:52)
I don’t know what I did wrong. You know, like he still blames himself for not making me man enough somehow.

Trevor Hoppe (09:00)
Mm -hmm. And what was that process like when you finally went down that road and just weren’t just curious anymore, but actually describing yourself as queer with your family? How did that go?

TT (09:12)
I mean, that was many years later. I didn’t actually come out to them until I was 22. And by that time I had left home. I had been living in Europe for several years. I had explored the gamut of what a young, you know, again, like it was Reagan era eighties, like craziness. So,

Trevor Hoppe (09:19)
Mm -hmm.

TT (09:40)
the, the in hindsight, it was like a really conservative time to just be a young person in general. So as much as we were exploring and as much as things were like artistically, like androgynous and creative and weird. And, you know, I think of the Brit pop and the new new wave era and like the post -punk era. And, you know, we got Boy George and we got

Trevor Hoppe (10:02)
Mm -hmm. David Bowie’s of it all.

TT (10:06)
the very, very beginnings of RuPaul and we got the, you know, we got, we started seeing, we started the visibility train that we see now. So I felt, I felt safe coming out to some people. I didn’t feel safe coming out to my family and I had moved back home and then I finally got a job on the East coast and moved out as an adult and found myself in a relationship because, you know, in the early nineties, you either,

Trevor Hoppe (10:23)
Mm -hmm.

TT (10:34)
fucked yourself to death or you got into a monogamous relationship. Those were the two avenues that were kind of politicized to all of us. So I found myself in a relationship and after I was in that relationship for about six or nine months, I came out to my parents in this really clunky way. And at first they were really, really supportive about it and they were really cool about it.

And then I started talking about it. And then it was again, kind of like this clamp down that I had experienced when I was a kid. And I talked about sexuality and gender and queerness. And they were like, we get it. Don’t talk about it. We get it. It’s bugging us. Don’t talk about it.

Trevor Hoppe (11:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, for the time, I guess, not the worst reaction possible. You know, I think back to those days.

TT (11:22)
Mm -mm -mm. No, I wasn’t disowned.

I wasn’t shunned. I I wasn’t ever not welcomed back in the house. But there were different microaggressions that happened. Two of my aunts who were born -again Christians who had left whatever church, one of them was raised in a,

Trevor Hoppe (11:29)
The bar was pretty low.

TT (11:50)
fundamentalist Christian church left that and then went into another fundamentalist Christian church. And she wouldn’t, when she found out that I was gay, she wouldn’t let me like be around my cousins anymore. Cause they were younger than me and somehow I was going to influence them. And I remember the first time I came home with my partner and it was probably about a year after I came out to my parents, they wanted us to sleep in separate rooms.

Trevor Hoppe (12:20)
wow.

TT (12:22)
And I was like, we live together. What do you think the sleeping arrangement is in my house? So like just stuff like that. It was not, we don’t love you anymore. Get out of our house. We can’t stand the sight of you. But if you are going to be this way, do it in a way that makes it feel good to us.

Trevor Hoppe (12:24)
Yeah.

So you’re coming out in your early 20s, it sounds like. When did you start sexually exploring before that? I assume before that, but maybe not.

TT (12:52)
Mm -hmm.

my God, when I was

like 11, I had my first orgasm when I was 11. So like all through late elementary school, junior high, high school, I was notorious for, this is gonna sound creepy in 2024, but I was notorious for setting up challenge games with mine and my brother’s friends as young teenage boys.

Trevor Hoppe (12:58)
Mmm.

TT (13:23)
where the payoff was always like, if you lost, you had to do some sexual act or you had to strip down naked or you lost a piece of clothing. And I was always an instigator in that way. But I mean, I think back of it and I give myself a little bit of a break because if I look back at the context of where I was and how my…

I was never one of those kids who was confident enough in myself or just so much myself that I was just queer, queer, queer, queer, queer from the get go. There were two other guys in my, two other folks, I’m just gonna say people now, because I don’t know how they identify these days, who were in my junior high and high school, who were gay as the day is long. They wore makeup, they dressed,

Trevor Hoppe (14:12)
Really?

Wow.

TT (14:15)
in

the most genderqueer way that I can remember. They were very, like one of them was super, super effeminate and they just, they couldn’t be any other way. So that’s just, they were just like, listen, love me or hate me. This is who I am. And I was so confused by them and I wanted to be them so badly and I couldn’t. Yet at the same time, I was expressing my own queerness in these sideways,

Trevor Hoppe (14:31)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hehehe.

TT (14:45)
non indirect ways that made it apparent that I wasn’t like the other boys, you know. So, you know, getting back to those, those challenge games and finding outlets for my sexuality. It, I wouldn’t say they were the most consensual all the time, but as kids exploring, you know, that’s.

That’s what happened. And we also, you know, there was also like masturbation all the time and access to pornography. And, you know, we did, this is pretty, we’re talking pre -internet, pre -cell phone, pre, you know, we couldn’t just dial, we couldn’t just log on and have everything at our fingertips. So for me, it was like,

finding whenever I would look onto something where I could see male sexuality portrayed, my dad, you know, every, I think everybody’s dad had some kind of porn magazines at some point. My dad really liked, my dad really liked Hustler Magazine and I loved Hustler Magazine because it always had at least one photo spread with a guy in it.

Trevor Hoppe (15:51)
huh, yeah, sure.

Ha ha ha.

-huh, totally, I know exactly what you’re talking about.

TT (16:05)
And then I

could be like, my God, there’s an erection. I can kind of fantasize. Once I got over a learning disability that impeded my reading skills for probably five or six years, I became this voracious reader and I would read the penthouse forums and all the salacious,

Readers, you know, readers submitted, who knows if they really were, readers submitted experience essays that were like pre -blog in those magazines, you know.

Trevor Hoppe (16:38)
Sure.

So you were raised on like straight nasty culture basically, like porn. For lack of a better term.

TT (16:50)
straight nasty culture. Yeah, exactly. You know, I’m always like, I want to, in fact, just

today, right. In fact, just today, I was thinking, you know, my parents didn’t have that many friends, but the friends that they did, like they were always hooting and hollering, whooping it up with each other. And they would go over and have like movie nights with their friends. And I was just like,

Trevor Hoppe (17:06)
Mm.

TT (17:10)
Were you all swingers? Like, I don’t, and like, you just didn’t tell us about it? Like, we just didn’t know? Like, so there was definitely some shenanigans going on. Yeah, for sure.

Trevor Hoppe (17:21)
Sexual energy. Yeah, well, both of those things for sure.

That’s fascinating. When did you first finally get to like have sexual experiences with another man?

TT (17:32)
the first time I ever had sex with a guy, and it wasn’t even really sex, it was just kind of like.

bumping around. He was much more experienced than I was. He was this French boy who I met on vacation with my foster family in Europe. And he and my foster brother got kind of we were at this like weird resort place and they kind of got paired up in this tennis.

thing because they both played tennis and Pascal, I’ll never forget his name. My God, I just loved him to death. Pascal tolerated my brother and as soon as he saw me at the pool, like made a beeline over and like sat down and just like his English was terrible. My French was terrible. And we somehow just like flirted our way into, you know, sneaking out of our hotel rooms late at night and going on walks on the beach.

beach

and holding hands and kissing. And it was like, it was so ecstatically wonderful. It was so wonderful and innocent and crazy. And I still wouldn’t come out even after that. I was just like, I don’t know. I’m so conflicted. You know, I had had such a guilt trip done on me about like who I who I was allowed to be in.

Trevor Hoppe (18:41)
That’s kind of like a movie.

TT (19:02)
but I think I was maybe like 18 or 19 when that happened.

Trevor Hoppe (19:03)
Yeah.

it’s kind of a beautiful experience. And you were living in Europe at the time, or was that just a vacation?

TT (19:10)
Mm -hmm.

I was living in Europe at the time. I lived in Europe from the time I was 18 until I was 21.

Trevor Hoppe (19:20)
I see, okay. So you have that sort of fling, it sounds like, kind of, did that last for just a sh, like.

TT (19:26)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

And that definitely it like it cracked something open. It lasted for like the week that we were on vacation. And then we would like we we would like telephone each other very briefly because it was super expensive to call people in Europe at the time. We would telephone each other and just check in. And then write. I was a he was a like my long distance romantic pen pal for a long, long time.

well into my mid -20s.

Trevor Hoppe (19:58)
That’s very sweet.

TT (20:00)
that kind of like that kind of like in hindsight, as I look back on how all of that, how my sexuality evolved and how my how my sapio sexuality kind of got tied up in all of that, I understand a lot more about who I was to the people who I had sex with after that and what made the sex with me different and why it led me to becoming.

Trevor Hoppe (20:11)
huh.

TT (20:27)
sex worker.

Trevor Hoppe (20:29)
There was a lot in that, so let’s break it down. Because the sapiosexual thing, I think some people don’t know that term. So my understanding is just that you’re attracted to people based on their intelligence or the way they think or something about their kind of brain power.

TT (20:32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I’m attracted to people’s,

I mean, for me it’s kind of a double thing. So I’m really, I’m a sucker for a pretty face. And for me, when I say sapiosexual, for me it’s about like the full package of a person. So I need you to be intelligent. I fall in love with your intelligence. I fall, and that’s the thing, like I fall in love. I get attracted to, I get.

Trevor Hoppe (20:53)
Mm -hmm.

TT (21:14)
I get, I allow myself to go to these places emotionally that most people are just like, I’m just gonna, particularly as masculine, I’ve sent our queer men, queer folks, you know, there’s a lot of hookups and it’s very emotionally vapid. It’s, or even, you know, I would say it’s like an emotional desert sometimes where it’s just very anonymous, super, super physical.

get my needs met and be done. And find pleasure in that, of course, but I find the most pleasure and the most gratification when I get to engage with somebody and figure out what makes them tick.

Trevor Hoppe (21:54)
Yeah. How do you think you got there? Like, cause that’s, that’s a journey, I think, particularly for men that is difficult because there’s so much discourse around our men’s sexuality as being so physical and emotionless, as you kind of say. And so what was the journey like to get to that place of recognizing the kind of full breadth of your own sexual desire?

TT (22:05)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

It was tough. I have I have said in the past to people that I found myself being really confused because what I thought was hooking up other people who I hooked up with interpreted as a deeper emotional connection. So for me it was you know it’s it’s kind of like I really think it is just part of the nature of who I am and how I connect with people and how I am sexual with people.

Trevor Hoppe (22:32)
Right.

TT (22:43)
that makes me, like there was no discovery, it’s just how I am. The discovery and self -realization that that was different or other than the way that most other men and masculine identified people engaged in sex with each other took a long time to kind of pull apart.

in my early 20s and even when I was in that relationship that I was talking about late teens, early 20s, and even into my early 30s, I think I would have people just fall madly in love with me and I had no idea what I did. I was like, we just fucked. We just had great sex. Like how great it like that’s all it was for me.

Trevor Hoppe (23:24)
Ha ha.

Well, so I guess I’m wondering, because I kind of know what you mean, right? That there’s this emotional connection that you feel, but it’s not love. It’s something, or it is love? I don’t know. How would you characterize it?

TT (23:36)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, I think having now been doing sexual healing work and sex coaching and intimacy work with people for almost 20 years, I would say it is love. It is a form of love. You know how the Greeks have different words for different kinds of love? It is in the spectrum of love. And I…

It kind of makes me really good at what I do because I can fall in love with you for a couple of hours and really invite you to open up emotionally and be vulnerable with me. And now that I know that is a…

skill that I have or that I was born with or raised with or conditioned to be with, It’s what’s made me really good at what I do. But as a young person, having society be like, this is how men have sex, and then really inviting people, because I talk, I joke around.

I’m curious, I’m playful when I have sex and even when I was younger, that’s the way that I always engaged. It was never like a quick hand job in the dark, like with some random stranger. Like I always wanted to know who you were.

Trevor Hoppe (25:04)
So you never went through a period of like having that, those kind of anonymous connections and you always sort of found your way through these more deeper connections or I’m just curious like.

TT (25:17)
Yeah, which made it, even though I love being promiscuous and I’m a total big old slut, it makes it challenging because I like to engage with folks before I have sex with them. That’s part of the process for me. That turns me on almost more than getting naked and getting to it. That’s the easy part in my sphere.

Trevor Hoppe (25:30)
Mmm.

TT (25:41)
Like the part that really turns me on is talking about it and sexting, I fucking love sexting. When I was introduced to the internet in the late 90s, mid to late 90s, I loved chat rooms. I loved them. Like IRC chat rooms, get me on one, I’m going. And you could live out.

Trevor Hoppe (25:51)
Haha, yeah.

Mm -hmm.

my god, I used to love IRC. my god.

Yes.

TT (26:10)
You could live out all

these fantasies and you could get really, you know, people because there’s a facade there, people would be more vulnerable in those chat rooms. And it was really interesting to me to it really turned me on to like talk about sex in the context of who you are as a person in this chat room.

Trevor Hoppe (26:21)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, I mean, it was like the days of actual like chat sex, like, which I don’t feel like is practiced very much anymore, but there was a time where you would use the little asterisk to denote, you know, actions or whatever, separate from work. You know, there was a whole kind of protocol. And I loved that.

TT (26:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it

was pre video. It was we we couldn’t do this what we’re doing right now. So you know there was pre video conferencing. It was pre. I remember there was one IRC room where this where this person I had met had rigged up this tiny little pixelated video feed. And if you were lucky if you could get a webcam you could do this tiny pixelated video feed and I remember the very first time I ever did like.

Trevor Hoppe (26:51)
Yep.

TT (27:14)
like video chat sex with another person was like 1998 or 99 and it was wild. I was like, what is happening? It’s like I’m living a porn living, living a porn video right now.

Trevor Hoppe (27:21)
Mm -hmm.

Did the internet change your sexuality in any way?

TT (27:33)
it just expanded it. Like stuff that I was always curious about, I just could go, you know, we’re talking like pre algorithm feeding you what your habits are. We’re talking pre like I missed the days of doing a being on a search engine and just going down this weird wormhole where the where there were no there were no bots telling you like feeding you what the algorithm thought that you wanted.

It was all associative. You’d click on a link and then you’d click on another link and you’d click on another link. And before you knew it, you were. Miles out into the stratosphere or deep, yeah, you’d get into some like weird dark shit and be like, back up, back up, erase, erase, erase.

Trevor Hoppe (28:09)
deep.

TT (28:20)
But the but going back to your question about like anonymous hookups, I didn’t really explore that until.

until after I had like my first major sexual awakening in my early 30s.

And I think because, you know, growing up with AIDS kind of hanging over everything. There was a lot of fear, there was a lot of shame, just I mean, you know, you’ve written books about this stuff. There was a lot of fear, there was a lot of shame, there was a lot of vilification of promiscuity and hooking up. Cruising culture had all but died and all of the people who I would have ever.

Trevor Hoppe (28:51)
Hehehe

TT (29:04)
learned anything about cruising culture from had died during that period of time. Like all our time was spent being kind of like respectable queer people. And then when you weren’t being a respectable queer person, you were you were out in the streets being an activist.

Trevor Hoppe (29:27)
Mm -hmm.

TT (29:27)
for the rights of the people who were still dying because AZT wasn’t working and the drug cocktails in the early years weren’t working and people were still dropping dead all the time. So it was kind of like, it was a weird time to be a young queer person in your like,

like when I had that first orgasm that I was talking about in 11, like I understood what I was attracted to back then, even at that early age. Like I understood that masculinity and men and maleness were the things that were tripping my trigger. And it was the same year.

that the headlines about gay cancer were splashed everywhere. And I kind of figured it out at that early age that if I chose to walk down this road that I was, you know, if I had sex with anybody else, I could die. So that kind of lived with me through the late 90s, through that period that you were talking about when you first came out. And…

Trevor Hoppe (30:19)
Mm.

TT (30:29)
Then I hit 30 and it was like, I had a second adolescence. I got out of that relationship. I quit my job, I reinvented myself and started to explore things that I felt I was curious about and I wanted to, I just wanted to have experiences. And some of those experiences were terrible.

Luckily, I met my current partner, my husband of almost 24 years now during that time. And one of the first things I said to him was, listen, I’m just discovering who I am as a person and sexually and as an artist. And I I need you to respect that. Or this isn’t going to work. And he was totally on board. So we’ve had an open we’ve had an open relationship.

Trevor Hoppe (31:17)
Wow.

TT (31:22)
with evolving agreements from day one.

Trevor Hoppe (31:26)
And how long have you all been together now?

TT (31:28)
It’ll be 24 years in August.

Trevor Hoppe (31:31)
Wow, that’s amazing. Congratulations. That is a feat, especially in the gay world. I’m at about 11 years now. And so I can appreciate what 24 years takes. So that’s amazing. But you mentioned earlier some kind of terrible experiences along the way. And I always like to take a pit stop to talk about that because I think unfortunately you have to have some of those to get to the good stuff. What was?

TT (31:46)
Mm -hmm.

Trevor Hoppe (31:59)
What does terrible sex look like for you?

TT (32:01)
Terrible sex for me looks like being with somebody who…

is not interested in who I am, or even that I’m another human being in the room, but is solely in it for themselves. Like there’s no feeling of reciprocation. And I have a really vivid memory of kind of like, after I got out of my first relationship in 2000.

I went through this really, really slutty period and I hooked up with a bunch of people. I was dating six different guys at the same time and, and hooking up with folks in between and, you know, doing all the, doing all the crazy shit, like staying up way too late. What a friend of mine said recently, nothing good ever happens after 2am, or 3am or something like that. But, you know, I’d be like driving across town.

at at three and four three and four o ‘clock in the morning and hooking up with tweakers and just it was it was just bad it was just it was it was empty sex it left me feeling empty i don’t know if they even would remember it the next day

I remember just feeling really horny and really wanting to explore this part of myself that I didn’t get a chance to as a younger person and finding finding myself in situations that either just felt bad. Like I could have been anybody. With a hole. And a pulse and a temperature and it wouldn’t have mattered. You know.

to this other person. And that’s just really, that’s gross sex to me. Like I remember hooking up with this one guy and he, I walked in and I was kind of unsure and he didn’t look like, you know, again, we had like early day internet, like gay .com or manhunt or something like that, right? And the pictures that he had in his profile, I was like, those are a little old.

Trevor Hoppe (34:02)
Yes, I remember it well.

TT (34:11)
But I was, I was, you know, horny and it was late and I, and I wanted it to happen. And I remember just leaving feeling like really gross and kind of violated. And he just kept in this really creepy voice going, you’re a lot of fun. You’re a lot of fun. And I, and the whole time I just, I didn’t know how to get out of the situation and I didn’t feel 100 % safe. And every time he said, you’re a lot of fun. The only thing I could think of was you’re not.

Trevor Hoppe (34:25)
Hmm.

TT (34:41)
I just want to get out of here as quickly as possible. I want to get out of here as quickly as possible, so I’m going to get you off and I’m going to leave.

Trevor Hoppe (34:48)
It sounds like part of that experience was about learning to say no. Is that fair?

TT (34:56)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Trevor Hoppe (34:59)
Why is that so hard? I mean, it seems so right. Yeah, I mean, just I think that’s a skill we have to learn, right? And I guess if you were thinking about how to tell people, because I think many people I talked to go through this kind of moment of struggling to get out of situations that they’re not excited about anymore. What tips could you give people who are struggling with that?

TT (35:01)
Why are we saying no so hard?

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

First and foremost, you have permission to say no at any time. You have permission to change your mind and you have permission to say no. And I’m a little, you know, I’m a lot older now and much more jaded and cynical about the world. So I’m, you know, so I’m like, I look back on those moments, like that one I just described, and I think.

Trevor Hoppe (35:39)
Yeah, I know the feeling.

TT (35:49)
If somebody had told me how good looking I was and how worthy I was of love and how much I was bringing to the situation and that power that was inherently just there, just being there, right? There was power in there. There was power for me to feel empowered. There was power for me to find my voice.

There was power for me to say yes or no and agree or consent to whatever was going on. And we were kind of, you know, I think back to that period of time, like we were at this cusp point of transitioning into another period where we find ourselves now where consent is a big deal. And people were learning to find their voices. So if you’re struggling to find your voice right now,

Trevor Hoppe (36:32)
Mm -hmm.

TT (36:38)
The only thing I can say is, is no is a complete sentence and you don’t owe anybody anything ever. You don’t owe anybody anything.

Trevor Hoppe (36:45)
Amen.

No, that’s really helpful, I think.

TT (36:49)
Just because you

got it to a certain point and you find yourself in a situation that feels vulnerable does not mean that you owe that other person who is, for all intents and purposes, a complete stranger, you don’t owe them anything. You don’t owe them your time, you don’t owe them your attention, you certainly don’t owe them your body.

Trevor Hoppe (37:12)
Amen. Do you think, I heard you mention earlier the way you phrased, anyone with a hole. Were top bottom by dynamics playing into that at all for you, do you think?

TT (37:23)
I was really versatile at the time, so…

And, you know, being the, you know, going back to that notion of sapio sexuality and the way that I engaged with other people, being a little bit more emotionally connected, I think that that tied into it too. Not that I considered myself submissive, but I really wanted my partners to have a good time. What I understand now about the way that I move through the world and form friendships and relationships is I’m super, super compersive

Trevor Hoppe (37:45)
Mm -hmm.

TT (37:54)
I love, one of the things that turns me on the most is watching somebody else be happy and succeed and have pleasure and have all the good things. I didn’t know what that term meant during that period of time. And I also didn’t realize how important it was to my own sexual expression. So for me, that manifested more often than not in not being able to say no to somebody because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings.

Trevor Hoppe (38:22)
That’s real. Comperson, I mean, so as I understand it again, it’s just like taking, being happy for other people experiencing pleasure, basically. It’s how I kind of think about it. Is that how you think about it?

TT (38:33)
Mm

yeah, it’s a term that’s mostly used in polyamory circles, meaning that I derive the greatest pleasure from my partner’s pleasure, or I derive the greatest joy from my partner’s joy. But I take that further out into the world.

where if you are having success as my friend, I wanna do everything in my power to lift you up and make it even more successful because that just like, it turns me on to no end. It makes me so happy to see other people experiencing joy.

Trevor Hoppe (39:12)
Yeah, it’s interesting because I think sometimes people mistake that, as you said, for submissiveness, but they’re different. And I guess I don’t think we have a good vocabulary to talk about that. I guess I’ve kind of realized that myself in my own life, the distinction between these things, because I also feel compersion is very close to my heart. And…

TT (39:21)
Mm -hmm.

Trevor Hoppe (39:35)
Does that, I guess I’m still trying to just get, you said you were very versatile at the time. I’m wondering how those top bottom categories, how you’ve navigated them, especially in relationship, this compersion thing, because I’m just fascinated by the relationship, if there is one or if you see one between those binaries that we’re kind of stuck in sometimes.

and these notions of pleasure and pleasing your partner.

TT (40:04)
Yeah, I definitely think about it. And I’ve definitely thought about it in terms of top bottom and expanding those ideas of top bottom to mean more dominant or alpha and more submissive or beta because they kind of get couched in there.

Trevor Hoppe (40:28)
Mm -hmm.

TT (40:28)
And

I’ve known some very dominant bottoms and I’ve known some very, very, very subby tops in my time. But for me, I have identified mostly as a dominant top leaning person for the last 20 plus years. So.

Shifting from versatile. I was just like, wait I like this much more because I get to be in control of the narrative and when I’m in control of the narrative You know, like I’ve I’ve worked as a dominant I have been dominant in personal relationships and When I am in that role, that’s when I get to express the most compersion because your pleasure is all at my fingertips

Trevor Hoppe (41:09)
Mm -hmm.

The scripts around like being a dom top are so inverse of that. They are they’re basically like your pleasure doesn’t matter at all right like if you read erotic stories, they are often couched in that way and Yeah, I think this is so real for so many men who identify in that top category that they are just as invested in compersion as You know allegedly bottoms are supposed to be

TT (41:23)
Right.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, many of the submissives who I have played with or been in relationship with or worked with professionally have commented on the fact that when they first meet me, they find me to be very soft and they don’t know if I can go there with them. And I actually think that it’s my ability to be vulnerable and to be soft and to be emotionally present that makes me a good top and it makes me a good dominant. If you’re.

If you don’t care about the other person’s pleasure or their happiness or their joy, you’re just an asshole. You’re not a top, you’re an asshole.

Trevor Hoppe (42:17)
Ha ha.

You heard it here first. I think that’s succinct and to the point. I appreciate that.

because I think people…

get caught up in the fantasy and they can’t distinguish fantasy from reality. And I think that’s where people really get stuck, especially, I think bottoms sometimes, but also tops because we just get sort of stuck in this box and can’t really see the forest from the trees or something.

TT (42:34)
Mm -hmm.

Right.

Well, I think that we get stuck in in what we are socialized to believe is a

masculine of center or, or, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re socialized into gender roles all day, every day from the time we’re spit out onto the planet. So, so particularly in a, a, in a culture that is so obsessed with, you know, in this day and age in the United States, gender roles are really becoming very, very, very rigid, for a, for a

broad spectrum of people, whether they know it or not. So the idea of playing with those gender roles and being softly, nurturingly, you know, paternally masculine and vulnerably masculine feels very foreign to a lot of guys who are obsessed with being men. You know, people with penises who are obsessed with being men.

Trevor Hoppe (43:38)
Mm -hmm.

TT (43:39)
The

misogyny is the internalized misogyny is rampant in those spaces

Trevor Hoppe (43:45)
So you went through this period of hookups, having this unfulfilling sex. Was there like a breakthrough moment or something where you were like, shake yourself out of this pattern?

TT (43:57)
Yeah, it’s funny because my partner never had any. He’s he’s one of those guys. He just you know, he loves cruising and he loves anonymous hookups. And it was never the thing for me. And it actually took him being really patient. He’s a little bit older than I am being really patient and understanding that not everybody is built the same way.

And letting me just explore on my own and be okay with me, you know, he’ll joke sometimes that I’ll come home and I’ll be all infatuated with somebody and I’ll talk about them ad nauseum and how cute they are and how sexy they are and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I’ll catch myself and I’ll apologize and he’s like, babe.

Trevor Hoppe (44:38)
Mm.

TT (44:49)
This isn’t my first time at the rodeo. This isn’t the first time you had a crush on somebody. This isn’t the first. We’ve we’ve been doing this for 24 years. Like, I get it. Like, you’re allowed to have all of your feelings. You’re allowed to you’re allowed to let yourself get swept away. I mean, I have I had a secondary relationship in the midst of this 24 year period, that was deep and meaningful. And I love that person to death and not literally.

Trevor Hoppe (44:51)
we’ve been doing this for 24 years.

TT (45:17)
And it really helped me also, like, I, you know, continue to find, continue to grow and evolve as a sexual being. But my current partner, when I was 33, 34, pushed me to have my first experience in the Body Electric School, doing a, doing a, their intro weekend called Celebrating the Body Erotic.

And there, all this stuff that I’ve been talking about, like the emotional connection, like trying to get to know people, being vulnerable, letting all of your emotions be available to you in the middle of some really hot, sexy, juicy, orgasmic experiences. Like all of that was, they create this container where all of that stuff is allowed. And for a lot of people, it’s too much.

Trevor Hoppe (46:08)
Mm -hmm.

TT (46:08)
And

for me, I was like, I found my people. I’m right at home. my God. What this is. This is the best thing ever. I want to do this. You know, I was I was I was working full time as an artist at the time, and I thought I was never, ever going to do anything else with the rest of my life. And then I found.

Trevor Hoppe (46:17)
Mm -hmm.

TT (46:30)
this like intentional connected sexuality and it became my mission to like bring it to the rest of the world.

Trevor Hoppe (46:39)
And tell folks, because I don’t think some people are familiar with body electric, what is body electric and where did it sort of originate?

TT (46:47)
Yeah, so Buddy Electric is a school that was founded by a man named Joseph Kramer in the late 80s in Northern California. And at that time, because of AIDS and people like, mostly because of AIDS, people weren’t touching each other, people weren’t, people were either having sex and dying, or they weren’t having sex at all.

And he saw this schism happening. Like if we can’t engage with each other sexually and also allow our emotion, our full humanity to be present, we’re not going to make it as a culture. So he started really doing a lot of research and then teaching classes and eventually formed the Body Electric school, which gives people a safe space to kind of play and explore sexually as adults.

Trevor Hoppe (47:25)
Mm.

TT (47:41)
And really experience the full potential of their orgasms and you know explore their pleasure and be curious and and and playful and experimental But it’s all like in this safe container. It’s a very guided experience. Like all their programming is very guided. So you never feel like you’re You know, if you start freaking out there’s always going to be somebody there to to

process that with you. And they have a bunch of different, they’ve gone through a bunch of different iterations. They just at the beginning of the pan, just before the beginning of the pandemic hit, they had a whole restructuring of the school and brought in a very queer, very BIPOC advisory board so that they could look at some of their programming and rework it.

so that it felt more inclusive to a much broader spectrum of queerness. Because originally it was men. It was men who were born with penises and testicles. That’s who was allowed and invited and welcomed.

Trevor Hoppe (48:50)
What do you think Body Electric taught you?

TT (48:52)
Body Electric taught me it was okay to have sex the way that I like to have sex. what it really taught me was it’s okay to give somebody else pleasure and not expect anything in return.

Trevor Hoppe (49:04)
Mmm.

Why do you think you, why did you need to, you didn’t know that before, I guess? What was the challenge there for you?

TT (49:12)
I think what it taught me, I think the challenge was to feel good about it.

it kind of gave me like a like context and language to talk about things that I knew about myself for years and didn’t I never felt seen I never felt understood I never felt heard and it gave me a place to express that and ask questions about it and explore it and unpack it and and then

Trevor Hoppe (49:31)
-hmm.

TT (49:39)
individuate it for myself. So it was really part of, you know, I always think that my sexual awakening that has had this very long arc has also been deeply tied to my spiritual awakening and my self -realization. And it was like somebody handed me this secret that was like, sex is integral.

Trevor Hoppe (49:59)
-hmm.

TT (50:02)
to all of the things that they tell us are important in the world, and then they tell us not to have sex. But we’re telling you, you have to have sex, and you have to enjoy it, and you have to find pleasure in order to be successful and to live a full, rich life.

Trevor Hoppe (50:09)
Alright.

And just this…

TT (50:23)
And

once I had that, once I had that, I was like off to the races.

Trevor Hoppe (50:27)
Does Body Electric connect to this identity of sacred intimate for you?

TT (50:32)
Yes, that’s where I first heard the term sacred intimate. That was where I first understood that there is a healing power that can be explored in really good deep connected erotic expression.

It kind of gave it like this weightiness and this import that I didn’t understand before that sex has, sex is a powerful thing that we deny ourselves all the time because the larger society says, no, you don’t talk about it. there’s always some shame attached to it.

Trevor Hoppe (51:01)
Mm -hmm.

TT (51:15)
We don’t talk about it, we don’t educate about it, we deny that it even exists. But, you know, we want everybody to have babies and procreate.

Trevor Hoppe (51:22)
Right.

TT (51:24)
yeah, but Body Electric really was like, not only are we going to tell you that the secret is having really good sex and being okay with that, but then there’s this thing, there’s this term that we as professionals can bring to the world to help other people explore that area as a sacred intimate.

When I first started professionally providing service as a sacred intimate.

I…

wasn’t necessarily cool with being a sex worker and it took me several years to like get over that internalized phobia as well. But you know like I’ve been in this industry for almost 20 years.

For me, it’s like any, I see people who label themselves as escorts or boyfriends or girlfriends for hire or rent boys I see them providing a service that is necessary and rich and really vital to other human beings.

And anybody who does that could label themselves a sacred intimate in my book. The thing is like I bring in the difference is like I intentionally cultivate the emotional connection, the the invitation for vulnerability, the invitation for.

for the people who I work with to really make it all about themselves and explore with me as kind of like, I see sacred intimates as like your guide through the amusement park of sex and emotions and love and relationships and intimacy.

Trevor Hoppe (53:14)
And adding in one more layer to it, I know you talk a lot about teaching tantra or tantric sex kind of practices or techniques. How does that overlap and relate with this kind of ideology, the body electric, sacred intimate, this kind of framework for you?

TT (53:23)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, so Buddy Electric has a big Daoist erotic influence. So there’s this sect of Daoist philosophy that talks about the potency of your lower chakra energy, which is where your sexual energy lives and how to kind of harness that and play with it and control it. And then over the years,

Trevor Hoppe (53:49)
Mm -hmm.

TT (53:56)
some tantra has kind of trickled into that through different avenues. So Body Electric actually has like an introduction, introductory tantra course that they teach. But as I have taken to studying tantra more in depth, what I realize is that, again, it’s like, it’s this very holistic approach to being.

a human being inviting sexual like recognizing like our sexuality and our pleasure are inherent to who we are not only that but they’re important and they’re a vital key to like your spiritual awakening. So if you practice these techniques we’re not going to guarantee that everything is going to that you’re going to going to wake up one day and be be the Buddha or enlightened or whatever but

you will know yourself a lot better and be able to function much better in the world. If you embrace some of these practices, you’ll be a better lover. You’ll be able to connect with people emotionally much faster and much easier. You’ll you’ll be able to discern. Subtle ways that your body is telling you yes and no in different situations and all of that. While it really helps you be a good lover and it really helps you be.

proficient and amazing sexually and has the potential to do that. It just makes you a better human being.

Trevor Hoppe (55:26)
Mmm.

TT (55:27)
So, yeah, you know, like I could get hung up on like all the intricacies of like breath work and, and orgasm exploration. And, you know, I do a body mapping class where we, we, we, you know, work ourselves up into different states of arousal and then find, and then kind of like map where that lives in our body. And,

and discover, you know, I really actually do like having my nipples played with, or I’m really curious about the way that scent plays a role in my sexual expression, or, you know, you can get very esoteric about it and can get really weird and kind of freaky, because our bodies are magical and wonderful and crazy, crazy places full of sensation and, and neural stimulation.

But just like the basic 101 of it is really about connecting so deeply with yourself that you.

you kind of like drop the…

you break out of the box or break out of the shell that we build around ourselves about what sex is supposed to be in, the roles that we’re supposed to play in sex and who the people, who you’re supposed to be and who I’m supposed to be. And you just get to be a human being playing with your human body and enjoying your human pleasure and invite the person who’s with you to do the same thing.

Trevor Hoppe (56:50)
If you were going to give a young person a tip or two for breaking out of that shell, obviously there’s a lot of work that can go into it over the life course of training, but just, is there something, I don’t know, probably not an easy fix, but something you can try to break out in that way.

TT (57:07)
Be curious about the things that give you pleasure.

Allow yourself, give yourself permission to be curious about the things that give you pleasure. Whether or not somebody is saying, you shouldn’t be doing that for whatever arbitrary reason. As long, you know, the caveat being as long as you’re not hurting somebody else in the process, if this thing is giving you pleasure, explore it. Find out the intricacies of it. Find out the why of it.

move towards that attraction and see if it’s real. And then if it is, build on it.

I’ve said in the past that sex is like adult play time. And if we don’t give ourselves enough time to play, if you ever watch children play, they’re constantly experimenting, they’re failing, they’re hurting themselves, they’re picking things back up, they’re having fun, they’re experiencing.

Trevor Hoppe (57:52)
Mm -hmm.

TT (58:08)
the full depth and breadth of a human experience just exploring what it means to be a physical creature in the world. And as adults, we get boxed into these notions that we’re not allowed to do that anymore. And I think we should be doing it regularly all the time, as much as possible.

Trevor Hoppe (58:30)
thinking back on the experiences that you’ve had, what does the best sex look like for you?

TT (58:37)
man.

The best sex for me is really slow. It is…

connected enough so that we’re paying attention to each other, but we’re not like neither neither person or nobody in the in the group of people who are being sexual with one another feels obligated to perform in any way.

and you get to be really real and goofy. Like, I can’t tell you how often I’ve freaked people out because I laugh during sex and I’m chatty during sex. And I, you know, it’s fun. It feels good. I’ve had people stop in the middle of like whatever we’re doing thinking that I’m laughing at them. And I’m like, no, I’m just having a good time. You should try laughing too. It’s really great.

Trevor Hoppe (59:29)
Laughter is a funny thing to experience in the bedroom, but once you kind of get used to it, yeah, now I often do the same and definitely it catches people off guard and you have to kind of be like, it’s okay. Like I’m okay, I’m just, you know, there are these moments that are kind of, I don’t know, silly or goofy as you said, definitely. I love that.

TT (59:35)
It is.

And

there are things that are there are things that are silly and funny about sex like like sex is not porn. It’s not clean. It’s not like if you look at people who are really into each other having sex, it’s very rarely what you see in porn movies or in sex scenes and television and movies. It looks weird. There are body parts all over the place. Angles, there are wrinkles and rolls and.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:15)
Mm -hmm.

TT (1:00:23)
You know, people are making funny noises and bodies are doing what bodies do and it’s it’s funny. And then it also feels good on top of that. So, of course, like if a laugh escapes from time to time, like God forbid, let it happen.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:30)
Ha ha.

Absolutely, I am all for having fun. So I think that’s a great message. And I just wanna…

TT (1:00:48)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, so

the best sex yeah

short answer is best sex should be fun, in my opinion. The best sex should be fun.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:54)
Yeah, amen to that.

Capital F -U -N. What strategies have you found in your life for finding that best sex?

TT (1:01:06)
Yeah, you know, it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of our time together. I also like working also working with sexuality professionally, hooking up casually and being casual about sex got really tricky for me for a long time and it got really blurry. Using my erotic energy in service to other people has been.

a fraught path, let’s just say, and difficult to navigate sometimes. So for me, what makes that possible is, is, you know, kind of what I was talking about before, like getting to know people a little bit before I jump in. I’m not going to say that I haven’t ever had the the smack of

love chemistry happen where you’re both where you you know we i think that if we’re lucky we’ve all had this happen where we meet somebody there’s instant chemistry and you know because the pheromones are there the the the willingness is there from both parties the consent is there and you just like rip each other’s clothes off and go crazy and it’s amazing that’s rare but it happens

But for me, like cultivating really good sex takes a little bit of work. And it’s not always as spontaneous as we want it to be. And it’s okay to negotiate. And you can make the negotiation leading up to your best sex really sexy.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:45)
Hmm.

TT (1:02:46)
talking, like really getting descriptive about what you’re into and talking about like why you’re into it and what, you know, like I wanna know, I’m curious like what other experiences have you had? I really get off on listening to my partners and people who I care about talk about other dalliances and liaisons and paramours. So yeah, taking the time to at least like…

get to know a little bit about what’s gonna, you know, who this other person is, makes it for a much richer experience in my opinion.

Trevor Hoppe (1:03:14)
And how would you, if you’re,

I just want to sort of think about the listener and, and, you know, if you are a gay man on the apps on Grindr, that’s a tough place sometimes to try to get to know people. How would you advise people like in that kind of context, is there a way to pursue that, to try to get to know people on that deeper level?

TT (1:03:24)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, I mean, again, I’m going to be really jaded here for part of it. But like, I have no time for somebody who “sup’s” me or or. W .Y .D.’s me, and that’s like the extent of their that’s the extent of their like, if I’m trying to engage somebody, I would say try to engage somebody in a little bit of banter in the text back and forth.

Trevor Hoppe (1:03:54)
huh.

-huh.

TT (1:04:07)
And if you’re comfortable sharing photos and that’s your thing, like do that, like A, know your boundaries and stick to them. B, like if you really want to get to know somebody, engage them in conversation. And for me, if I’m getting like one word answers or one line answers or, you know, the, for the opening is, Hey, what’s up? And a dick pic, but your the rest of your profile is blank. I, that’s not going to be a good interaction for me.

Trevor Hoppe (1:04:36)
Mm -hmm.

TT (1:04:36)
You

know, knowing yourself when you’re approaching those apps is really important and kind of sticking to that. Like, don’t settle. It’s an app. There are hundreds of people on it. One of them is going to be the guy who rocks your world. You know that. Maybe not on Grindr anymore. Grindr kind of sucks these days, but…

Trevor Hoppe (1:04:46)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

No,

yeah, I just use it as the reference because I think it’s the one.

TT (1:05:00)
But even

like Sniffy’s, which is the, yeah. But Sniffy’s, which has become the ultimate cruising app, right? Which is such an oxymoron, in my opinion. But it’s the ultimate anonymous sex app. Even there, you can find ways to engage with people.

and figure out like, eh, eh, eh, eh. If that trips your trigger, if going to a cruising spot and hanging out and waiting for whatever to come along is your thing, do that. I think the idea of best sexual experience is kind of arbitrary.

Trevor Hoppe (1:05:43)
Of course course.

TT (1:05:44)
and it really depends on who you are. So, you know, if your best sexual experience is going and sucking a bunch of dicks in the rest stop parking lot, be my, go for it, honey, and celebrate it.

Trevor Hoppe (1:05:59)
A plus.

100%. I always like to end with this because I think breaking down the shame of talking about sex is vital. What’s the sluttiest thing you’ve ever done?

TT (1:06:13)
Mm -hmm.

my god.

There’s so many things. I’m like the sluttiest I’ve ever done. Folsom Street, my last Folsom Street fair I ever went to.

Trevor Hoppe (1:06:17)
Hahaha!

TT (1:06:28)
Was it Folsom or Dore I can’t remember. Dore Alley. Last Dore Alley I went to. I was in it to win it. I was feeling good about myself. I was it was 2019 I was having a really good year Went there with my partner, we were kind of seeing somebody at the time they went off to have the rest of their they got, you know, they were both introverts and they went off to be.

to decompress after the overwhelming crowds of those street fairs in San Francisco. And I stayed out and I hooked up with a couple of other sex worker friends of mine and we just went bar hopping. And I found myself, I just, I bar hopped until my dick wouldn’t get hard anymore and I knew after that, it was time to go home.

Trevor Hoppe (1:07:20)
haha

TT (1:07:22)
So, you know, like I was in the Eagle eating somebody’s ass in front of a bunch of people at three o ‘clock in the afternoon. And then we went to this other bar and we did a bunch of stuff there. And then, you know, I was in the smoking area at the, my God, what is that bar on in SOMA? There’s a bar with a notorious smoking area where everybody just has sex in the back.

Trevor Hoppe (1:07:49)
yeah, exchange something, exchange power exchange. No, anyways, it doesn’t matter.

TT (1:07:54)
Power exchange? No, it begins with a P. I’m gonna, now I’m gonna have to go look it up. But so I was in the back area there and just like, you know, everybody’s stuff was in everybody’s hands and you were just going full tilt boogie. And I was just like, you know, the whole time in the back of my mind, I’m like, I gotta go get tested on Monday and make sure I don’t bring anything home. But literally like I was standing there.

And I had been out all afternoon and been having all these amazing experiences. And this friend of mine was trying to organize a gangbang for another friend of ours, because it was their birthday. And they were like, come on, let’s go. I got all the guys in the hotel rooms ready. And I just looked down and I had just like.

Trevor Hoppe (1:08:33)
Well,

TT (1:08:40)
I was saturated and I was like, and my dick’s not getting hard anymore and I don’t feel the least bit turned on. I am just so full of a really intensely slutty, like San Francisco sexy street fair experience. Like people don’t get it, what those street fairs can be like. So that was a really, really.

Trevor Hoppe (1:09:04)
I love it. I think that’s fabulous. Thank you

for sharing that. And if…

TT (1:09:09)
crazy, slutty experience, probably

my last slutty experience for a while.

Trevor Hoppe (1:09:15)
And if people want to learn more about you and the work that you do, where can they find you?

TT (1:09:19)
they can so true confession, true, true stories. I’m on a little bit of a sabbatical right now. I’m still open for consultations and I’m trying to figure out what my next steps are. I’m not seeing clients in person at the moment, but I’m definitely available for like online consultation and doing things like this. but, my website is, www .integral -eros .com.

or just Google TT Baum and I will come up on all the social media apps and you can get in touch with me and ask me questions and Yeah, we can make the world a better sexier more open place

Trevor Hoppe (1:09:58)
Fabulous. Well.

Thank you, TT for joining me. I think you are definitely having some of the best gay sex, so I’m always eager to learn from other people that I admire, so thank you.

Trevor Hoppe (1:10:12)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much as always for listening. I am truly grateful. And remember, if you are not having the best gay sex of your life, I can help. My services as a sex coach can help you identify and overcome the obstacles that are standing between you and your best sex life. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Happy holidays. Till next time.

OVERVIEW:

What makes for truly great sex? Sure, physical attraction matters, but at the heart of the best experiences is something deeper: intimacy. This week, host Dr. Trevor Hoppe sits down with Shane Lukas, a sex worker turned entrepreneur whose empathy-driven design business, A Great Idea, helps foster connection and community. From growing up queer in rural Illinois to exploring the complexities of public and private sex, Shane shares his journey toward understanding the transformative power of intimacy. Along the way, they dive into how queer desire is inherently political, the courage it takes to express your wants, and how listening—to others and to yourself—is the secret to becoming a better lover. Whether you’re looking to build deeper connections or just navigating Grindr, Shane’s wisdom will challenge the way you think about sex, desire, and the human body. Tune in for a thoughtful and candid conversation that will leave you feeling inspired to explore your own intimate possibilities.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to The Best Gay Sex Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is about intimacy. You know, if I was walking down the street and I asked a random guy, what do you think makes for great sex the best sex? Nine times out of 10, most guys might start prattling off a list of physical attributes. know, they want that big dick, that fat ass, or those juicy lips. But ask a different question.

Instead ask, tell me a story about the time that you had the best sex of your life. And I bet, although those superficial qualities matter, of course, know, not gonna lie, a big dick or whatever can be fun. But what often rises to the surface instead is that magical transcendental experience of bonding that makes sex special. That’s intimacy. That’s what’s driving us often.

to open up Grindr, or to head down to Steamworks if you’re in Chicago, or log on to Sniffies But toxic masculinity has wormed its way into our little brains and convinced us that sex is just about getting off. But today’s guest reminds us it is so much deeper than that. Shane Lukas has made something of a career out of intimacy. First, as a professional sex worker, he developed an

intimate understanding of what drives us, especially as men, to seek out sexual connection. you know, spoiler alert, it’s not just about the nut. Today, through his graphic design firm, A Great Idea, Shane continues to find ways to promote intimacy and connection through his quote unquote empathy led design services. Let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (02:01)
Shane Lukas welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast.

Shane Lukas (02:04)
Thank you, Trevor. Glad to be here.

Trevor Hoppe (02:06)
It is a pleasure to have you. I have been an admirer for many years and I’m so glad we got the chance to connect finally through my husband. And I am very curious for people out there, tell us a little bit about before we get into like kind of the work you do now and how you got to where you are. Like where did you grow up? Like situate us in like young Shane’s life. Like where is this taking place?

Shane Lukas (02:28)
I grew up in the Midwest in the rural part of central Illinois and so spent most of my life out in the fields and just kind of exploring the great vast nothing that is cornfields and soy fields.

Trevor Hoppe (02:45)
Well that sounds like an interesting place to be queer.

Shane Lukas (02:48)
There were not a lot of out queer folks back then, right? So I just turned 50 this year. So this is way back, this is the way back machine. So there weren’t a lot of people who were out, but there were some really courageous people who were. And I think that was great to see early on grow.

Trevor Hoppe (03:03)
What do you think, as a young queer person growing up in that context, like, when did you start to feel like, you know, maybe you were a little different from the other guys?

Shane Lukas (03:15)
I’ll be honest, I actually didn’t even, it didn’t really cross my mind that that was my story or my identity until I was dating a person who’s a cisgender female and now non -binary identified, but they and I had this conversation and debate about what it meant to look at your significant other in this sort of checklist, like what are the things that matter? And the things that mattered to me the most weren’t

the body parts. They were really like all these other components of themselves. And that really kind of broke open after a long discussion about what my affection, what my pleasure centers, what all these things could come from. And I think that is what opened the door. And I will say…

I was also a theater kid. so the accused of being gay and a lot of the sort of fey or fem kind of things that ended up coming out of performance and that kind of stuff is common. But I didn’t really take that to heart as that was my story. I wasn’t necessarily stuck with the stigma of it. I just wasn’t sure it was my story. I think for me, I came to it intellectually more than I think by experience. By the time I was 17, and I came out at 17, once her argument made sense, I was like, makes sense to me.

Trevor Hoppe (04:29)
You’re like convinced, yeah. When you came out, did you come out as a gay man, bisexual? What terms were you using?

Shane Lukas (04:35)
It’s a great question. I, cause back then the languages were so limiting. And I think, knew, would say by, cause, and I would say even to this day, like why, where I came to the term queer, very much felt at home. My first publishing experience was poetry in a bisexual publication or my first national experience. And so to me, I always came to embrace queer and the possibilities of queer early on, even before I could really articulate that language.

Trevor Hoppe (04:40)
Yeah.

fascinating because queer you know went through a kind of renaissance in the 90s as this like terminology that people use are we talking about that time is that when you would have used that term

Shane Lukas (05:13)
Yeah, because it actually, know, queer was already being used even in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was used as a rebellious phrase, right? Like there was, you know, I’m here and I’m queer, there’s lots of, there were uses amongst a lot of advocates and activists already of the term. And when I came out, a good example of what happened at the same time is that David Wojnarowicz work made its first national exhibition in my hometown.

at one of the state universities. And so while I didn’t identify at the same time within that story, it was sort of like it lived in the subtext of this environment where there were so many universities and there were so many people who were already engaging at that time in the AIDS epidemic, which was very much in motion. And I think I came to understand queerness, if you will, just kind of unconsciously. So by the time I came to understand it academically and intellectually, I was on board.

Trevor Hoppe (05:41)
Wow.

Shane Lukas (06:09)
But I think the conversation to bisexuality at the time was the sort of natural way. It wasn’t that I was afraid to be gay. It was that like, I can understand my sexual self in a way that isn’t limited by this confine. And while I’m a masculinist, like why generally I’m attracted more to men, more to people who are sort of masculine center. I generally understand also that I’m also attracted to people sort of in a broader gender identity spectrum.

Trevor Hoppe (06:39)
and those early, like your first forays into sexual experiences, what were they like?

Shane Lukas (06:46)
I started with Planned Parenthood as an activist when I was 14 years before I had sex. And so the first time I had sex was on my birthday with my girlfriend at the time, who was not the same person who introduced me to bisexuality.

Trevor Hoppe (06:51)
Wow. Wow.

Shane Lukas (07:04)
But it was like very strange experience for me and at the same time I loved it. Obviously before that there had been some interaction I think with different, I would say sexually charged experiences. So they weren’t necessarily engaging in intimacy but there were definitely moments of sort of friction with like my babysitter’s daughters and stuff like that. There were definitely pieces of that. I don’t know that I ever felt at home in it. I don’t think, you we’re not taught to…

comfortable in our own bodies. They’re not comfortable to be taught with these contexts. And so I think I was always kind of like, everything just felt like, I don’t know if I should be here. I’m not sure I should be here. Like, how does this work? I don’t even know how this works. And so, you know, other than discovering masturbation, which is great, like

Trevor Hoppe (07:44)
That’s a good way to describe it. Yeah.

Shane Lukas (07:52)
Those things, sure, but to have shared experiences, I think that was not something that it even crossed my mind at the time. There was just so much trauma at home. There was so much instability at home that I think my personality was just very much geared about how do I just not make a mess in life. so I think coming to the idea of my sexual self and my relationship self.

very much probably is parallel for a lot of people as they’re kind of evolving into that pubescence and through that process. It’s clumsy AF, is all I’m saying.

Trevor Hoppe (08:25)
Yeah, yeah, but what… Clumsy is a nice little catchphrase to think about what youth sexuality can be like because it really can be very clumsy for sure. When did you discover like sex with men? Like what was the first kind of experience where you were… yeah.

Shane Lukas (08:43)
was terrible. It was awful. It was awful. It was awful. Now, it’s weird though, in some ways, because it was awful, but it was also very much, in some ways, I would spend chunks of my life kind of living through this experience to explore it more. It was a public experience. It was a guy who was driving around in the downtown of where I grew up. There was this adult bookstore in the center and people would call, it was called The Loop.

which is again, many cities have similar things. I would write my honors thesis on public sex in college. So I would spend years working on essentially researching and talking about the way that public sex spaces are created and structured to sort of create affirmation cycles and other forms for people to find safety, security and connection at least on their own terms within that space. So.

without going on too long. Essentially, like, I found somebody who was driving around, I went back to their place, it was horrid, it was the terrible experience. Lots of… But also, like, lots of intrigue and there’s a certain grisly, dirty grittiness that lives within kind of these, you know, anonymous kind of things that I also have come to love over time. So I was certainly…

Trevor Hoppe (09:50)
Hmm.

Shane Lukas (10:00)
not in the right headspace to be there. couldn’t have set parameters around my own safety if I’d wanted to because I didn’t know how to articulate them. And so there are things that could have gone much worse than they did, but it was also not enjoyable. So I will go with both of those things.

Trevor Hoppe (10:14)
Yeah. I feel that it’s like, you know, sex can be complicated, right? It can be both good and bad at the same time. You can hold those things in, you know, in your hands and deal with that duality. That seems like it started you on an adventure around public sex, like maybe a lifelong adventure. like, what, does public sex, what did that mean to you? Like, why do you think that’s part of your story?

Shane Lukas (10:31)
You

You know, first of all, there weren’t a lot of other options. And so, you know, for young queer people or, you know, there weren’t a lot of places to connect if you were under the age of 21. And, you know, you weren’t able to access bars, especially at that time. So we’re in the late 90s. So between fears around HIV circumversion or fears around violence, that kind of stuff, there were a lot of limitations as to where you could connect with other people.

And so public sex spaces are and or were and still are, which is something that I’ve been really kind of interested in the current sort of space that they take. So it’s a different conversation. But like at the time, right, those were really necessary spaces. So not everybody engaged in public sex spaces was engaged in public sex, which is also really important. They became themselves community enclaves of safety. So individuals, there were plenty of at the time what we would call fag hags or, you know,

cis women who would hang around straight men, or gay men, or at least, you know, closeted men and kind of hang out. They would also hang out in the spaces. There were some people who were playing with gender identities who were also playing with, you know, were living in those spaces and may not be engaged sexually, may or may not. But there was this idea of this young and older population that would play this interweaving game.

And it was a game of affirmation. It was a game of engagement. It was a game of learning. It was a game of mentoring in some contexts. Again, sometimes predatory, sometimes not. But it was fascinating that way. And I think I came to love the sort of subcultural, socio -cultural geography of it. And I always fell in love with it. I just fell in love with it. I fell in love.

Trevor Hoppe (12:21)
Yeah, that’s fabulous. I think you’re right that at a certain time and context, like public sex spaces were critical and they remain critical but for different reasons today than in the past and different groups use them in different ways and that changes over time obviously.

How did you know what to do, I guess, is really what I’m curious with. Because I think that’s a question that a lot of us struggle with as young queer people, like in those first sexual experiences with men.

Shane Lukas (12:49)
my gosh, again, clumsy is the only word I can think about it is that we tend to be, you know, we’re all, everybody’s clumsy. mean, I think wherever you are in the sexual identity spectrum, invariably, if you come in having the rule book already in hand, one, you’re probably doing it wrong. And two, right? Like, you also don’t leave room for exploration and finding the places that you find pleasure.

Trevor Hoppe (13:05)
Yeah.

Shane Lukas (13:12)
So to me, I think what I’ve always been drawn to in intimacy is the connection with the other person. Now, it’s not that I don’t like anonymous play or that I don’t like play where you don’t have that level of involvement. Foucault was very influential for me and so there’s always this sort of fantastical nature of a dark room with just bodies hanging out and like, sure, and there’s part of me that loves that.

But what I really enjoy is the connection. Like I really find value in the humanity of it. And I think the different body types, the different experiences. And so to me, always, I think that always was invigorating for me. And so I learned by listening to other people’s bodies. Like that was really important to me.

Trevor Hoppe (13:56)
Tell me about listening to other people’s bodies, because I think people struggle with that. They want to do everything verbally, you know, with words. And obviously there’s a lot that isn’t done without words. What does it mean to listen to someone’s body to you?

Shane Lukas (14:11)
I think sometimes it just means some patience to not…

to give them contact in a way that isn’t always directly to like genitals or other parts of the body in that way. Like sometimes it is the more subtle spaces that lets people relax because the pressure’s not in the same point. And you can listen to what brings them pleasure to feel them relax, to feel them, and also just to be enjoyed. I know it sounds weird to say, but like so much, and there are places for it. Again, there’s glory holes, there’s plenty of places that you can enjoy and just…

straight -up genitalia play, like not a lot else going on, right? Fine, great, enjoy it. There’s also toys for that. But I think what I really like about the human interaction is like I want to be able to connect with you. sometimes that’s just like shoulder, like just touching the shoulder in the right way and seeing how they respond, like do they want to be touched? Are they comfortable with that level of touch? It’s interesting to me how many people are not.

And that part, think, is something that I learned early on just from public engagement and just kind of what that meant. And then in my own personal life, as I started to integrate it, to me, it became a critical piece to understand where people are at and how to connect with them, especially when I care about them.

Trevor Hoppe (15:29)
Yeah, and so like, it’s like that listening right? It’s feeling when someone kind of pulls away or resists touch and that, as you say, can be instructive far more than words because it might not even be something they’re conscious of. And that’s really adds to the complexity and beauty of sex. It’s what makes it kind of magical is that it’s…

Shane Lukas (15:52)
or they lean into a feeling they just never have been, they’ve never had. Like there are sometimes, and this again, we could talk about sort of the gender representations here. are probably, in my experience, like to be touched a bit differently. And oftentimes I think…

I wish cis men or at least the individuals, the sort of masculine of center folks who do touch them would sometimes take a step back a little bit. And I think I learned by many of the women in my history and then many of the women in my community who are very confident in their agency, who are very confident in the ways they like being touched to acknowledge that like there is something really important about living into that touch and also that consent piece. And I don’t mean consent like an overt like I need

formal consent, but that consent that like, yes, this feels good or yes, this feels safe, this feels like you’re not gonna hurt me, especially particularly in incidences where you are with people you don’t know and it is sort of— or they as men aren’t comfortable with their own bodies and you have to sort of wrestle with that. And again, all people wrestle with that across all genders, but masculine representations of that can sometimes be brutal.

brutish, you know, they can push back really hard like, no, man, just a dick. And you’re like, okay, we know how this is gonna go. Like, this is not, I’m not sure this is working for me. And I’ve had situations like that where I’ve been like, I’m not sure this is gonna be, sometimes it is, sure, I’m not, know, whatever, sometimes I’m into it. But if I’m not into it, like sometimes I’m like, it’s not for me. Like, that’s not really, like if that’s what, if it’s just transactional, it’s okay. Sometimes it’s got a place. But generally speaking,

I think it’s also listening for that pleasure.

Trevor Hoppe (17:38)
I hear you say that you really prize and value this form of kind of deep intimate connection and kind of have learned over time that that transactional, that the transactional sex is less appealing. Do you, are there some experiences in your head where you feel like you learned that lesson that were, you know, that were bad, that were instructive though in terms of learning like what you think you wanted for the future?

Shane Lukas (18:04)
It’s hard to answer that in sort of an absolute. I think it’s sometimes how you enter the space or you enter the engagement, right? Like if I’m going into a back room in a bar in Europe, It’s my expectations of what the transactional nature of the engagement will be is different. That being said, I have had some great experiences with people that I still have contact with that I expected to just be, you know, like fully transactional and were not.

Trevor Hoppe (18:27)
You

Shane Lukas (18:34)
And so I think to me, I’m always open to sort of seeing and reading where the other person is. And if it’s so cold and so in some ways very selfish, I’m really not interested in that level of selfishness. I know it’s, and again, there’s no harm in it, not a judgment here. Some people can go in and they want selfishness and there are some people who are just very eager to serve and that is, that’s great. I have a pro, I’m certainly, I have a dominant nature. So I get that.

I like a little bit more engagement that way. And so I think I can very early on tell when that friction’s there about what I want and what they want. And you just kind of, again, sometimes it’s unspoken and you negotiate and be like, I think it’s time for me to step out. Can you answer your question a little bit?

Trevor Hoppe (19:19)
Yeah, definitely. I really, I’m thinking about young people and a lot of young people have fear around bad experiences and that holds them back from having maybe any experiences sometimes. And so I try to give people some practical advice for how to negotiate those bad experiences. I guess, so maybe rephrasing it in those ways, like, do you think there are tips?

that would work for people trying to negotiate those experiences where they feel like, this is not kind of what I had.

Shane Lukas (19:51)
I mean, the number one thing I’m always gonna say is, and not everybody feels capable of doing this, right? Like having the confidence to be like, hey, we’re good. Like, that’s good, that’s enough, I’m good, right? Like being able to draw a line and be like, hey, thank you, I’m gonna step out and we’re good. How you respond to somebody who may not be able to hear that message, that takes a lot more courage and I think also being cognizant of the space you’re in.

So again, if you are not comfortable drawing those boundaries, really choosing spaces where you can be heard. So when music’s not so loud, when there’s space, when somebody can clearly get your signals. If you’re trying to do this in a back room.

with no light or an adult arcade with no light. Like, I don’t know how you’re, you might not be seen. They might not be able to hear you. There’s things like that that have to be considered. So finding ways to do that. Again, like that’s a way to stop it from happening. If you’re in the middle of one and you don’t know what to do, gosh, over the years I kind of learned how to deal with it. I know that’s not the best answer and I’m not sure that’s gonna help young people in that way.

But I was also, I have a history as an escort, I’ve got a history in doing different, in doing sex work. so negotiating bad sex is kind of like part of the work. And so, yeah, do I get a tip? So, but I hear your question and I think it’s a very valid one. I think what I wish there were were more spaces for young people to have those conversations.

Trevor Hoppe (21:08)
That’s the job.

Shane Lukas (21:24)
about, you with their friends, with other people to say like, whoa, I didn’t know what to do here. I was not enjoying this. You know, whether it’s physical, like this person does not know how to suck a dick. That is a distinct, that is a distinct conversation to have. Or whether this person really made me feel threatened, like this person really made me feel nervous. This person made me feel like they were going to violate my boundaries. And how do I do that? And I think that I would love to see more conversation about, I know.

It’s been a big motivation for me within the harm reduction movement to encourage that.

Trevor Hoppe (21:57)
Yeah, exactly. I think the idea of saying no is so easy and just like the idea of saying yes, think it’s conversely like we have this idea that we’re just going to know what we want and know what we don’t want and like easy peasy. We just say no to what we don’t want and say wait, yes, what do you… But in practice when you’re faced with a real -life human being who has feelings who might be your boyfriend or someone you really are attracted to, it’s a different ball game altogether. So I just…

I’m always kind of in search of like how to like help young people think about those situations because you have to kind of kiss a lot of frogs to get to the, I don’t know what the metaphor is, but to get to the good stuff, right? Like there’s a lot of not great stuff on the way.

Shane Lukas (22:44)
I mean, but the mistakes are, you know, the mistakes can be good. Like you said, they’re, not, not, I think the hunt, the hunt for a prince sometimes can overtake the actual moments to enjoy the experience you’re having and to remember that it’s not forever. And to take from that, there’s different versions and pleasures you may not know that you have as you learn someone else’s body and learn someone else’s, because again,

separate from threat, separate from somebody who’s doing you harm. There’s all those things that are healthy boundaries to have. But yeah, I mean, sometimes you’re with someone with a different body type or a different sense of pleasure and all of that. And to just give the chance to listen to that, one, it makes you a better lover. I mean, it really does. It makes you recognize because the person that you’re, you know, the big hottie that you’re dating right now is gonna be 10 years older at some juncture.

And if you don’t learn how to like work with them and their bodies as they age, then that will be a point of friction. If you don’t learn how to work with your own body as you age, it’ll be a point of friction. And not good friction.

Trevor Hoppe (23:46)
That’s, yeah, exactly, that’s a good point. Like we can desire what is now, but the future will be different than the now. And we have to kind of anticipate that. I think that’s productive, although I doubt that’s something many people can hear very well, especially young people, right? It’s just sort of far in the future, distant. Thinking about that phase of sexual development for you, do you?

Were you using terms like top and bottom back in the day when you were first starting to have sex with men?

Shane Lukas (24:19)
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I didn’t really bottom very much early on. I think part of it was coming out when I did. So I was 17 in what, 1991. So, you know, again, coming through college, through the 90s in college, like that’s definitely an apex.

of lot of the conversations around HIV and all those things. so I think positionality was a big part of the conversation. I wasn’t, I think I was cognizant, but I was certainly sexually active in a way that to me, stigmatizing people living with HIV then didn’t make any sense, especially as I became an educator years after that.

But it was already part of my core philosophy, I think, long before that, where I paid attention to the facts, I paid attention to the things, whether condoms and all the different, I was very rigorous on condom usage, for example, prior to prep usage and things like that. But this kind of rigor was kind of standard and positionality was part of it. And I think that eventually would come to be part of the conversation around the toolkit that people have to prevent seroconversion, HIV seroconversion particularly.

that was the big thing was about pitching that positionality. And so I think I was very much a rigorous top for a really long time, for a long, time.

Trevor Hoppe (25:35)
And that was strategic.

Shane Lukas (25:37)
It was subconsciously, I’m sure, strategic. I mean, I certainly bottomed and it didn’t happen very often, but I’m grateful that when it did and if it was, like for example, with Alcondoms when I was really, really young and I was still sort of learning by the ropes, I’m glad it was done in rural Iowa. I’m glad it was done with a close couple. There were things like that that I am in retrospect, like whew, but.

At the same time, not all my peers had that opportunity. even I was sort of, I would consider myself relatively knowledgeable then. I mean, I was always learning, like, compared to many of my peers. And I was certainly not always making the decisions that were my best benefit down the road. And I think that would inform my harm reduction work later. But I think topping was a very easy way for me to do that. It was a very easy way for me to sort of think of my risk as less.

Trevor Hoppe (26:29)
Yeah, at the time, back in the day, this is like a time capsule now. We’re talking about pre -prep era. You know, it’s crazy to think that prep is in 12 years now. But we talked about that as strategic positioning. People would make decisions based on positionality in relationship to HIV. And so that’s helpful to kind of hear what that experience is like, because I think a lot of, young people, just don’t, they don’t have a, that’s not a reference point anymore, I think, in a post -prep era.

Shane Lukas (26:58)
Which is good and bad.

Trevor Hoppe (26:58)
And certainly what a, yeah exactly, right? Like it’s just a sort of fact of the context we’re in now. It’s not necessarily value -laden, it just is.

Shane Lukas (27:07)
or a side. Like we didn’t have sides then. So go sides. Go sides.

Trevor Hoppe (27:11)
Right? I know this term is popping up everywhere. So today you still would mostly use the word top to describe yourself.

Shane Lukas (27:21)
No, I’m very versatile. I love my versatility. No, are you kidding me? But again, I’m not a power bottom. not. So I definitely prefer certainly versatile play. It’s a big thing. Even as a dom, like subs to me, I prefer them to be versatile. And so to me, that’s part of it. Because again, it comes back to pleasure, comfort.

They’re one of my favorites, one of the cis women that I just am deeply enamored with. I won’t name names, but she’s very, one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, one of the greatest people I’ve ever had collaboration with. She used to fist her boyfriend. And like part of what I loved about being in community with so many people with such levels of confidence about their bodies, about the ways they live, the way they exist in this world.

is that they always came to the conversation with this idea that positionality didn’t determine whether someone’s role. And in queer culture, it’s often been that case where that has somehow been a diminishing characteristic or it’s been a limiting characteristic. And I think, I just appreciate that the models in my life were like, it’s your body. You should work with it as you want.

Trevor Hoppe (28:35)
love that. It’s actual mentors, basically, who kind of gave you different ways of thinking about the world, it sounds like. Yeah.

Shane Lukas (28:44)
and just different ways of thinking my own body. So when I hear that voice in my head, like, I’m a bottom, I’m like, but you know, it’s also about listening to my own body. I am not a power bottom. can, there are certain times, you know, there are certain ways that I want to enjoy with it, enjoy it. If I want to be comfortable, there are certain things I have to know if my body’s not up for it, if my body’s not here. So we’re not into it today. So that’s not where we’re gonna go.

Trevor Hoppe (29:04)
Yeah?

Shane Lukas (29:05)
that takes some listening and I think it also takes a little bit of practice and being able to be in tune with your body. And I think, I hope that young people and all people have an opportunity, at all ages do that. Because I think even senior, I would say more mature population community members, that’s a big issue that I feel like I see these days.

Trevor Hoppe (29:23)
guess I’m thinking of two kind of parallel phenomena and I’m wondering if you’re just your take on them. One is the possibility that over time we become more comfortable with nuance in our own sexuality and are able to practice being like a submissive top, which is, you know, maybe as a young person not as obvious a choice. Or, and or really,

Conversely, I think there’s been an explosion of vocabulary, as we all know, that now like passive top is a choice on like sniffies, for example. And that just, I mean, what? Like that’s a new kind of phrase.

Shane Lukas (30:01)
Some of them always were, so that’s not new.

Trevor Hoppe (30:03)
No, exactly, right? So is it that the vocabulary is like reshaping us? What do think the causal relationship is there between us and these concepts?

Shane Lukas (30:19)
I think the vocabulary is just reflecting the realities that were always there. Like one of my favorite things, one of my favorite terms that’s evolved is homo flexible, right? So homo flexible to me is one of the most fascinating terms and marks a significant change in the way the gay people were so threatened by an attraction to opposite sex engagement or sort of a broader gender rep relationship in their sexual engagement because they were like, traitor, right? Like I said, my first publication was in a bisexual publication, so I was a traitor to everybody.

Trevor Hoppe (30:28)
Mm -hmm.

Shane Lukas (30:49)
And so this idea that one could primarily engage in, you know, homosexual and homoerotic behavior, but recognize that, like, I could be attracted to, or I could be turned on, or I could find pleasure from a different experience. Love it. So to me, the changes in language actually are more… they’re more representative.

And what I love is they give us a much freer sense about thinking about how we can evolve not just where we are today, but where we’re going and where we’ve been. And I think it’s important to note that there’s a temporal aspect to that too. So where you are today is not where you’re to be in 10 years and that you’re able to sort of shape your body. Maybe today you’re pansexual, you might down the road feel like you’re not, that you are more directed or more interested in a particular gender identity than another.

That’s great. I love it. I love being able to honor it and name it and put it in the room and be like, yeah, yeah, like that’s my story. So to me, love it. Love it.

Trevor Hoppe (31:48)
Love the new vocab. I mean, I mostly agree, right? Like there’s a part of me that’s like an kind of an old crotchety man who’s like, we need a term for everything. But on the other hand, especially with my students, really see they find these, they find many of these new terms like really valuable to like kind of validate their own experience that they were already having really. it’s not like it’s, know, so I hear you. just, it’s something I think about a lot, like, right?

Are these terms, some people would argue that these terms hinder us, that they limit our possibilities. And sometimes I find that appealing and I don’t know.

Shane Lukas (32:27)
I mean, the binary is very comfortable because if it’s not this, then it’s that. If it’s not this, then it’s that.

How many people live within the far extremes of that? mean, whether you’re talking about the Kinsey scale and that’s antiquated, right? Or whether or not—whatever you want to talk—no matter where you want to talk about anything, there’s no real black and white. Most of us live in this middle of the gray. And I think what I love about the expansion of language is that, is it both prohibitive and does it—is it also liberatory? Absolutely. And as a queer person, live into that because that’s all a queer is about. It is about the living dichotomies and holding the multiple things at the same hands, like testicles, I guess.

Holding them in the same hand and being okay with it and recognizing the human experience is this very complex journey. And it is this space where people are going to sometimes not even be aware of what their desires are. It assumes that everyone knows themselves so well. And I think I come from a school of Foucaultian analytics where I’m like, I don’t think you know yourself at all.

I think you are working through a story and you’re hearing it as it happens, but honestly, you’re mostly playing back its history and its predictability is very impossible. It’s very difficult for you to get to. You think you know what you’re gonna do until you’re there and then you don’t. And then you’re like, whoa.

What was that about? And you’re like, ha ha, surprise, that’s how life happens. And I think what I love about this new language, about this vocabulary, is that it creates an imagination of what’s possible when I think about my own story and the decisions I want to make. And I think that is what I fought for, that every person be seen in the language and the story that they wish to tell. And I think that to me is a beautiful thing.

Trevor Hoppe (34:03)
Is there an experience? Yeah, I saw you smile there. I’m just thinking, is there an experience you’re thinking of there where you’re like, you thought you knew what you’re going to do, but then surprise?

Shane Lukas (34:10)
I mean, there are many, right? Like there’s sometimes where I feel like I’m gonna be really bold and I’m gonna go into this fisting experience and I’m gonna do great. And I remember this one time, I was like, I was having this interaction and this guy was like, like really gonna go and then he pulls out a glove. And I was like, I don’t know that I can do this. I’m really nervous now, cause I was like, fisting, like fist.

Done! And I was like, but then I realized, fist body complicated. And then how long it took. Like that was the other, I think I’m just grossly impatient. also, unless they are really practiced, fisting bottom takes a long time and a lot of poppers and I can’t, yeah, it’s a lot of poppers. So, yeah. And I wasn’t really prepared for that. And I was like,

Trevor Hoppe (34:59)
Yeah.

Yeah

Shane Lukas (35:08)
I can do it, but now my expectations are very different.

Trevor Hoppe (35:11)
So I have sober friends. Do poppers… Is sobriety and fisting incompatible? Is there a way to do it without poppers? I don’t know because I’m not part of that community.

Shane Lukas (35:23)
It’s a great question. I am also not in that community. So I learn and talk to other people. It’s certainly been integral for people to relax enough and kind of get the sphincter kind of like to a place where they can, they’re comfortable. I imagine, like I have, I would love to try.

But I’ve never been able to get that comfortable. Like I said, I have a negotiated relationship with Zavodum and I do enjoy it. But there are people who look aspirationally at that more than I do. And I think if I were comfortable enough, I would like to try. I don’t know that I’ve never done poppers. Again, I’ve been mostly, well, I’ve been sober my whole life. And so not that poppers necessarily exclude that. I think, again, there’s this sort of wave of stuff.

That’s it in that. I think I always associate it with VHS and so my head always just goes to a rental store every time I smell it. Yeah, so I don’t know what the answer to that is. All I know is I’m always willing to try stuff, but I would wanna try to do it as naturally as possible and I don’t know that my body, I don’t know that it can get relaxed enough.

Trevor Hoppe (36:33)
Yeah, I mean, I feel that. It takes a deep state of relaxation for sure, from what I understand to get to that point. And poppers do, since you mentioned it, I was just kind of curious, because it seems to be those things are always related, but.

I’m curious, I ask this question sometimes because I think it helps us to get to some of the intricacies of how we get what we want and how we treat other people and how we build a sexual community. After you have a bad encounter with someone, and let’s say not a client, right, there’s someone outside of that sex work experience, are you willing to go back and try again?

Shane Lukas (37:19)
gosh. It depends again on the setup, right? Like sometimes it’s bad because you’re not in the right head space. Sometimes it’s bad because they’re not listening yet. It depends on any other connection I have. Now, you know, again, if it’s a random encounter, no, probably not. Probably not. Or my expectations change. Like, this is definitely gonna be like.

a hand job circuit because that’s a place I can still have my control. I don’t need to depend on them. It’s fine. I can rub their furry chest or whatever and this is fine. Happy day. So, you I can draw those boundaries about physical proximity, right? So if it’s like an anonymous account or public account or something like that.

If it’s somebody that I’m close to, that’s harder to talk about because it depends on where they’re at and what they’re looking for from it and what my regular engagements look like. So if it’s somebody that I’m going to interact with often, I’m usually pretty cautious about having any sexual encounters anyways, unless it’s somebody that I know I’m going to have that negotiation with on a regular basis. But I would say yes, sometimes if the connection is there and the emotional and intellectual connection is there, because I’m probably a sapiosexual at heart.

Like I’m definitely drawn to the intellect. But I think I would restructure the boundaries and restructure kind of what the engagement looks like. So if they’re not particularly good in a particular way or there’s just something that’s kind of a mismatch somehow, sometimes it’s just, know, cuddling and petting is fine too. There’s lots of different ways to show intimacy, you know, beyond f***ing

Trevor Hoppe (38:36)
you

Can you think of a time you’ve changed course like that? I mean, we sort of addressed that, I guess. I’m just curious, like, you thought one thing was going on the menu and then padding or whatever or something, something totally different and that became like, that was fine, like that was good.

Shane Lukas (39:06)
Yeah, mean, in terms of an experience in the past, I would say there are people who the bravado can sometimes be more than the outcome. And I think that’s more of a statement about queer cultures sentiment that one’s value is their sexual vitality.

And so they go into it as if they have to prove something and it’s like not great because it’s not really where they are and in some ways you’re just dealing with a sort of false expectation out of it. And so once you can sort of change that expectation, then you can go back and be like, well, this is who you are and where you’re at. And I like that. And I could be willing to go back into that scenario.

with that mindset and you don’t have to perform in a way that isn’t natural for you. And I found in the past when I’ve done that, somebody I played with years ago who very much kind of came into it like, I’ve gotta be all like, I’m gonna eat your ass and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

Trevor Hoppe (40:19)
MAH F*** YOU IN HA

Shane Lukas (40:25)
And I was like, my God, stop it. And it’s okay. because that’s not, we set up this thing where one’s value is their vitality. And I think about this as I age. I don’t want to go on too long about it, but like essentially I think about those things as I age as a factor.

Trevor Hoppe (40:43)
definitely that the bravado is real out there and I’m guilty of it. I think we’re all guilty of it too, right? Like, because you get caught up in the scripts and the scripts are so like, can be wild. I mean, you you’re not…

Shane Lukas (40:56)
Do you change your voice? Do you change your voice? Do you get like a bravado like, I’d like you to do me good or I’d like to do you good. Like do get that? Look at you blushing. Look, you got it, you got it right there. Do you do that? Do you do that like?

Trevor Hoppe (41:11)
No comment.

Shane Lukas (41:12)
Please, please do it so I can make this my ringtone so I can get like a good ringtone.

Trevor Hoppe (41:15)
I know, right? My husband would have more to say about that than I would, I’m sure. But yeah, I think whether or not we’re conscious of it or not, like we are always sort of performing in all aspects of life. And sex is of course one of those where it can become dramaturgical. I feel like I’m up for an Emmy sometimes or something, you know, like.

Shane Lukas (41:39)
Well, you know, it’s funny though, in talking about this, like there’s a scenario that I really enjoyed. I was traveling and I was at this bar, you know, hanging out and that kind of stuff. And this person comes up, adorable, beautiful, beautiful person. And I wasn’t really particularly planning to hook up. Like that wasn’t really the intention in the night. I mean, who doesn’t love some good flattery? So we’ll go for that. Like who doesn’t love some good flattery, some good affirmation?

I’m a Leo. I’m gonna eat it all, all day, right? So, but what was interesting is that it was not only flirtatious, but we did, we did connect. And then when it came time for, I don’t know what you want to call it, the closing of the deal, right? Like it was very tactical flirtation, adorable, I get beautiful smile, just gorgeous, gorgeous. And tactical thing. And then we’re like, so do we go anywhere? And he looks at me and he’s like, but I just want to cuddle.

Trevor Hoppe (42:11)
Feed me.

Shane Lukas (42:37)
And I was like, yeah. I’m like, I totally would have fed him. I would have totally let him f It was beautiful. And not just beautiful in physical appearance, which he also was, but just in smile and energy and all of that at the same time. But it’s also like, I just want to hang out. I really like this. I like this level of intimacy. And I think I really value that. And so over the years, I’ve been very lucky to have different experiences with that sort of scenario.

Like, the different things like that. But it was notable that it was like… It was almost like he was expecting me to be off -put by it because I think he was expecting, like, there’s this thing that like, now I’ve got to perform. Now we’ve got this flirtation. There’s definitely some sexual energy here. And now what I’m gonna do is now I’m gonna throw water on it. But that’s not really what he did. What he did was say, this is what I’d like to do and I’d like to do that with you. And that invitation is f***ing beautiful.

beautiful and adhered to him to me forever and taught me a lot.

Trevor Hoppe (43:41)
And that confidence also just like in knowing what you want and asking for it is also very sexy. It just in and of itself, right? Like whether or not you know you’re necessarily responsive to it you can appreciate just like the… It’s hot, right? To like to be so sure in that way of what you want. I have a friend, this is Anant Ecuador, but his profile headline is like cuddle therapy because that’s you know, that’s his thing and he gets so much…

action based on that, you know, like, because I think we’re all craving intimacy, you know, like whether or not we want to admit it or not, and especially as men, we’re not really told we should admit that. So, yeah.

Shane Lukas (44:26)
We don’t learn how to do it. We don’t learn intimacy. I think if I’ve employed something as a lover, I love saying that term, it just makes me giggle every time I say it, but as a lover, in intimacy, is, we talked earlier about listening to and that really in some ways is what that is. It is that confidence to know that like,

Trevor Hoppe (44:38)
Yeah.

-huh.

Shane Lukas (44:54)
The pleasure can come from so many parts of the body. It can come from so many places. And, you know, again, speaking as this apiosexual or somebody who very much prioritizes intellect, certainly I know that that’s big turn on for me. Like, you want to quote some, you want to quote some, what, Edna St. Vincent Millet? Fine, great. Well, let’s go have sex now. We’ll do it. So, awesome. Great. Good job. So, whatever. Bring it. So, I think that there is, though, this thing about

in being a good lover, whether you’re in a monogamous relationship, a poly, whether it’s open, whatever the case is, people want to be seen and they want to be heard. And I think anybody who is a good lover and of the people I’ve learned from, whom I’ve either had sex with or engaged intimately with or not, models that I have never had any intimacy with in that context, but have simply brought that not confidence in their lives and who they are, they still wrestle with all the self -esteem issues, but confidence in knowing, listening to their own body.

and being like, is where I am and I’m interested in where other bodies are. And I’m considerate of those other bodies. And that is f***ing sexy.

Trevor Hoppe (45:59)
Looking back on, and I know this is like a difficult question obviously, and there’s no right answer or probably no singular answer, but if you’re looking back on all the sex you’ve had, is there an experience that jumps out as like, this was the best?

Shane Lukas (46:13)
You know, all I can answer to that is I’ve lived in 17 cities and people say which city is the best. Every city brought its own memories. Every city brought its own experiences. What I want.

Trevor Hoppe (46:18)
Hahaha.

Shane Lukas (46:23)
What I’m grateful for is a story that’s just rich in all these different chapters and these pieces. There isn’t one that’s just the best because honestly, again, it depends on the person that I was with and the engagement I have. I don’t know. I know it seems maybe flippant or trite to say like they’re all unique. There’s definitely, you know, moments that stand out, intimate moments that stand out, pieces of unexpected spaces. Like I remember having sex in an alley behind a church on the coast of a foreign nation, like in the moonlit night. Like I’m just jerking off with this guy.

Trevor Hoppe (46:37)
Mm

Shane Lukas (46:53)
and then like rubbing it on the church wall. Like that, sure, right? Like there’s plenty of things that live within the sort of, you know, panoply of experiences that are there, right? But I do, I don’t know if that’s, can I use that word that way? I’m gonna use that word that way. But you know, I think what I’m grateful for is…

Trevor Hoppe (46:58)
Yeah!

Let’s do it. We’re here. Yeah.

Shane Lukas (47:17)
the people that I’ve been able to build relationships with, whether they were short or long term, and I don’t mean relationships like, you romantic relationships, but relationships with people that I’ve come to trust, people I’ve been in contact with for 30, 30 plus years.

that I’ve had intimate engagements with where we both see each other as humans, where we all see each other as connected. And I treasure that. Like it’s a dynamic of a relationship that also has other layers and other pieces to it. And to me, I’m grateful it’s there. And if I never have another intimate experience with that person or those people again, then that’s fine. That’s a shared story that we have. Sometimes we do like 20 years later or whatever it is. And it’s also interesting because we’re also different bodies and different people. So…

I don’t, yeah, I wouldn’t say there’s one. You’re all beautiful. All of you. If you’re watching this and I’ve had sex with you, you’re beautiful.

Trevor Hoppe (48:08)
I love that. I mean, I hear that, of course. I wonder though, maybe not in specific experiences, but what do think the qualities are where you look back and you think like, yes, that was amazing. Like what…

Shane Lukas (48:21)
How am I supposed to choose that? mean, getting f***ed in the back room sometimes was amazing and I don’t have their name. Like getting at the same time like a weekend spent with somebody I had no idea I would expend with on like a vacation ship or whatever it is, also amazing. My partner of 11 years, amazing and I love very much and enjoy the sex that we have, right? So like there are, they’re just all so…

unique in their own way because the people that I’m engaged with are unique in their own way. Gosh, it sounds so trite like a hallmark. Like I feel like it’s gotta be some hallmark card somewhere around that. like you’re special just like f***ing you was too. Maybe, I don’t know. But so there isn’t, I guess that’s what I love. I think what I’ve come to learn without getting, I’m sure I’ve been long -winded. So thank you for your patience on all my long -windedness.

I think what I’ve come to think about as I turn 50 this year right now, right? And also being around sexual and reproductive health, rights and social justice for so many years is I’m grateful that I never lost sight of the humanity of the people that I was engaged with and celebrate like the different.

body types and life experiences and all these things that I was able to connect with in ways that were pleasurable, enjoyable, intimate, fun. my gosh, joy. Joy has to be part of it too in its own right. Like there’s all of those things that for those of us who grew up in the HIV, you know, in the middle of that crisis were just torn from us. And I think the idea to reclaim that and have that as part of our bodies, as part of our experiences, that has been a gift because that was not the story that many people experienced.

that many people had an opportunity to access during that particular wave and I will even say today in an era, you know, again where we’re still seeing so much stigma about sexual behavior around our own bodily autonomy, our freedom for everybody that is just being challenged at every angle. So the joy of it and my gosh, it is fulfilling and replenishing to have that.

Trevor Hoppe (50:28)
does joy look like in sex?

Shane Lukas (50:31)
It is that ex… is that… It’s that look in the eyes when they come. my God, so happy. Such a happy thing. Such a happy thing. But it’s also that moment where they’re like, they just want to touch and like touch in a way that you want to be touched and they can see that from you and they’re reading it back. And you also are getting a chance. So to me, that’s a lot of joy. And that sometimes comes with laughter and it sometimes comes with that grin. my gosh. That…

That joy, that sort of, and that intense moment. Like, you know, again, even in my home life, you know, it really matters a lot to me that there are these moments that just feel very intimate and very, very there and very present. And I just love, like, when the pup looks at me in the eye and like, no. Like, those are things that, yeah, I just think are beautiful.

Trevor Hoppe (51:21)
Mmm. Mmm.

Yeah, I get that 100%. How do you find it?

Shane Lukas (51:34)
Find it. that’s a toughie. You mean like when people are husband hunting or you mean like in the world?

Trevor Hoppe (51:41)
No, mean literally like, you you’re gonna go out there and you’re thinking, you know, I’m looking to have this like sex that has these qualities that you think are really great, like joyful sex. Like, because I hear, you know, like I said, I hear from a lot of young people that like this is not the kind of sex that they’re finding in the world and they’re frustrated by that. So I guess what strategies have you found for finding that connection?

Shane Lukas (52:07)
Be interested in other people. I know it sounds counterintuitive, it’s strange that we have to say it sometimes, but be interested in other people. I think for me, and again, I can only speak for me, that’s what draws me in.

Like there are people I’ve had sex with who I would not consider they’re not the mom. In fact, what’s interesting is as well, I find interesting sometimes is for years, right? Like I worked with sex workers for like 20 years as an activist and still continue to support decriminalization efforts and things like that. But like I was around porn stars and was around escorts and strippers and all these people whose job it was to look beautiful. And that’s great. they and many of them I have deep admiration and appreciation for and affection for.

great relationships there. But I think so many people, including them, oftentimes approached their engagements with other people with a lack of curiosity and a lack of wanting to engage with other people. They were looking for affirmation, which is like, I want to be interesting to you. Like, that’s my goal here. My goal is that I am interesting to you. And I think…

we’re missing a piece where we are interested in the other people, whether you want to call that active listening or they want to call that whatever. But if you’re not interested in them, don’t f*** them. Like, don’t… It won’t be enjoyable, probably. It won’t be particularly great. They won’t listen to you, probably. So, that’s probably… You’re not going get a lot of mutuality out of that. And so, don’t do it. But approach the world to…

hang out with people who you do find interesting, who you do find curious, who you do want to spend time with. And you’ll find that like once, whether you’re naked or with your clothes on, like at that point, if you’re able to sort of expose a little bit of vulnerability with boundaries, all the controls, all the things that are there, but you can still do that, you’ll find that it’s a much more enjoyable experience, even if it’s just stroking out or petting or like, I don’t know, whatever.

Except for that thing, there’s this toy that you can stick your dick in called a something box, which is a very weird toy. And I don’t even know how that thing works. I’ve been looking at it for years, but don’t, maybe don’t do that. I don’t know what that other thing is, but it’s weird because they both say it’s the weirdest ads I’ve ever seen in my life. other than that, give yourself some space to be curious, you know?

Trevor Hoppe (54:31)
Do you think you can do that on the apps?

Shane Lukas (54:34)
think you can. I think you can approach them that way on the apps. Like, I think people People have a portrait of what they think perfection looks like. And again, everybody’s attracted to different stuff, I get that. But it’s worth asking yourself, like, of the things you find most attractive, do they also come with the characteristics that also make them fundamentally unattractive? Can the things coexist at the same time? If somebody’s gonna work 20 hours at the gym to look pretty,

into their job and you are wondering why it is that they’re maybe not as curious about you, that might be part of it.

I’m not saying that they’re necessarily mutually exclusive. There are people I know who are in great fitness and do a lot of different stuff and they are very curious people. But the culture of that, the culture of body image doesn’t necessarily yield itself to a space where there’s a lot of interest in other people. Just like there people who are not physically fit and may be interested in their life and that they’re focused on their problems and their only stuff and they’re not interested in curiosity to you or that kind of stuff. You should be able to listen for that.

And so you can do that in apps. I’ve met great people through apps, great friends, great non -sexual friends, great, you know, friends across the gamut. And that’s usually because I’m also interested in being a human being all the way through. Like my dick, my ass, like all those things. Fine, great. I love my fur. I love my fur. Great. But I hope that you want to spend time with me for a few reasons. If you want to spend time.

Trevor Hoppe (55:58)
Hmm. Yeah, I hear that. I definitely think you can be curious and there is a way to approach guys online where you… You seem like an interesting person. I don’t know. It’s such a stupid baseline level. Like it’s not even that high of a bar and yet man, so many of the messages you get and sometimes send, I have to say I’m guilty of it as we all are, are not that interesting. And so I…

Shane Lukas (56:25)
Great pics!

Trevor Hoppe (56:26)
Yeah, right?! You know, like, And I get the, you know, I don’t know.

Shane Lukas (56:28)
Great pics.

But the risk starts with you, right? The risk starts like, you when I have a profile and that kind of stuff, like my profiles have, you know, some of the basics in there, but they also don’t. They also are like, I refer to myself as an activist all the time. I will put stuff in there about current initiatives that I’m working on. And I actually like people who have profiles sometimes that have probably no…

whether there’s no mutual attraction or not or that kind of stuff. But sometimes I’ll just send it out and be like, that is a great profile. I love that you’re sharing a little bit of yourself and your story here because that tells me that you want to engage with the world in a holistic way, in a whole way, I guess in a whole way too, that’s kind of funny in itself, in a holistic way. But that there are things about which you want to express a curiosity in your life. And I think I enjoy that, even if they don’t overlap with mine.

Trevor Hoppe (57:09)
You

Shane Lukas (57:21)
I really respect that people are willing to put that part of themselves, that part of their story out there.

Trevor Hoppe (57:27)
Yeah, try to give, I hear that, I try to give positive feedback. People have told me maybe I have a praise fetish. I think it’s just, I’m just a nice person sometimes. Like, I don’t know that we need a word for that. That’s my old man thing coming back. But like, I will send those messages and be like, really great profile because I wanna create that environment and many times people don’t respond and that’s totally fine but I just wanna like put that positive energy out in the world no matter what guys do with it.

Shane Lukas (57:39)
You Midwesterners. I relate.

Trevor Hoppe (57:56)
I think it’s.

Shane Lukas (57:59)
I mean, it says a lot about also the sex that maybe you and I both have, right? Like it says that we are interested in people. And I think fundamentally, certainly sex is about pleasure. There’s a certain space for anonymity and anonymous play and that kind of stuff.

I get it, but like the brain is also a sexual organ and I because I’ve lived my life sober. So half the point of inebriation is to dull a lot of experience. I live eyes wide open. So I want my experiences to be meaningful. I want them to be engaged. I want to be engaged with them because it’s awesome. Otherwise I do something else. So I think it says a lot about you when you responded to people online that

I think for people who are struggling with that and having the courage to be able to do that, I think it is finding different points in your personality that you feel like you want to share, that you feel comfortable sharing, and making it an invitation for people to come hang out with me. I’m cool.

Trevor Hoppe (58:57)
than building a wall. And I think a lot of people build walls with their profiles, know this, that, or this. And it’s like, well, tell me what you do like. What are you, rather than frame it in a negative. Anyways, that’s another big mantra of mine, like make it positive. Make it positive. Like, why is it so negative? Anyway, I like to end every interview with a segment I call Sorted Lives and Untold Tales, or SLUT for short. What’s the sluttiest thing you’ve ever done?

Shane Lukas (59:16)
Love it.

Ooh, okay.

Gosh.

Trevor Hoppe (59:29)
Go through the Rolodex.

Shane Lukas (59:30)
Here’s the thing, I have epically failed. You know what? I’m gonna take a different tack on this. I have epically failed trying to do the sluttiest things I’ve ever done. I have had a room at the Parliament House and I have left the door open and no one came in.

Trevor Hoppe (59:41)
-huh.

That would be me. I feel you.

Shane Lukas (59:47)
I have tried to throw sex parties and I couldn’t get no nothing. And I don’t know if I like didn’t put it on right or like, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not some everybody’s cup of tea. I don’t know. But like I have tried some pretty sordid stuff over the years that have epically failed. And I’m always amazed at like these people be like, I’ve got 18 people for my gang bang. Now don’t know that I wanna do that but.

Trevor Hoppe (59:51)
No one came.

Shane Lukas (1:00:14)
I’m always kind of like, kudos, you you like, you know what you want and you’re able to do that. I clearly, I need to bake more cakes or have more adverves. I’m not sure what it is, but I would say my biggest problem is they epically fail. Is that my desire is sometimes greater than the outcome. And then like sometimes though, on the flip side of that, I won’t be looking for it at all. And I am in a back room with six people.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:30)
Yeah, I relate.

Shane Lukas (1:00:44)
and like life. And so I have at least chalked it up to maybe just not my time.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:51)
I appreciate that. I just like to ask that because you know I think we all have these, some people call them war stories or whatever, but like just moments that stand out or in your case the absence of those moments but I think that speaks to something too just about the complexity and reality. I just want you know the real experiences to come through because we’re trained not to talk about it in public and I think that’s a shame.

Shane Lukas (1:01:18)
No, absolutely. mean, expressing desire is courage because this isn’t the culture that allows it. And queer desire particularly, you know, is always inherently political, hence the story of my entire harm reduction existence. And so I appreciate you and bringing these stories forward and all the work that you do, Trevor, is phenomenal. And again, I think something to be honored and appreciated. So I wanted to take a minute and also thank you.

Trevor Hoppe (1:01:42)
Thank you, Shane. And for people curious about the work that you do, where can they find more about you and find out more information?

Shane Lukas (1:01:51)
Gosh, you we haven’t really talked about my company at all. So yeah, you can find out about me. You can go to shanelukas .com. It’ll point you to my company. We’re a brand communications company. But I also am certainly an advocate in many communities and speak out around social justice and equity in a context of queer liberation, anti -racism, a variety of contexts.

So always happy to do that. And I make new friends. I’m always happy to make new friends and encourage that. And if there’s any opportunities to, again, be in community with people to talk about destigmatization, whether that’s around sex work, whether that’s around queer liberation, whether it’s around queer f***ing, always happy to join those conversations.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:36)
Thank you so much, Shane.

Shane Lukas (1:02:38)
Absolutely. Pleasure. Thank you, Trevor.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:39)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much for listening, as always. And remember, if you’re not having your best sex, I am here to help. My services as a sex coach can help you identify and overcome those barriers that are standing between you and your best sex life. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Till next time.

OVERVIEW:

Being honest isn’t always easy, especially when it means going against the grain. In this episode, I talk with Acep Gates, a trailblazing gay, HIV-positive content creator living in Indonesia, where being out can come with dangerous consequences. Acep opens up about his first sexual experiences, navigating dating apps in a country where Grindr is blocked, and the unique challenges of being both queer and Muslim. From surviving conversion therapy to learning what he truly wants in bed, Acep shares the raw and often surprising lessons he’s learned about honesty—with others and himself. Whether he’s challenging stigma or licking a lover’s armpit (yes, we go there), Acep’s story is as vulnerable as it is inspiring.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is about honesty. You know, they say it’s the best policy, but it doesn’t make it easy. Whether it’s slipping off your wedding band or, heck, pretending to be someone else entirely online or shaving a few years off your age or a few pounds off your weight, sometimes it just seems like Grindr and

Honesty don’t mix. But here’s the rub. We get so caught up in other people’s fibbing that sometimes we forget to check in on the lies we tell ourselves. Today’s guest reminds us that it’s being honest with ourselves that can be the real challenge. What do we actually want? And what do we truly need? Finding sexual fulfillment depends.

on answering those questions without shame or pretense. Today’s guest knows a thing or two about living honestly, and I truly am in awe of this man. Acep Gates is a trailblazer, living honestly, openly, as a gay HIV positive man in Indonesia, a country where, you know, being out and open comes with a steep price. But he is out there living his truth.

through his wildly popular YouTube channel. Let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (01:40)
Acep Gates, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast.

Acep Gates (01:44)
Thank you, Trevor. Thank you for inviting me to join your podcast.

Trevor Hoppe (01:51)
It is my pleasure. I’m so excited to learn more about you and the work you do. But before we kind of get into the deep, tell people who are listening, like tell a little bit about like where you grew up and what it was like there being a queer person.

Acep Gates (02:05)
So guys, my name is Acep So I was born and still living in my country in Indonesia. So I’m a content creator in my country and I have been sharing my personal journey as an openly gay and also living with HIV in Indonesia. Indonesia is quite, I don’t know how to say, like it’s really complicated for…

queer people who lives here because there are lot of, you know, like some kind of discrimination, stigma, and a lot of, you know, like bad things happen toward us. So yeah, it’s quite challenging for us.

Trevor Hoppe (02:45)
I can imagine. And Indonesia is a majority Muslim country. And how has that impacted you and your sexuality?

Acep Gates (02:50)
Yep. Yeah.

It’s really complicated as I was born in Muslim family as well. And I’m still adopting religion too. So it’s really, really challenging. And especially when I come out to my parents about my sexuality, they forced me to do convention therapy. Conversion therapy, yeah. In Islam we call it rukiyah because

Muslims believe that if you are gay, you have to be cured by this kind of therapy. And I did it for one month and it was really horrible. You know, it made me so depressed and my mental health was really worse. And one day I also like was thinking to end my life because I cannot live like this. So yeah, but then

after one year. So I kept fighting with my parents and then fortunately they tried to understand me and you know like until they were fine again.

Trevor Hoppe (04:10)
I cannot imagine what that would have been like to go through conversion therapy. Were you, was that a coming out process that you initiated or did they find out some other way?

Acep Gates (04:24)
So yeah, actually in 2017, I got a scholarship to do a change program in the US. I learned about LGBT rights and human rights. And when I’m back home in the middle of 2017, so I initiated to, you know, to talk to my parents about this because I think it’s really important for me.

and for the other gay guys who have been struggling about this.

Trevor Hoppe (04:58)
I can’t, like, I mean, this sounds trite, right, to say that that’s brave. It’s like, I’m sure people tell you that all the time, but like, that’s really brave. And I admire that a lot because it’s, can’t imagine the danger and the fear that you must’ve felt telling your family and people around you that information. Do you think, what, what,

When did you start to sort of appreciate that you were gay? How like, what age were you when you started to feel that way?

Acep Gates (05:34)
So I think it’s a long journey actually to finally accept myself for being me. But I still remember like I’m totally accepted myself like when I was in the university like a few years ago because I struggle a lot with a lot of problems and I think I

I was so brave to make any kind like decision in my life and I tried to come out as well on social media, on YouTube, on TikTok and some of my video just like blew up on YouTube and since then I lost a lot of opportunities. It’s really hard for me to get a job because most of the company here will be considering your

sexuality, your HIV status, something like that. But after I come out, there are a lot of opportunities as well. know, like many collaboration, many of the other opportunities. I don’t need to work with a conventional company anymore. And since then, I feel like, okay, so yeah, how can say? I never regret.

of what I had been doing. So now I’m so proud of myself, no regrets. I’m proud of being gay as well, so yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (07:10)
my god, okay, fabulous! Alright, well that’s a journey. I’m here for the journey. Tell me a little bit about like what your first forays into sexuality were, like how did you start to explore your sexuality?

Acep Gates (07:25)
I tried to explore my sexualities when I was in high school. So actually I was staying in Islamic boarding school. I didn’t stay with my parents. So it’s really challenging. And it’s really hard to hide my desire as well because in the school we are just like boys students. Sometimes we shower together, something like that.

So yeah, but in a holiday time, so when I’m back home, I was really curious to have sex because I never had sex before, but I watched some porn movie, especially when the guy got fed by the other guy and I had some desire. So I talked to myself like, my God, I want to get fed as well.

Trevor Hoppe (07:54)
-huh.

Mm

Acep Gates (08:23)
And then I joined the online group on Facebook because I didn’t know about the dating apps or something at the time. So there was some some online gay online group on Facebook in Indonesia at the time. So yeah, I joined one of them and I posted a message that guys, I want to try to have sex and I will try to get f***ed.

Trevor Hoppe (08:24)
Mm -hmm.

Mm

Acep Gates (08:51)
anyone want to help me something like that and that’s a no and that’s a no like there was a guy who chat me me and he said to me like hey I have I can f*** you but you need to book a hotel and you need to pay me like around 10 US dollars and I said like

Trevor Hoppe (08:56)
I love that.

Wow.

Acep Gates (09:19)
Hey, I agree with that. And in two days, yeah, in two days, we met in a hotel. we met in a hotel and I met a guy and I told him everything that I never had had sex or anything.

Trevor Hoppe (09:28)
Wow.

How’d it go?

Acep Gates (09:45)
So he tried to do some kind of foreplay, he touched my body, I was so nervous, I didn’t know what should I do. And then he tried to kiss me and I vomit like that, something like that because I don’t know, it’s like a French kiss. Something like that. But you know, right now I do really love kissing but at the time I didn’t like it.

Trevor Hoppe (10:01)
no.

Acep Gates (10:13)
And until he tried to f*** me, he put his dick in my hole slowly and it got me really hurt until he pulled inside my hole or something like that. I was crying and I said to stop it, like, can we just stop? And I just paid him like 10 years dollars. In Ethiopia it’s like a…

150, you know, like thousand rupiah. And after that, I just went back home because I didn’t want to continue the sex because it’s, you know, like hurts my whole. So yeah, since then, I never had sex until I was in the university because I feel like, my God, it’s so scary. It was, was really, you know, like a

confusing for me. So yeah, that was my first sexual experience.

Trevor Hoppe (11:19)
my God, there were so many lessons there, like along the way. I can’t imagine meeting someone like that for the first time in a hotel. That must have been really scary, I can only imagine. In uni –

Acep Gates (11:22)
I’m

Yeah.

Yeah, I didn’t even know about the lubricant as well.

Trevor Hoppe (11:38)
Yeah, right. mean, how would you? There’s no guidebook you get, unfortunately. Do you feel like you learned, you watched pornography, do you feel like that was helpful or do you think that was not helpful in terms of learning?

Acep Gates (11:44)
Yeah, because they’re… yeah.

So actually it’s not helpful for learning about sex.

Trevor Hoppe (12:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, it looks so easy there, right? It’s just like, whoop, it happens. You’re like, my gosh. And then real life is obviously different. You have these fantasies of being a bottom, basically, sounds like, right? Is that a term that you identify with?

Acep Gates (12:09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so I identify myself as a bottom right now, even after the accident when I was in high school. So since then I try as well to f***, but I was still curious to be a bottom and eventually I try again, again, again, again until I do really enjoy it, like until right now.

Trevor Hoppe (12:47)
Yeah. Yeah, practice makes perfect for Cher when it comes to bottoming. How did you find guys in university? Where would you meet men to explore your sexuality?

Acep Gates (12:52)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So when I was in university, I started using the dating app. So it’s made me easier. So yeah, met some guys from that.

Trevor Hoppe (13:15)
And in IndieG is that that grinder or is it like Hornet? What apps are popular there?

Acep Gates (13:21)
Still Grindr, our government blocked the Grindr but we’re still using the VPN so we can still use it. The most popular thing I think like Grindr, Hornet and Walla.

Trevor Hoppe (13:38)
And when you’re using a VPM, because I’m just curious for people in the United States and other places where the government is not blocking these websites, when you use a VPM, you’re basically pretending to be somewhere else, right? Like your phone is like sending a signal that you’re in a different location. Is that right?

Acep Gates (13:59)
Yes. So actually only the I don’t know how to say like it’s like the internet things but the location it’s still on dating apps. The location is still the same in Indonesia. So there is no different. Yeah. Yeah there is no different.

Trevor Hoppe (14:14)
okay, it’s just the internet is coming through. Sorry, this is like so stupid question. I literally wasn’t sure how it works. So you can still see that people are close by and they really are close by. Okay. Sorry, that was my silly question. So you’re meeting guys on the apps. What were those early experiences like? Do any jump out as you as like particularly…

Acep Gates (14:19)
Yeah.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Trevor Hoppe (14:42)
where you kind of learned something important about your own sex life.

Acep Gates (14:48)
Yeah, meeting a lot of guys, especially on dating apps, I learned a lot of things, not only about sex actually, but also to know what I want. I also like learning more about, you know, the racism on dating apps and the gay community sometimes, and body shaming, something like that. Because on dating apps, we, you know, we are dealing with a lot of things like

Trevor Hoppe (15:08)
Mmm.

Acep Gates (15:17)
body type, skin colors, or something like that. Yeah, and meeting a lot of guys as well helped me to find something that makes me great in sex. for example, for the position in sex, which one I, you know, like the most creeper, something like that. So yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (15:46)
Hmm. How do you think you learned? I guess sometimes I feel like I learned through bad experiences, like, that really wasn’t good. Were there any particular experiences that you remember it was being like, that sucked or that was bad. And then you like corrected the course for the future to find better experiences.

Acep Gates (16:10)
yeah, one of the worst experiences while I was meeting some guys is they were always judging my femininity. You know, because I’m a bit girly, I’m a bit feminine, so it’s still a big deal for most of the gay guys here. So one day I met a guy and he came to my hotel and

Trevor Hoppe (16:21)
Hmm.

Acep Gates (16:38)
He looked at me and he asked me, are you working with the government or military because your body looks a bit like a masculine? But when I started talking with him and he said like, my God, your body looks masculine but the way you talk is like a girl.

So I don’t really like it and blah blah blah and yeah we didn’t have sex. So I think that’s the worst experience for me. And the other thing would be like when some guys didn’t understand how they f*** a bottom. Like some of the bottom like me I need something slowly before they you know like

Trevor Hoppe (17:06)
Mmm.

Acep Gates (17:36)
They thought me they need to be slowly first, but some of the guys that I met just they just like I was my god as I didn’t I don’t really like that because it really hurts my whole

Trevor Hoppe (17:51)
Yeah, it can be very painful. so for the first experience with the kind of femme shaming, is there a way that you try to, to like seek out men who are comfortable with that? Like, have you found ways to like screen out guys who are who are kind of, we would say in the States, like mask for a mask is like the catch phrase that some guys use.

Acep Gates (18:16)
Yeah, yeah. Most of the guys here always ask before me and most of them like ask me, are you feminine or not? And since then, I always like, yes, I am. So since then, they just maybe like consider things when I told them that I’m a feminine, something like that.

Trevor Hoppe (18:34)
Mm.

Acep Gates (18:45)
But fortunately, there are a lot of guys as well who could accept our femininity. yeah. I mean, I just don’t want to waste my time with the guys who cannot accept me for who I am. So, Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (19:04)
Amen to that. feel it’s same. I feel the same. It’s like a balancing act because I don’t think of myself as particularly feminine. Like that’s not a word I would really relate to very strongly, but a lot of guys read me as feminine. So I never know how to answer that question when guys are like, are you masculine or feminine? I’m like, it feels like either answer is wrong, right? Like, like neither one is really true, but, but I agree that like,

Acep Gates (19:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (19:31)
I will tend to say feminine more often just because I know that’s what it’s like, they’re trying to screen out too. And if they care about it, it’s usually because they’re not okay with femininity. So I’m like, I don’t want to waste my time either. It is a waste of time. I totally understand that. And for the second part about the guys going too fast, like how…

Acep Gates (19:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (20:00)
Is there a way that you try to like, do you tell guys beforehand now? Like, hey, you know, could you go slow?

Acep Gates (20:07)
Yeah, so all the guys that I met I mean I always told them like please slowly but some of them just like ignoring it and then like Okay, but I was horny and I’m gonna just keep going then. yeah Yeah, yeah

Trevor Hoppe (20:24)
Yes.

I hear that it’s challenging sometimes to communicate. So yeah, I can understand that that’s a challenge. Tops are sometimes just, I don’t know what they think your hole is. They think it’s porn maybe or something that’s just.

Acep Gates (20:34)
Hehehehehe

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (20:50)
in general, other than those things that we just talked about, like what do you think makes sex bad?

Acep Gates (20:57)
things that make sex bad. think when the guy like, f*** to me less than 10 minutes.

Trevor Hoppe (21:05)
a quickie.

Acep Gates (21:07)
Yeah, so actually I don’t, I’m not really into quickie. I’m the kind of guy who needed time to enjoy the sex. You know, so I’m not really into like rushing thing. So yeah, and sometimes I do really love long sex like more than one hour. So yeah, something like that.

Trevor Hoppe (21:37)
Definitely the quickie thing. A lot of guys are looking for quickies sometimes and I’m like, I don’t know why rush it? But so, so I guess it sounds like if you were, if you’re out there, I’m just trying to be for, for listeners, like people often are looking for advice. Like how do you avoid the bad stuff? And in this case, How do you avoid, how do you find guys who want longer sessions? Like what do you,

Acep Gates (21:42)
Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (22:06)
What do you look for?

Acep Gates (22:07)
Yeah, so actually it’s really challenging to find a guy who can f* me with a long duration but yeah, I just like to keep trying, you know, like yeah, keep trying to meet the guys when I found some guy who can f* me that long. So I usually like

Trevor Hoppe (22:20)
Haha, keep trying!

Acep Gates (22:37)
keep in touch with them and we meet again in another time. So yeah, so I think there is no particular way to find a guy who can f* me that long because sometimes I really understand like not all guys can f* me that long. Sometimes they are tired. Sometimes they are, you know, like having a lot of problems and it affects to

their capability as well when they’re having sex with me. yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (23:11)
Yeah, I know when you find a good, a good, we would call them like a f*** buddy here, like you just hold on tight and then don’t let him go, like keep coming back for more. So it sounds like regulars, like you have regulars.

Acep Gates (23:17)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, fortunately right now I have two f*** buddies. So yeah, they are really good in bed for me. So we usually meet like every two weeks or every month. yeah, it’s good. I mean like we can satisfy each other.

Trevor Hoppe (23:32)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm. Yeah, you kind of know how each other works. That’s awesome.

Acep Gates (23:54)
Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, not only not only about f***ing only about sex, but the things that I like from them is communication as well. These two guys has a good communication skill and not only for sex, but you know, a small talk, deep talk, we talk a lot of things while you know, like while break.

when we’re head side. So yeah, that’s a good thing as well. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (24:30)
I like that. I really enjoy sometimes learning. You talk, you learn about people, and it’s fun to hear about their lives. So much of the gay world on the apps, it can be so wham -bam, and you don’t say anything. So communication is obviously really key.

Acep Gates (24:35)
Yes.

Trevor Hoppe (24:50)
How did you meet these guys?

Acep Gates (24:51)
On dating apps, like I think the easiest way here in Indonesia, if you want to meet gay guys or hook up, you know, looking for boyfriend or something, only dating apps. Yeah, the easy way.

Trevor Hoppe (25:10)
And do you, well, looking back on the experiences you’ve had, all the sex you’ve had, do you think there’s an experience that jumps out as being like the best?

Acep Gates (25:19)
The best? I think the best sex that I have having sex with my two f*** buddies I think they are the best of the best for me so far.

Trevor Hoppe (25:39)
I love that. What makes it so good?

Acep Gates (25:44)
So maybe like their dick a bit… One is so I don’t know how to say in English like a a straight and long yeah long and and the other guy like long and a bit

Trevor Hoppe (25:56)
Long? -huh.

curved.

Acep Gates (26:03)
Yeah, yeah, like curves, yeah. So yeah. And they can f*** me like with a long duration. So yeah, like a good kissing, good communication.

Trevor Hoppe (26:16)
I love that. Sounds pretty passionate.

Acep Gates (26:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (26:21)
That’s sweet. Do you think size matters?

Acep Gates (26:25)
yes I mean like when I was younger I was thinking like size doesn’t matter but right now I realized that size matters because I don’t know like every time I when I got f***ed by guys who has a like for me like a small dick it’s always made

my hole hurt. I don’t really understand why, but when I get slapped by like a, you know, like a big dick, big dick in terms of Asian size, I mean, because we, for me, like we have like a different definition of big and small, right? So yeah. So yeah. yeah. Getting f***ed by a…

a big dick is more comfortable.

Trevor Hoppe (27:27)
Isn’t that fascinating? Because I think the stereotype is the, or the idea people most people have is the opposite, right? That it’s more painful. But I hear that from guys, sometimes from bottoms, that actually it’s the opposite sometimes, that smaller can be more painful, which is kind of counterintuitive. So size does matter in your book. I definitely hear that. It sounds like kissing, passion.

Acep Gates (27:42)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (27:54)
Have you ever played around with both of your f*** buddies together?

Acep Gates (28:00)
no. So, I’m not really into like a tri -sam or you know like a group sex. I try many times. I have been trying even until right now like a tri -sam or just something like that. But I still don’t understand like I still don’t know how to find the things that I like you know like during

Trevor Hoppe (28:13)
Yeah.

Acep Gates (28:27)
this kind of activities. yeah, maybe one day will find out the things that make me really like to do some kind of orgy or something like that.

Trevor Hoppe (28:42)
No, mean, absolutely. think you know what you like, right? And so I just was curious about that. So it sounds like one -on -one is definitely your vibe. And what do you, if you have the power to like set up the ultimate fantasy and make it in real life, like what would that look like for you?

Acep Gates (28:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So

Trevor Hoppe (29:17)
you just said you weren’t into group.

Ha ha ha!

Acep Gates (29:36)
only me and 10 guys and this house has like a pan room and each guy with each room and I come to you know like one room and I had sex with them and moved to another room so yeah it’s not a group sex right?

Trevor Hoppe (29:44)
-huh.

Huh.

I love that! It’s like the Brady Bunch or something. All these little rooms where you’re just moving in.

Acep Gates (30:01)
So that’s Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (30:09)
Have you ever done anything like that at all?

Acep Gates (30:12)
No, maybe in a sauna, I tried. Like in a dark room, there are a lot of light room. Yeah, I tried. But yeah, and then I only has a quick one guy. So yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (30:16)
Yeah.

One guy at a time. No, I get it. That makes sense to me. 101 is definitely your vibe, for sure. What types of skills do you think it takes to have the best sex?

Acep Gates (30:31)
Yeah.

think for me personally, the best skill maybe like being more active when we have sex because you know like in Indonesia, in the gay scene here in Indonesia we still we’re still thinking that if you are bottom you just lying in a bed and get f***ed and you don’t move or anything

Trevor Hoppe (31:06)
Mmm.

Acep Gates (31:10)
But for me as a bottom, personally, I need to be more active as well, like explore what kind of things that my sex partner like. Like for example, every time I have sex, I always ask my sex partner, do you like when I lick your nipples and your armpit or something like that? Because I do really love to, you know, like bite or lick.

the nipples and also like the armpit like licking their whole body. I love that. And some of the guys like love that as well. And most of them always say to me, “Acep, most of the bottom never, never done that to me like that. So I love that when you do it to me.” So yeah, for me, like we need to maybe like more balance because some of the top that

that had sex with me always said, I’m too tired. You need to be more active to reading or something like that. yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (32:24)
Yeah, so being an active bottom definitely is, is take skills and, and what I mean, it takes muscular skills. takes dexterity and you to stretch. Like you have to be kind of a limber person for sure. It’s kind of a workout. So the licking is interesting though. I like that little tip.

Acep Gates (32:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love

Trevor Hoppe (32:48)
Yeah, because there’s these scripts that we follow, I think. And so sometimes, like what you’re supposed to do, sometimes when you break out of those scripts, people, it can create nice moments. Like people are like, that’s different. Like, yeah, I like doing that. That’s awesome. What would be your top three tips you had for people for finding the best sex?

Acep Gates (33:14)
First, keep exploring. I think sex, in sex we need explore. We never know which one is the best or what kind of the best thing in sex without exploring for me. So yeah. And the second one, I think we need to be more, I don’t know, like a bit sensitive, like more understanding. Maybe like…

I don’t know how to say, a communication skill as well to know what we want, to know what our sex partner want as well because sometimes we need to talk about this to our sex partner and to find the best sex for us as well. And the third…

What was…

I don’t know. The pet peeves?

maybe we have to be honest. mean, like when I was younger and started exploring, I had sex with some guys and I feel like I didn’t really enjoy it, but I keep lying to myself, I do really enjoy it, but actually I’m not. So I think being honest to ourselves as well is really important to playing the best sex because

when we are honest, we will be more, I don’t know, like knowing what we need and what we want. So yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (35:00)
What do you think were some things that you were lying to yourself about?

What do you think, so you said you’ve got to be honest and that there were some things maybe you were lying to yourself about, that you were enjoying it, but you weren’t enjoying it. Why do you think, where does that come from? Like, why do we feel the need to lie?

Acep Gates (35:18)
Yeah, so I think a few years ago I met a really interesting guy and I did really like him but eventually, I mean, we had sex but in sex for me he was not really good in sex. We had sex many times but still, like, my God, I didn’t like it. But because I like him, like,

his personality, his look or something like that I just, you know, like try to keep lying to myself like it’s okay, it’s okay maybe that’s the process or you know, something like that and when these guys like ask me, do you like it? Yes, I do and blah blah blah or something like that and most of the time I always I always did like fake orgasm so yeah

Trevor Hoppe (36:16)
Mmm.

Acep Gates (36:19)
So that’s come from that experience.

Trevor Hoppe (36:24)
Definitely the faking of, yeah, when you’re faking, if that word is involved, then definitely there’s not honesty, and so that’s challenging to be. Well, that’s too bad, because I can imagine that when you meet someone you think is really great, and then the sex is not, it’s very challenging.

Acep Gates (36:32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (36:43)
Well, I don’t want to end on that sad note. But so the last question that I always ask is a segment I called Sorted Lives and Untold Tales, or SLUT for short. And this is totally subjective. But what is the sluttiest thing that you’ve ever done?

Acep Gates (37:00)
Okay, so yeah, if if and I told you that I’m not really into group sex but this This is best thing that I ever done is some kind of a gangbang thing. So I like it yeah, I mean like I told you like I have been still like, you know exploring do like about with groups like something

Trevor Hoppe (37:25)
-huh.

Acep Gates (37:27)
so like, last year there were, there were two guys on dating apps who asked me to meet for threesome. And I realized that I don’t like threesome, but still I want to explore it. And then I, I said, yes, I can come to their hotel. When I come to their hotel, I was really surprised because when I opened the room, there were like,

10 guys naked already and these two guys told me, you know, like, I’m so sorry. So actually I lied to you. So here they are like, like 10 top guys. so is it okay if, you know, like we are like, like f***ing you because

Trevor Hoppe (38:16)
Haha, -huh.

Acep Gates (38:27)
The button is only you here. I was really confused and complicated. I was a bit scared but I also curious how to get fed by 10 guys. And then I said, okay, it’s not problem. Let’s try. Yeah, it’s like three hours and then it’s just like a f me. But still, the strange things that I felt like…

I didn’t get horny.

So yeah, even 10 guys like fk me, one by one. Okay, I can handle all the dicks there, but still there is no feeling. I didn’t really enjoy it. Even like they fked me around 3 hours. Okay, I didn’t even cum. So yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (39:19)
So we need to rent out a whole hotel for you and have them all in different rooms, and then it would be the vibe.

Acep Gates (39:25)
Yeah, but in reality, ten guys in one room.

Trevor Hoppe (39:32)
my gosh. That’s wild. I mean, that’s wild. I can appreciate that that wasn’t your vibe, but I many bottoms would lose their minds to be like, my God, you organized this entire thing. you think they, because you’re very public figure, do they know who you are? Is that something you have to negotiate?

Acep Gates (39:59)
Yes, yes. So after we had sex, some of them told me like, thank you for the contents and blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay.

Trevor Hoppe (40:13)
Aww. So that’s been a good thing so far is like people knowing you are. Okay. Good. I’m glad to hear that. Well, if people want to learn more about you and the work that you do, where can they find you online?

Acep Gates (40:19)
Yeah, that’s the good things. Yeah. Yeah.

So you can visit my YouTube channel, Achep Gates or TikTok, Achep Gates or Axe or Twitter at Achep Gates Reel and Instagram, Achep Gates. But unfortunately, my previous Instagram got suspended. this Instagram is a new one.

Trevor Hoppe (40:55)
Fabulous. Well, I hope that people reach out and follow your content because you are doing some fabulous work to beat stigma against HIV and just around sexuality in general. I really am grateful for the work you’re doing from across the globe to you. It is admirable and just fabulous and sexy. So congratulations on being all of those things. My pleasure.

Acep Gates (41:19)
here.

Trevor Hoppe (41:22)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much as always for listening. And remember, if you are not having your best gay sex, I can help. My services as a sex coach can help you identify and overcome those obstacles and barriers that are standing between you and your best sex life. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Till next time.

OVERVIEW:

Reputation. Whether you’re owning it like Taylor Swift or dodging it like Shawn Mendes, it seems like everyone has something to say about what others say about them. In this episode, I’m joined by the inimitable Rodney McCoy, who has spent decades in the queer scene building a name for himself—one satisfied partner at a time.

Rodney shares how a reputation isn’t just something that happens to you; it’s something you can wield. From leather competitions to unforgettable bukkake tales, he breaks down how the right kind of rep can unlock new connections, while teaching us how to navigate the fine line between being celebrated and misunderstood.

If you’ve ever wondered how to turn your bedroom skills into a legacy—or just want some tips on leaving a lasting impression—this one’s for you.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Trevor Happy. Today’s episode is about reputation. You know, I think having a reputation has gotten a bad rap, and pop culture might be partly to blame. Riddle me this, what do Joan Jett, Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, and still figuring it out Shawn Mendes all have in common?

they’ve all put out records about having a reputation. A bad reputation. But why is having a reputation always so sus? We talk about houses of ill repute, but what about houses of good repute? I mean, wasn’t it word of her legendary milkshakes that brought all the boys to Khalees’ yard? And like Khalees, today’s guest makes the case that having one satisfied partner

can lead to two more at your doorstep. Rodney McCoy has worked for over four decades to keep HIV prevention sexy. And that is no easy feat. Most of our libido’s shrivel when we hear the term HIV prevention. But through his Listen to Daddy podcast and as a multiple title holding leather man of color, Rodney has earned a reputation for using his kink platform for a good.

Let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (01:35)
Rod McCoy, welcome to the Best Gay Sex podcast.

Rodney McCoy (01:39)
Thank you, thank you. It’s an honor, it’s a privilege. I’m glad to be here and thank you.

Trevor Hoppe (01:44)
I’m so excited to talk to you more, to learn more about what you think the best gay sex looks like. But before we get to all the good stuff, tell listeners a little bit about where you’re from and where you grew

Rodney McCoy (02:01)
Well, first of all, you know the song Native New Yorker by Odyssey? That would be me. I’m a Native New Yorker. am the Brooklyn to be exact. I’ve lived all over the great borough of Brooklyn. And I am also the oldest of five kids to, of course, the same parents.

Trevor Hoppe (02:05)
Of course.

Rodney McCoy (02:23)
I do have to say, and I have an ex who teases me about being from New York, because I’ve been living in the DC area now for 20 years, well, over 20 years. And he says, why do people from New York leave to New York to talk about how great it is?

It is it is and I just love going back there. Of course. I have another reason to be there being that my partner is there So that’s even more reason to go back and but no that’s where I’m from I think as people get to know me they’ll be like, yep He’s a New Yorker. So Yes, so native New Yorker here exactly

Trevor Hoppe (02:47)
Mm -hmm.

New Yorker born and bred. I love it. And what was it like growing up there as a young queer person? that was that, what part of your life journey did you start to think, I might be different from the other boys?

Rodney McCoy (03:12)
As a teenager, just starting to explore it, I don’t even say explore it, but just recognizing it, especially in a conservative Christian family, it was not easy. People would think, you’re in one of the gay meccas. Wow, you would think that, know, like sky’s the limit.

Trevor Hoppe (03:25)
Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (03:35)
Not necessarily, not when you’re a teenager and not when you don’t know what’s out there. It actually took me leaving New York to go to school for those of you who know Oberlin College, that’s where I went. I call it, right, it’s in Ohio, a fairly prestigious liberal arts college. Also very progressive in terms of its politics, in terms of its environment, and that allowed me to come out. So when I came back,

Trevor Hoppe (03:46)
Nice.

Rodney McCoy (04:03)
about five years later back to New York. That’s when I started to discover, wow, all of this was here and I didn’t even know it. So I would say as a young adult, particularly in the 90s in Brooklyn, man, especially in downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, that was the place to be. for those who may be listening, who grew up or lived in Brooklyn in New York City around the 90s, y ‘all know what I’m talking about. I mean.

Trevor Hoppe (04:31)
Ha ha.

Rodney McCoy (04:32)
I mean, the nightlife, the people, it was just amazing. It was just exactly what I needed to really come into my

Trevor Hoppe (04:39)
I love that. And so did you start having sexual experiences while you read Oberlin or did that take coming back to New

Rodney McCoy (04:47)
I had a few in my freshman year and for some reason and looking back, I think I was just so intense as a person, intense in my studies, intense in mingling with folks, intense in the political arena in terms of the campus. I think I’m looking back, I may have turned some people off.

So it wasn’t until I got back to New York, you know, where people were like, here’s this, but you know, I’m, I’m in my twenties, early twenties, back in New York, fresh off the farm, as I called it, coming back from Ohio to New York and, know, and, you know, being slender, you know, much more skinnier than I am now. it’s getting, you know, small, skinny, you know, outgoing, like, hi, how, who are you? And, you know, I got a lot of notice.

Trevor Hoppe (05:23)
Ahaha

Ha ha ha, weren’t we all?

Rodney McCoy (05:40)
a lot of attention. So I really started exploring sex and having sex when I came back to New York in the 90s. And I was about to say, you know, like coming back to New York that I thought I was on, what you would call it, that I had come into my own. That actually came later.

I think in my 40s and 50s. That’s when I would say now is when I’ve really come into my own sexual. But I think I had a very good start, a very good foundation coming back to New York, coming back home.

Trevor Hoppe (06:14)
Were there any particular experiences that stick out to you at that time that you’re like, this is the thing that was like, wow, this is what sex can be

Rodney McCoy (06:23)
Jesus.

Trevor Hoppe (06:24)
Roll the tape.

Rodney McCoy (06:25)
There is, roll tape. I’ll never forget and I, okay, I’m gonna tell on myself. So I’ve always been, as an adult, I’ve always worked in HIV prevention. And there was one organization that I worked for where some of the things we had to do was go do outreach in some of the areas where we congregated, socially, sexually, all that good stuff.

And there was one particular encounter with a handsome young man, we were about the same age. And, you know, so I was doing my spiel about condoms. This was pre -prep. So talking about condoms, talking about getting tested, blah, blah, blah. And I could tell he was looking at me and that was not what he really wanted to hear. So I broke my, and he was gorgeous. He was so sexy. And I was, and so he let it be known.

When I was off the clock, he was like, I really appreciate you talking to me, but that’s not what I wanted to talk to you for. And so I was like, okay, how about this? Wait till I’m off the clock. And I don’t know what it was. I think it was his face. I think it was his body, even the way he smelled. But that was some good ass sex. That was some good, good, that was some good f***ing And most of the time I topped

Mount Morris Baths, and it’s so funny because this young man, I met him in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I remember quite a few occasions in Mount Morris Baths in New York City in Harlem, which is no longer there, unfortunately, where there was an older gentleman, a professor at one of the local universities. my God, he was, oof. It was

I didn’t realize I had a daddy thing until I met him. And first of all, he was so handsome and in a very professorial kind of way that you would look at him and go daddy. And just his sexual energy was just very nurturing, very easy going. But when we would get horny, just everything would ramp up and would just and I also remember because and

Trevor Hoppe (08:30)
Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (08:44)
Hopefully the FCC doesn’t mind me saying this, but I would f*** him. And I wasn’t too much into bottoming then, but I really just liked his energy so much that when he did me, it just felt amazing. I was like, whoa. And that’s, think, was the start to me being versatile. And most times I was topping. I didn’t really enjoy bottoming or flipping.

Trevor Hoppe (09:00)
Mm -hmm.

Mmm.

Rodney McCoy (09:13)
until my 40s. But there was one, you look at what you done did. Look at what you done started, because actually, and I’m going to New Orleans for a conference that’s going to happen. New Orleans was also a place where I had a wonderful sexual experience with a local down at and I don’t know what it is about me in bathhouses. I don’t know what it is. But he was tall, you know, like that tall

Trevor Hoppe (09:21)
Ha ha ha ha!

Rodney McCoy (09:43)
dark, handsome, muscular. Maybe a few years younger than me, was in my late, mid to late 30s. He was just a little bit younger. He tasted so good and I sucked him off. And it was just delicious, know, tasting it, feeling a splash on me. I was on my knees sucking him, you know, like right there. And so I thought that was

And so, you know, after we wiped up and we were talking and we were vibing, and so I was just, okay, and he’s cool. So I was fine with talking and he got this look on his face. And I was like, what? And he said, and I’ll never forget, he said, I want to know how it feels to be inside you. And I said, ooh. And at the time I was kind of like, and here’s the other thing, dude was huge. And I’m already.

Trevor Hoppe (10:32)
-huh.

Rodney McCoy (10:34)
not that experienced in bottoming, but I was like, well, God damn it, I’m gonna give this the old college try. And I have to tell you, that was one of the first times, and I remember being on my hands and knees, doggie, and he didn’t have his own room, but there was a space, there was one open space between the cubicles at Flex, Flex New Orleans, which is unfortunately no longer there.

But so we went into that space and he just slid in slowly. And I think because I was so turned on and I was comfortable with him, I just breathed, took a breath and just let him slide in slowly. And he just slowly stroked me, slowly stroked me. And I was just, and I just remember feeling so good. It was also the first time that came while getting

And that was memorable for me because that rare, even now that rarely happens.

Or let me put it this way. That was the first time I actually ejaculated. Now, I also discovered anal orgasms. That’s a whole nother story. But yeah. Okay, you’re like, we got time today. But yeah, those are some of my more memorable times from when I was living in New York. What happened in New York, what happened when I traveled outside of New York. But yeah, I would say the 90s.

Trevor Hoppe (11:46)
we’ll get there, don’t you worry.

We got time.

Rodney McCoy (12:05)
That was sexually, that, you know, now that I look back, it’s like, you did quite a bit, quite a bit. I also realized I had developed a bit of a reputation because I was out there, I was doing whatever I wanted to do, whoever I wanted to do for better and for worse. And I had the reputation, I learned decades later that I was a slut, Rod was just after that, which there was some truth to that, but no more than everyone else.

But everyone was like, he’s just all about the sex. He’s all about the nut. You can’t really get with Rod. And I learned that from an ex who was still a good friend of mine. People were actually saying to him, don’t date him. Don’t date Rod, because he’s just about the sex. And it’s just amazing to me how I was doing the same things everyone else was doing. And I should know because A, I was having sex with some of them, or B, I was having sex with guys they had sex with. So that’s how I knew.

Trevor Hoppe (12:35)
Mm -hmm.

Exactly.

Rodney McCoy (13:04)
So that’s how I knew, it’s like we’re all doing the same thing while y ‘all hating on me. Cause I was very open and vocal and like, what? I’m a grown man and so were you, what’s the problem? What is the problem?

Trevor Hoppe (13:15)
When you live out loud, know, people always have things to say, but the truth is that everybody else is on, well, now Grindr back then, obviously differently, but everyone indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rodney McCoy (13:25)
Scruff here, scruff, because I, I hate Grindr. I do not like Grindr. So, but that’s me personally.

Trevor Hoppe (13:34)
Definitely. Well, it sounds like you’ve had some pretty amazing early experiences. I wonder if there were some bad experiences along the way that might’ve taught you some lessons about what you’re into or not into or boundaries or lessons that you took away.

Rodney McCoy (13:52)
The answer is yes.

It’s funny because I talked about learning how to bottom and I do remember there was one and this happened I think for a lot of us. There was this because I mostly talked but there were guys who wanted to f*** me. guess they I guess I whatever I look like back there they were liking it. So I remember this this one guy in particular I mean very handsome very very masculine very muscular.

who really wanted to f* me and I was like at the time because I was more comfortable topping rather than bottoming it was like, okay, we can give it a try But I want to flip and he said, okay. Yeah, sure. You can do that. You know, we can you know, let me let me f* you first and then you can do me and He did me And it was it was okay But what what really got me was when and he came

And so was like, okay, it’s my turn. He’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right. And that was very common. Games like that, well, at least among the circles that I ran in, that was very common. know, guys who said that, you’re like, who would say anything just to get the ass? So I heard of such tales until it happened to me. You know, guys who said they were top. And then when you got them, you like to wherever y ‘all were going.

Trevor Hoppe (15:01)
Really?

Rodney McCoy (15:22)
You know, you’re wondering why both your legs are

So I had heard that from too many of my friends. I was like, well, if that’s a problem, send them my way. Right. And I think, you know, like looking back, I wish he had just been honest. Cause that kind of messed with me a little bit. It’s like, you didn’t have to lie. You know, I could have either said, yeah, or I would have just said, no thanks. And you know, let’s just keep it pushing. The idea that someone would had to, you know, to lie just to get what you would want. That’s like not.

Trevor Hoppe (15:30)
Right?

Rodney McCoy (15:51)
I thought we were grown, we don’t have to do that. Another time that I also do remember was a buddy of mine had an ex that I wound up having sex with. And that was cold, and not cold, but that was bad for me for two reasons. When I had sex with my buddy’s ex, he said,

He got very cold. He was like, okay, we’re good. I’m good. You can see yourself to the door And I was like, I did and this was someone who I had known socially before we messed around and so I was like I never knew that side of you. Okay Okay And out of guilt I told my buddy what had happened. I didn’t I left out the cold part, but I said look I gotta tell you this is

he lit into my ass and not in a good way. And it’s so funny because then his ex, when he learned about it, he said, I wish I had told him not to tell him. Because apparently he heard about it too. And that’s when I, I’m not going to say I totally learned that lesson. That didn’t stick firmly into him much later in life. But it was my first glimpse

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should or be to. know, some men just need, there are so many of us out there, some of us just really need to be off limits. Especially if they’re connected to someone you know.

Trevor Hoppe (17:11)
yeah.

Yeah. And is that a rule for you now? Do you try to avoid people in your networks?

Rodney McCoy (17:25)
something.

I’m on.

Depends on who it is. Now in terms of work networks, do sometimes, depending on the person and depending on how we interact, for the most part, if we are working as colleagues, as a matter of fact, yes, work colleagues, even if they get me hot and I’m just like, yeah, I’m just like, no, I don’t sht where I eat. Not that sex is shtty unless you don’t clean out right. But.

But I’ve learned, you know, it’s just better to not mix work with that kind, with sexual pleasure. So that’s a hard, fast rule for me. If you are the ex of someone who I am close to, even if you’re the current of someone that I’m close to, either I’m just not gonna do it or there’s gonna be some conversation first. Because some people don’t mind, some people don’t care.

But that experience I told you about taught me some people do care. So at the very least have the conversation. That’s very important. And that’s what I would tell anyone. And if you’re afraid to have the conversation, then

Trevor Hoppe (18:39)
Yeah, exactly. And I think some people think it’s hard to even know what those emotions will be until you’re in the moment. And it can surprise you sometimes where you’re like, I thought that this would be cool. And now that I’m at it, I’m like, this is not cool. I totally, it’s a potentially volatile mix of emotions there. So I totally get that. What other kinds of, you know, rules or

Rodney McCoy (18:48)
Yes.

Trevor Hoppe (19:08)
or ways that you filter things that you’ve learned from having bad experiences that have helped you create some tactics for finding the good stuff and avoiding the bad stuff.

Rodney McCoy (19:22)
There are so many of us, seriously, in terms of guys, there are so many of us that if there is someone who’s not interested in me or someone who otherwise might be off limits to me, the first thing I had to learn was don’t stress it. Let it be and be okay with it. Be quite all right with it. There are so many more men.

Trevor Hoppe (19:42)
Amen.

Rodney McCoy (19:46)
that we can have fun with. The other thing is being okay with saying no and being told no.

Trevor Hoppe (19:55)
Yeah, it’s two -sided coin.

Rodney McCoy (19:57)
Exactly. And I’ve had to really, really embrace that because I’ve had to learn, you know what, I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. Not everybody is my cup of tea and I have a pretty big cup. You know, I have a very broad, you know, what I like and what I, as opposed to what I don’t like. Exactly. I have a Stanley Tumbler. Right. Sometimes it’s a Stanley cup.

Trevor Hoppe (20:14)
It’s one of those Stanley Tumblers, you know, just like this.

Mm -hmm

Rodney McCoy (20:24)
But the and the other side to that is even with that, there are still some, I’m just not feeling it. Or, and just like I can say no, I’ve had to look, the guys can tell me no too. Even if they don’t tell me no, but I just kind of get ghosted. Yes, that still happens in 2024. It’s like, okay, you gave me the message. I can take a hint. And even though would prefer people being honest, also, you know what, it’s okay. It’s okay, because.

I’ve had to learn while I’m busy stressing you or bumping my head over here, there’s someone over here. There may be more people over here who like, know, hello, what’s up? So that has really helped me in terms of really being more chill when it comes to just navigating this thing. Just navigating. Yeah, go ahead.

Trevor Hoppe (21:15)
And you mentioned the saying no thing and I’m just curious because this is a debate I have with myself basically all the time is do you actively say no or do you just not respond? Because I feel like those are both the same thing but people feel strongly. I feel about one direction or the other and I don’t know. What’s your feelings on the

Rodney McCoy (21:39)
I really do think if it’s an in -person interaction, I would definitely say, just saying, just saying. If you’re ambivalent, because sometimes there’s ambivalence.

If you’re a bifid, if you’re not sure, say so. If you’re just not feeling it, say so. I think the one area, and I struggle with this too, is we talked about the apps. I find that the apps are a space where that’s probably more acceptable if you reach out to someone and you don’t hear back, okay, they’re not interested, until they say otherwise.

that seems to be acceptable. So sometimes I’ve done that myself. I’ve been on not only doing it, being on the receiving end. I would say the apps probably are the only place where that’s somewhat acceptable. But in person, not just saying it, just just saying it. And that’s how I feel.

Trevor Hoppe (22:30)
Yeah, totally. Of course, I think the in -person thing makes sense. I’m such an internet baby that like, you know, the internet is such a locus of how I like think about having and finding sex. But yes, of course you can find it in person too.

Rodney McCoy (22:45)
And people forget that. As a matter of fact, I tend to do better when I meet people in person.

Trevor Hoppe (22:52)
Yeah. And why do you think that is? Because I think that’s true for myself as well and a lot of people. What do you think’s diff… You know, what works for you in person?

Rodney McCoy (23:03)
And let me say this, when I say in person, even this kind of face -to -face interaction to me is better because you get to vibe a person. You get to really get a sense of what their energy is. that looks are fine, but energy, if I look at a guy and I say, they look like they’d be a really good time.

That’s gonna get my attention, excuse me, much more than, or in addition to how they look. You know, because if you kind of look like you’re just gonna lay there regardless of your position or just kind of, or make it all about yourself, then it’s kind of like, or if there’s, just am not feeling this energy. No, no, no, you’re touching me. It’s like, as opposed to if you’re just being your natural charm itself and I’m just like, tell me more. Give me more.

Give me more. Yeah. And I think that’s it. You really can vibe off a person. And that says more than what any profile can say.

Trevor Hoppe (24:05)
Yeah, definitely. I have had many experiences where you think it’s gonna vibe based on online conversations, and then you get there you’re like, wow, your energy is just not a match for me. And I’m sure the opposite is true too, right guys? You’re not sure about, and then it just like clicks and they’re so charismatic.

Rodney McCoy (24:26)
Or they know what they’re doing and I and I have to say this so there’s a hot guy and that when I was in Fort Lauderdale and You know, we vibe we vibe it was just like off the chain and I’m that is that his husband excuse me, which at first I was kind of like physically I don’t But because they wanted to treat something they were married I was like why not?

but he knew how to use that dictum. I was like, whoa, okay. I might need to recalibrate some things here, because the math ain’t math -ing. I mean, in a way, I was glad the math didn’t math, because, I was fing the hubby. I was fing my friend, and then his friend was f***ing me. I was just kind

Trevor Hoppe (24:54)
Ha!

Dang.

Rodney McCoy (25:17)
This was me before I went. And I was, so sometimes you’re right. Sometimes you just don’t know. And, and again, talk about Fort Lauderdale, the same, the same event where I met this guy, there was another guy who I had met online and looks wise, I was kind of like, I’m not really feeling it. And I didn’t really give him that energy.

when I happened to be at this event where there was a f*** party. And there was this older gentleman who I kind of like, you know what, I’m liking his energy and we had so much fun. And then we looked at each other, was like, I know you, yeah, we were talking. And so at the time we were like, we need to do this again. And I was really into it. We did not hook up again, unfortunately, because that happens sometimes at events like

But that was a lesson for me. It’s like, you know, sometimes, yeah, there is a difference between what is online versus what’s in person.

Trevor Hoppe (26:25)
Amen. And do you have any tips for people to like, suss out the vibe online? Because I feel like that’s the biggest challenge.

Rodney McCoy (26:33)
I would say if a person is willing to talk, if they’re willing to chat, that is the first main thing for me because I’ve seen some guys put in their profile, I’m not here for the back and forth, I’m not here to make small talk and on the one hand, I get it, we know what we’re all here for, thank you for being very clear. But that also said to

you’re probably a pus bag. so, and yes, pus bag, exactly. So a little bit about that. So as a top, I love fing. I love aholes literally. So my current partner was like, well, I hate saying current partner, like they’ll be the next one. So my baby, my baby was like, but you like a*holes. And he had firsthand experience of my love for

So we were like, doesn’t make sense to say, to call someone an a**hole when it’s clear you like them. So that’s how we were like, well, so what would be a body part, something with a body that would just be like so disgusting. And that’s where we came up with the pus bag. So, right. So, and so even though I get it, you’re on here, you’re not about to chit chat, you’re like, let’s just get it done, but it still has a whiff of the pus bag about it. So if someone is willing to talk.

Trevor Hoppe (27:41)
repulsive.

I like that.

Rodney McCoy (28:00)
by, you know, answer questions and also talk, you know, like find out about what they like and what you like. I think that’s a good start. You know, it’s like, yeah, that might be. And if there’s consistency, you know, I think those, that’s a good way to start.

Trevor Hoppe (28:17)
Definitely a good way to start and it’s hard to get a handle on some time and I struggle with it as well because sometimes you’re just, you’re looking and someone’s interested but they’re just not giving you what you need to get there and it can be sometimes hard to sort of set that boundary for yourself. like, whatever’s on the other side of this door, you know, just not willing to kind of risk it given their inability to communicate. So I feel that. Communication, I guess.

Rodney McCoy (28:42)
right and and and just like guys who say i don’t want to communicate they’ll put that in their profile those of us might be like let’s communicate let’s buy we can put that in our

Trevor Hoppe (28:57)
I like that. So not just being negative about it, being positive, being like, this is what I want. I, you know what? I’m going to put that in my profile like now, because I think you sometimes have to put out what you want to receive in the world. And that is one good. So that is a tip I really appreciate to put it out there. So thank you for that. Before we segue to the good stuff, I just want to stop one more little train station. I’m curious.

Rodney McCoy (29:13)
you’re welcome.

sure.

Trevor Hoppe (29:27)
After you’ve had a bad encounter with someone, are you ever willing to go back for seconds?

Rodney McCoy (29:34)
It depends. And I’m going to say it depends what the bad experience is. If the bad experience is a person didn’t maybe wasn’t as fresh, wasn’t as clean, didn’t clean as well as they thought. Yes. If everything else was otherwise good.

I would go back and be like, hey, you weren’t as fresh doing me. And I’ve also had to learn, and this is where bottoming for me helped too, because I was one of those plus bag tops. Ooh, you painted on me. Ooh, you weren’t quite as fresh. Ooh, I’m never going to have sex with you again. ooh, girl, let me tell you what happened with so and so and so and so. I was that top. I was

It was only when I started bottoming that I realized, you know what Rod, you’re a pus back against the top. You need to chill. So, right, exactly. And I don’t mind telling all myself even. So, know, so things like that, I’ve learned showing some grace around, you know, if a guy’s not too clean, you know, either give him a chance to clean up or maybe not today.

But let’s try again another time, especially if everything else is going well. There have been some situations either because we’re just not compatible, the energy is not there, it feels like I’m doing all this work or I’m not getting, like for example, guys who, for me, I like noise. If a guy is just so quiet or there’s no gesture, just kind of like,

And I believe when they say I’m enjoying myself and I’m just like, but I’m not

a guy who doesn’t know how to listen to me. In fact, I did have to tell this guy. No, because bottoming especially, it’s like I’m trusting you. So if I say slow down and you don’t slow down, you know, and right now I’m not even talking about consent violation, borderline sexual assault. I’m talking about you don’t know how to listen to me and I’m trusting you with my body. So apparently no.

And I had to tell someone because he enjoyed it. I said, no, you know, you’re about you. You don’t know how to listen to me. So, no, it wasn’t fun for me. So, yes, to answer your question, I’ve had some experiences where I did not and would not after if it was like that, if it was just incompatibility or you’re not listening to me or care about me.

Trevor Hoppe (32:01)
Yeah, I think those are the moments where, you know, we learn a little bit of humanity sometimes in the way we treat people and also just learn a little bit about what we need and deserve.

Rodney McCoy (32:14)
How about that? And I think a lot of us, and particularly as gay and bisexual men, how we come into our own is so much shrouded in shame and punishment and belittling. So we almost feel like we have to be secretive. And yet the thing about sex that makes it work is when you can talk about what your desires are. But at the same time,

Trevor Hoppe (32:15)
Yeah, deserve. We deserve things.

Rodney McCoy (32:40)
We’re taught to hide our desires and just our desires to get sexual with other men. And that’s not even talking about cake. That’s not even talking about different forms of relationships. You know, just the idea of me desiring someone of the same sex or both sexes or all sexes, you know, that I’m not hetero, you know, that. And I think that sometimes feeds into that sense of shame, that sense of I can’t really let anyone know what I’m about.

can probably lend itself to some of the bad experience.

Trevor Hoppe (33:13)
Thinking back on all the sex you’ve had in your life, you don’t have to think about a specific experience maybe, but if one comes to mind, but like what do you think looking back counts as like best sex, either a specific experience or context or like what gets you there?

Rodney McCoy (33:31)
Hmm, that’s sense. Well off the top of my head noise. Noice. Topping or bottoming or flipping or borrow or whatever. I need noise. Because noise says to me, A, whatever I’m doing you’re enjoying it and I love that.

Trevor Hoppe (33:49)
Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (33:50)
It also shows yeah, I love that it also shows that you know, you’re uninhibited You’re really in the moment that encourages me to be in the moment with you. I love noise I love those sex noises definitely That to me is best sex best sex is When I can say what I want you to do and you can tell me what you like me to do for example

If I can say, watch the teeth, careful of the teeth, and you’re like, ooh, sorry, and then you just adjust accordingly, that is good sense. Not getting offended or embarrassed. No, it’s just like, the thing is is that I’m learning you, you’re learning me. We have to communicate what we like. If I can communicate what I like, if you feel comfortable communicating to me what you want.

Trevor Hoppe (34:28)
Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (34:42)
In fact, I do kind of like it. was talking with a friend of mine who’s straight, who’s hetero, and we were listening to some songs where these women who are rappers or singers are really assertive in terms of what they want their partner to do. And he’s getting into it. And I was just like, do you like it when a woman tells you what she wants? And he just looked back and said, yeah.

And I realize I’m the same way when it comes to, and I’ve had my own experiences with women and I like an assertive woman too, but it’s really guys and guys who own what they like, whether it’s being dicked down, whether it’s, you know, me coming on their face, you know, whether, and if you love me eating ass, we are golden. That’s one of the things that definitely I

eating ass as the act in and of itself as the prelude to what’s next and a guy who loves me eating his ass. mmm. And God help me if you like eating ass too, because I don’t get enough of that. I live in DC. It truly is bottom city. And so, you know, so on the one hand, it’s great because I get to eat ass, but then it’s like, but this verse top loves his ass eating too. So someone who loves doing that, I’m just like, aw, come on.

Trevor Hoppe (35:39)
That does

Rodney McCoy (35:58)
So I mean, I hope this kind of answers your question in terms of what to me is good sex.

Trevor Hoppe (36:03)
Yeah, the noise is key. And like when you say noise, I’m assuming we’re talking about a broad spectrum of things. Is there a thing that like, I don’t know, what do you feel like it does for you, the noise?

Rodney McCoy (36:17)
The noise lets me know you’re enjoying yourself. It lets me know that you’re present. It lets me know, particularly if I’m topping, that what I’m doing to you is really turning you on. And that strokes my ego. I think tops miss the point when they make it all about their nut. It’s like, no, dude, you need to make sure your partners are satisfied for two reasons. One, they’ll come back.

Trevor Hoppe (36:30)
Mmm.

Rodney McCoy (36:46)
they’ll come back. Number two, they’ll tell their friends.

Trevor Hoppe (36:50)
I love

Rodney McCoy (36:52)
And they’ll tell their friends. what that means is it does that sometimes it does mean that you’ll get some friends who will want to get with you too. And that’s an ego stroke. or sexual experience in the making. But it’s also a way and I’ll admit to build a reputation. You know, if we let’s be honest, you know, I think as men in particular. We like having a good reputation on anything we do.

He’s great to hang out with, he’s great to talk to, he’s a really good listener. he’s a great worker. He’s a great f**k.

So my whole thing is, whether I get with your friends who are not with your, you know, with your permission, going back to what we talked about earlier, the fact that guys have something good to say. In fact, there’s this dude I wanted to get with for years, who at one time looked at me and said, I’ve heard about you. And what did you hear? And he just smiled and walked away. I was like, okay. All right. Yeah.

So it’s a win -win for tops to focus on their bottom partners. It really is. It’s not about what they do for us. It’s what we do for them. And so noise is like, it says to me, noise is like, you’re a grown ass man. You’re a grown ass man. You’re comfortable in your sexuality, which is a turn off for me.

And it’s like, you’re not afraid to express when something feels good. And especially if something I’m doing to for or with you makes you feel that good. God, it’s such the huge turn on. Yeah. Noise. Noise and kissing. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (38:28)
I love that. Do you find, this isn’t a side, but in my experience, Americans are very noisy and then when I go abroad, people are less so if you had that experience at

Rodney McCoy (38:42)
I have not had as much experience as abroad when it comes to sex. And the guys who are foreign born who come here almost feel like they’ve got the space now to make boys. yeah, so I really can’t comment again because of my relative lack of experience with sex abroad.

Trevor Hoppe (39:05)
No, that’s, totally get it. just one of those things that I hear from like my French, one of my friends is French is like, gosh, you Americans are so loud in bed. And, and he was like, French people are not loud at all. And, it fascinates me because I like the noise too. So I think of it as a good thing and a form of communication. But my, French friend was like very put off by it. It was like, you’re too noisy, but I love the noise. So I’m here for it. So.

Is it important for you whether you’re partner orgasms? Thinking of like best sex, like how does orgasm factor

Rodney McCoy (39:40)
The truth is yes, it is important to me. Whether it’s ejaculation or an assgasm or both. I like and I’ve always been the top who really gets off on pleasing his partner. That does more for me than getting my own nut. So when you’re coming, when you’re orgasming, when you’re assgasming, when you’re shooting, that makes my dick harder.

Trevor Hoppe (39:48)
Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (40:08)
that gets me physically hotter. That just puts a smile to my face. That’s just like, yeah. You know, even to the point where if I’m having sex and I’m kind of ambivalent about coming, I’ll be like, no, I’m good. I’m good. trust. I’m good.

Trevor Hoppe (40:23)
Yeah, so for you, actually, it’s more important that they come than you yourself.

Rodney McCoy (40:30)
Because I can always take care of myself. For better and for worse I can. No, I’m gonna put a better on that I can always take care of myself if I have to You know if he wants to see me come, know, and I’m feeling if I’m not feeling it I’ll be like I’m not feeling but if I’m feeling it I’ll be like, okay Give me a few minutes if he comes first. So it’s like I can always take care of myself, but I love the idea of

Trevor Hoppe (40:30)
Interesting.

Rodney McCoy (40:53)
him really enjoying himself because again I like pleasing my partners and honestly it does kind of build a good reputation, “Oh, he’s a good top!”

Trevor Hoppe (41:02)
I love the reputation idea. I had not considered that, but of course it makes sense when you think about it that word travels.

Rodney McCoy (41:04)
Yeah!

Yeah, I mean, we’re sitting here talking about sex publicly. You know, imagine if you and I, if it wasn’t an interview, but it was just Trevor and Rod talking, you know, and there might be some names that we might privately even say some names. let me tell you about this dude. Because, oof, you know, and that’s just how and that’s just how we do. So for those of us who think I can treat my partners topping or bottoming any old kind of way.

And that’s why when people will be like, well, I understand why I can’t get with such and such and such and such or or people don’t seem to gravitate toward me. I don’t understand why. You know, where’s my imaginary cup of tea like?

I’ve heard about you.

You might want to rethink that, that thing that you do and that thing you don’t do. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (42:00)
My mouth, my lips are sealed. sure I don’t know anyone like that.

Rodney McCoy (42:05)
You know and and and if it’s just me I will own that my experience has been and I’ve been on both sides of that so

Trevor Hoppe (42:15)
I’m sure we all, I think I say this to my friends all the time as I’m showing my friend a Grindr profile, I’m like, my God, how many people have shown other people my Grindr profile and said X, and Z about, right? Like, of course they have.

Rodney McCoy (42:27)
And I never even thought about that, because I was just thinking in terms of live conversation with your boy or with your best girl or with your good Judy. But I didn’t even think about the profile. It’s like, my partner and I did something like that similar just recently. And it was so funny, because I was just on, like, we’re grins and giggles, because I do that sometimes when I travel. It’s like, who’s going to pop up? Who’s around?

Trevor Hoppe (42:41)
Yeah.

Exactly!

Rodney McCoy (42:54)
And he happened to be with me. I was like, look, baby, look. Look who all is here. And he recognized one or two people. So I was like, yes, it truly is. Truly is.

Trevor Hoppe (43:02)
It’s a small gay world sometimes.

Thinking about that best sex, if you had the power, if you had that like Thanos glove and could snap and just turn fantasy into reality and make like that fantasy come to life, like what would that best sex fantasy look like to you?

Rodney McCoy (43:22)
I’m trying to think well first of all I have I have fantasy of and I might as well put it up put it out there here I have a fantasy of having sex with identical twins that has always been a fantasy of mine that I have always wanted to have so definitely a hot pair of and we’re men of a certain age so if I say a hot pair of double mint twins

Trevor Hoppe (43:47)
-huh.

Rodney McCoy (43:48)
so yeah, something like that. ooh, what else? What else?

Alright, so I have a birthday coming

I have always wanted to have a birthday orgy where, yeah, where I f* all the bottoms, all the tops of the verse, f* me, then it’s a free for all, and then when everyone decides they wanna come, it’s one big bukkake scene on yours truly.

Trevor Hoppe (44:18)
Fabulous, that sounds attainable.

Rodney McCoy (44:21)
I’ll probably wait a year or two because I was with someone last year Where I was like help me put this together. I was dating someone so I was like, you know, you’re a freak I’m a freak help me put this together. It never happened It never happened. So it did not happen. So But yeah, I I do want a birthday orgy at some point I really do

Trevor Hoppe (44:36)
Yeah? Aww.

Rodney McCoy (44:47)
I probably, if I think of something else, and of course different celebrities and things like that, I’m just like, God, there are too many to name. There really are. Idris Elba is at the top of the list.

Trevor Hoppe (44:55)
Who does it for you?

my gosh, yeah, he could.

Rodney McCoy (45:07)
So could Henry Cavill.

Trevor Hoppe (45:10)
that’s a big man.

Rodney McCoy (45:12)
I like to climb trees. yes. Let me see. Who else? else? You know what? For some reason, you know what? It’s the, I think it’s the Deadpool thing, but Ryan Reynolds has a body on him and he’s so snarky. It’s like you’re so snarky with that mouth. What else do that mouth do?

Trevor Hoppe (45:13)
Ha ha ha ha!

Rodney McCoy (45:33)
So Ryan Reynolds, God, who else? I just took one of these like online Facebook quizzes where, so I’m gonna have to think about that. Certain celebrities, know, sports figures, like pretty much damn near a lot of the guys at the Olympics this year. my God, my God. The pole vaulter. the,

Trevor Hoppe (45:52)
yeah. The pole vaulter.

Rodney McCoy (46:00)
The Turkish guy with the gun who just looked like he just walked off off the street. Just decided to shoot a few things and got a silver medal, but he’s hot though. Noah Lyles, Noah Lyles kind of like, okay, I see you. I know what we can do with some of those medals. Who all else? Marcell Jacobs from Italy. You have Marcel, one L, Jacob. yes.

Trevor Hoppe (46:06)
The shooter.

Ugh. Mm -hmm.

I’ll have to check them out. Yeah, they are pretty at the Olympics for sure. you’re pretty.

Rodney McCoy (46:31)
my God, my God. I would be like Janet Jackson, one of her earlier hits, No Sleep. No Sleep. wait a minute, and Frederick Richard and Stephen the pommel horse guy. Those two, those two. Woof, woof. mm -hmm, yeah. I’m a bit of a freak, so.

Trevor Hoppe (46:46)
so cute. So

I love that you focus, you have very like focused ideas of like hot, it’s like attached to bodies in a particular, sometimes I ask this question and it’s so abstract, but you’re like, you know, you know what you want. And I love that. That’s very.

Rodney McCoy (47:12)
I like what I like and there’s a and for me what I also appreciate is that for me there’s this wide range of what I like, of what turns me on. It’s a combination of yeah, the Stanley Cup, you know. So it’s like you have a pretty good chance with me. Pretty good chance if you’ve got a handsome face and a decent, nice or tight, hot, whatever tight and hot is, yeah. And you’ve got a personality to match.

Trevor Hoppe (47:21)
the Stanley Cup.

Rodney McCoy (47:41)
and freak energy, freak energy, whatever that freak energy is, whether it’s obvious or, you know, like where it’s just, you you step into a room and your freak flag is like up. The sexy nerdy thing gets me too. In fact, the pommel horse guy embodies with his body, embodies sexy nerd. It’s like, yeah, mm -hmm. He’s got a girlfriend.

But if he ever, and if he does play for the other team, he’s gonna have me

Trevor Hoppe (48:11)
what is, this is a term that people throw around, but I don’t think anyone ever really defines. Like, what does freak mean to you?

Rodney McCoy (48:20)
There’s a key syllable and that is free. And when I think of freak, a person who is free with their desires, yeah, a person who is free with their desires. They can name it, they can claim it, they have no problem expressing it, they have no shame about it. Yeah, I don’t do the walk of shame, I do the stride of pride. And that to me is right, right.

I what am I ashamed for? I got a recommendation. What am I ashamed for? You know, there were two or three nuts between us. What am I ashamed for? We made noise. And that’s what a freak is. He, she, they are so free in terms of who they are sexually. That shame has no place in it. And they’re willing to do and explore and be whoever they are sexually.

That to me is a

Trevor Hoppe (49:16)
Emphasis on the free and freak. think that’s fabulous and helps me because it’s something that I, maybe I’m gonna add that to my profile too. I got a lot of things to add to my profile after this conversation.

Rodney McCoy (49:28)
You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

Trevor Hoppe (49:31)
What kind of skills do you think it takes to have the best sex?

Rodney McCoy (49:34)
Wow Communication That’s I would say that would be the number one, you know, there are I think many things up in here that we like and that we’d like to do But it needs to be able to come here to be able to say this is what I want to do. That’s the number one skill

I would say that’s the number one skill, communication. This is the other thing too. When we say, you you should know, you should know, you know, even for those of us who are sexually active and have been for a while, if we don’t satisfy our partner, the whole either in the moment or in general, then it’s like, well, you should know this, you should know this. And I’m like, dude, this is the first time I’m having sex with you. I don’t know you, not really.

Yeah, and to me, such statements like that are like, don’t project onto the other person the work they’re not doing because you didn’t do the work yourself of really knowing what you like, how you like it, and more importantly, to effectively say, this is what I want. That’s why if guys say, you know, to me doing sex not so hard or harder, whatever that is, to me, that’s perfect because it’s like, okay, now I know what to do. If it’s like,

Not there, but here. Again, I need to know that. Or you missed a spot. Again, I need to know that. know, some guys are extremely hardwired in their nipples. Some are not. You know, some guys, exactly. Some guys love to have their asses eaten. Some can take it or leave it. Again, that’s the one thing where I’ll say that’s because you haven’t had it done right. That’s the only thing.

Trevor Hoppe (51:00)
Amen. Some don’t like it at all.

Ha ha ha

Rodney McCoy (51:15)
Some guys like to have their dick sucked. Some of us do not or some of us are ambivalent You know some of us some of us don’t like teeth. Some of us don’t mind a little sweeping I Found that out not too long. I was like, okay I’d rather have dentures that I can pop out rather than scrape a dick But you know again if you tell me that’s okay that turns me on then I’ll be like, okay, where are my canines? so

Trevor Hoppe (51:21)
Yeah,

Rodney McCoy (51:42)
But so it goes back out. I would say that’s it. Communication. And also knowing what you like. Because…

Trevor Hoppe (51:42)
Communication, yeah.

Yeah, that takes time, right? I mean, that’s so hard. think even, you know, as I’m in my, just, turned 41 recently and it’s still amazing when you learn new things. Old dogs can be taught new tricks, it turns out, but there is a baseline that you need people to be in touch with and, yeah.

Rodney McCoy (52:00)
Yes. Yes.

I would agree, yeah. And being able to communicate that. And to listen. And to listen. Just because five guys before you said they liked that thing, and the sixth guy was like, not so much, you know. And I’m gonna own my stuff. Once upon a time I would be in my physical damn everybody else would do, why don’t you like it? And that goes with the same and hearing no. If they don’t like that, then the next question is, okay, then what would you like me to do? What does

So yes, being able to listen.

Trevor Hoppe (52:38)
What tips would you have for young queer men out there trying to find that best sex but struggling to find

Rodney McCoy (52:44)
The first question I would have is what are you struggling around? If you’re struggling around with being okay with being sexual, what I would, and this is not a read, this is for real. know, counseling is a good thing. A gay sex positive counselor, because there’s a lot of messaging around, particularly men having sex with each other. For some reason, women having sex with each other,

I’m not going to say it’s 100 % acceptable, but women can get a pass. You know, it can be exoticized even, not necessarily for the better, but at least the idea isn’t foreign to a lot of people, but there’s still even a tad more shame and judgment passed still for our sex between each, between, between guys. That’s a lot to unpack to really get to heaven to get. Yeah.

Don’t be ashamed if you need to speak to a counselor about it. That’s number one. Because God knows even in terms of learning how to bottom, there’s some internal mental stuff that I had to get past as well. Eventually I had to talk to people and not just the therapist, but even guys who bottomed it. It’s like, well, how did you navigate this? Or what do you think of this? So one, check the messaging. That’s the big thing. Because once we can get past the shame and the guilt, then it can be

masturbate and play with yourself. You know, a lot of times people treat masturbation like it is the, how do I put it, the appetizer. Or no, no, no, it is the, how do I put this?

It’s what you do in the meantime until you get the real thing. And masturbation is not a placeholder. It is not a filler. It is a viable experience because that is how you learn how you like to have your dck scked That’s how you learn if you like to play with other parts of your body, how you like to be stroked. Again, what other parts of your body you like to be touched. What kind of pressure do you like? Do you like a light touch?

Trevor Hoppe (54:27)
Mmm. Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (54:52)
You need something firm. Toys. Toys for your dick. Toys for your ass. Toys, you know, to play with other parts of your body. You know, different types of lube Masturbation, self -play, solo play. I can’t emphasize that enough. That also helped me bottoming. It still gets me through if I don’t, I live in DC. So I don’t always, I don’t always get the dick that I want when I want it.

Trevor Hoppe (55:02)
Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (55:21)
the toys come in handy and it also helps me prepare. I’ve got toys dildos of different sizes and different thicknesses. So it helps me to play with different textures, different lengths in different positions. So when I finally do get some dick, it’s like, okay, I’m more ready. know, that’s one of the ways I would say to young men, don’t be afraid to play yourself and don’t be afraid to play with yourself because if I’m playing with you, I want to know what you like.

you can have a better way to tell me. And don’t be afraid to have sex with more than one person because that’s how we learn. know, guys, we do different things with guys, they do different things with us. That’s also how we learn. And with that, I would say, don’t forget condoms, PrEP, DoxiePep, getting tested every three to six months. That’s, in my work in HIV prevention, what I tell young men

Trevor Hoppe (55:52)
Mm -hmm.

Rodney McCoy (56:18)
If you want to play the grown -up game, you gotta know the grown -up rules. And those are the rules. Everything I’m saying right now, these are the grown -up rules. This is how you get to being like us.

Trevor Hoppe (56:31)
Playing the big leagues. I like that. Get that Stanley Cup. All these sports analogies.

Rodney McCoy (56:32)
Playing in the big leagues. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am a guy who loves sports, so I do. Football season is coming, kind of unintended. And like I tell any guy that I’m with, it’s like, be prepared to join football with me or at least be okay to be a football widow, or widower, excuse

Trevor Hoppe (56:54)
I mean, I love the outfits for sure. It’s, yeah.

Rodney McCoy (56:58)
I love both, especially when they’re playing the game in the rain and they’ve got those light colored jerseys and pants and the moisture is showing everything while you are doing that Hail Mary pass to win the game that I bet on. I’m one of those few gay guys who really enjoy the game and not just the players themselves, but I actually enjoy the game itself.

Trevor Hoppe (57:23)
Well, I like to end with the same question every time. A segment I called Sorted Lives and Untold Tales or SLUT for shirt. What’s the sluttiest thing you’ve ever

Rodney McCoy (57:32)
yes, that’s right.

Now I’m almost embarrassed to mention it. So the first time I went to, God, there are two stories. I, I can make two quick stories? Okay, so one of the sluttiest things I did was, well, this was kind of mild in comparison, but the first one was kind of mild where I was in Montreal and I was with a partner at the time

Trevor Hoppe (57:46)
Absolutely.

Rodney McCoy (58:04)
things quite bluntly things were not good things were not good and I was like you know what he’s gone to bed I still want some action I want something I didn’t know what so I went so the hotel we were staying at had a bar downstairs so I just decided okay let me just go on some shoes and an oversized t -shirt it was the 90s and that was all and I went downstairs mixed and mingled

And some guys, know, and I wore it low enough that you couldn’t exactly see, but if you look real closely, you could, and some guys were like, is that the only thing you’re wearing? It’s like, maybe, maybe.

Trevor Hoppe (58:43)
I love that!

Rodney McCoy (58:43)
And again, ironically nothing happened, sexual, but I got a lot of attention and I got a lot of energy. I did. No.

Trevor Hoppe (58:51)
-huh. Were you wearing underwear?

Dang! Bold!

Rodney McCoy (58:56)
No, no, no jockstrap. No, I was bold. again, but it came out of the space of like just wanting some kind of attention. And ironically, and again, nothing sexual happened, but I didn’t realize at the time I just wanted attention. So I wound up doing that and got some attention before I went back upstairs. Yeah. And the other thing was, again, playing out in orgy.

Trevor Hoppe (59:18)
of that.

Rodney McCoy (59:24)
sucking as much dick as I could and finally I was just like you know what and I I did I think this was before I learned what bukkake was I was sucking off these guys in a circle and so I wanted all of them to come on me and so I kept sucking on them until one after the other just shot on me and the host and I got up at one point because I had to shout and one dude just and the host just looked at me and he was like jeez you’re covered in cum

And I was. And it was glorious. Glorious. And trying to think. I don’t know if this counts as slutty, but me and my best friend and his husband, my best friend at the time, Maggie Rest In Peace, and his husband and I went to an orgy together. And there was another dude turned out to be a boxer. And so long story short, I’m trying to remember what it was. I think, no, so me and my best friend,

Trevor Hoppe (59:55)
And you were like, yeah.

Rodney McCoy (1:00:22)
He was fing one guy, I was fing another, and we literally were side by side, sinking our thrusts in time, you know, with each other. So we were going in at the same time, we were coming out and going in at the same time. Sometimes we lost the rhythm and then sometimes we got it back. And I was f***ing a boxer and I didn’t realize he was a boxer until after he…

left and was like why are you following us? And I was like yeah, f*** the hell out of you and you wanted more.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:58)
Yes!

Rodney McCoy (1:00:59)
Yeah, I was, know, Tinashe ain’t got nothing on me. She’s the one who sings Nasty Girl. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. I was like, I’m glad you’re singing the song, but girl, you ain’t got nothing on

Trevor Hoppe (1:01:12)
my God. Well, amen to that. Clearly you are right. Those stories were fabulous. Thank you for sharing them because, you know, I just think sometimes talking about it, frankly, it’s just real. Like we have these moments where we feel like we’ve got the Stanley Cup right in our hands and it feels nice. So thank you. And thank you so much for making the time, Rod. I really am grateful.

Rodney McCoy (1:01:33)
Right.

Trevor Hoppe (1:01:39)
for your wisdom and insight and experience. Where can people find you if they wanna learn more about you?

Rodney McCoy (1:01:45)
Okay, so I do have a website and it’s Rodney McCoy, R -O -D -M -C -C -O -Y dot info. If you reach me there, you can leave me a message. It’ll come to my email and I have two emails. can reach, not yet, do it through the website. You can also reach me on Instagram, on IG. I am daddy, D -A -D -D -Y dot Rod.

That’s me on Instagram and on Facebook. I am daddy rod D a D D I E Rod and I’m D a D D I E because Facebook won’t let me be great

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:27)
Dang Facebook and Meta. Well, thank you very much. I am so grateful for the conversation and I look forward to hearing more from you out in the world down the road. Thanks.

Rodney McCoy (1:02:32)
Thank you. Thank you so much.

And you will. And you will. Thank you.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:46)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much for listening. Truly, I am very grateful. And remember, if you’re not having your best gay sex, I’m here to help. As a sex coach, I can help you identify and overcome barriers that are standing between you and your best gay sex. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Till next time, see you soon.

OVERVIEW: They say practice makes perfect — and when it comes to sex, I couldn’t agree more. In this episode, join me, Dr. Trevor Hoppe, as I sit down with the incredible Alexander Cheves, author of “My Love is a Beast” and longtime sex columnist for “The Advocate.” We dive deep into his wild journey navigating sex, kink, and fisting, and explore how meaningful practice and experienced partners can transform sexual exploration.

From growing up on a conservative Southern Baptist farm to cruising gas stations and finding himself in Berlin’s legendary kink scene, Alexander doesn’t hold back. We talk about the power of fisting orgasms, setting boundaries (even when it’s messy), and how the best sex takes patience, experience, and a little self-love along the way.

If you’re ready to level up your sex life, tune in for Alexander’s candid stories and actionable advice — because good sex takes practice, but the best sex? That takes intention.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is about practice. They say that practice makes perfect. And you know, I think that’s true when it comes to sex Just imagine, if you needed relationship advice, would you call up your friend who’s been single their whole life? Mm-mm. I don’t think so. Not your best bet. And the same is true when it comes to sex. We need to learn…

from partners with experience. The more the better. You know, I think there’s a word for people with lots of sexual experience that it rhymes with glut. Okay, okay, stupid, I know, bad joke, but you get the point. Experience is key. And as we’re gonna hear about today, that is especially true when it comes to kink and BDSM practices.

Trevor Hoppe (00:59)
Today’s guest, Alexander Cheves, has been writing and thinking about queer sex for well over a decade. Through his Sexy Beast column for the Advocate Magazine and his book, My Love is a Beast, Alexander has become an icon of the queer, kink, and fisting communities. But he didn’t get there overnight. It took

practice. In today’s episode, he reflects on his journey learning from partners and practicing with partners with more experience than him. Let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (01:33)
Alexander Cheves, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast.

Alexander Cheves (01:36)
Yay, I’m excited to be here. I love love gay sex

Trevor Hoppe (01:39)
Yes, gay sex is the best. I am really grateful for you making the time to come talk about how you have sort of figured out how to have the best gay sex of your life. And I was listening to a little bit of the interviews you’ve done recently and I learned that you grew up in Zambia a little bit and I did not know that.

Alexander Cheves (02:00)
Yes, my parents were missionaries, actually. Very conservative Southern Baptists. So that shaped, in many ways, my youth and my identity.

Trevor Hoppe (02:16)
And was part of that process or experience, were you having, were you becoming aware of being a queer person during that time? Or was that something that happened later in life for you?

Alexander Cheves (02:27)
It happened back in the States.

When I came back to the US, me and my sister both really struggled around kids our own age. And we both kind of mutually thought that it was because we were so culturally disconnected from other kids our age. We didn’t know any of the same music, we weren’t like really socialized for American culture at that time. And we didn’t know like any music, any pop culture references. We were very, very sheltered on top of that because our parents were conservative Christians.

And I think that we both, so we both had very awkward, ugly duckling phases there for a while where we just didn’t know how to behave around kids of our own age. And we both assumed that it was because of Africa. And later it’s because we were both queer. Me and my sister both realized like, we were both just gay and didn’t, and like many young gay kids, we didn’t even know how to like live in our own bodies yet.

Trevor Hoppe (03:14)
Hahaha.

Alexander Cheves (03:26)
And it seemed that that process just happened so much later and slower for us than it did for other kids.

Trevor Hoppe (03:26)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, definitely. I can appreciate that. So once you started to become aware of that, like what was the, I presume there’s some tension there, right? With your conservative Christian folks and family upbringing, like how did you navigate that, like that sexual awakening as a queer person?

Alexander Cheves (03:50)
Well, my family lives on a farm in Georgia. So after we traveled the world, we moved back to this farm in the middle of Georgia, about an hour from Atlanta. And I heard the word gay in Sunday school, because a kid raised their hand and asked a question about gay people. And so that was the first time that the word was explained to me in the same breath that…

Trevor Hoppe (04:05)
Mm -hmm.

Alexander Cheves (04:15)
I learned what gay meant, I learned that it was a sin and that it was punishable by hell or whatever. And I knew in that moment that that’s what I was. So like, the minute the word concept presented itself to me, I knew I was gay. Or at least I knew that the word had some kind of like…

Trevor Hoppe (04:34)
without even like…

I’m just curious, like, was there an understanding of how did you know what that meant in the moment?

Alexander Cheves (04:36)
Yeah, I get it.

Well, I remember the Sunday school teacher, her name was like Cece or something. And she was this kind of very matronly older woman. And when she said in her very kind of Southern accent that that gay is a man who likes is two men. I was like, I have a crush on my friend David at school. And that means it’s me.

And I knew that, like, maybe I didn’t know in that moment, but my visceral response to the word proved that it was something to me. I remember climbing up in a tree on the farm and daring myself to say the word gay, like, out loud. It was like a curse word. And just a word that charges you in that way, it has to mean something, I mean.

And I was old enough then to like put it together that if I’m having such a strong reaction to just a word, there’s probably something there. And I had a crush on David. I had a crush on my classmate. And he didn’t love me back.

Trevor Hoppe (05:47)
David, we all had those, I mean, many of us for sure, I had the same experience, like my neighbor for sure, I remember crushing on and what, like, did, I assume, you know, you never, David never probably became aware of that crush, right? Like that’s not something you expressed.

Alexander Cheves (06:05)
David did actually. Yeah. Yeah. I got a friend, a mutual friend, a friend of David’s who ended up being my best friend for, is still one of my best friends in life. one of David’s friends I became friends with in order for him to relay the message. And yeah, and David.

Trevor Hoppe (06:08)
Scandal. What happened?

That’s so tender.

Alexander Cheves (06:33)
Right. And David was not interested and did not even really merit it with the response. Did not even really even acknowledge it. But then I became really good friends with his friend whose name was Russell and Russell and I were, and then Russell and David kind of stopped being friends. And then Russell and I became really good friends. And, and, and I think I was really unbearable during like high school, but Russell really put up with me and he’s a good friend. So.

Trevor Hoppe (07:00)
of and did you start to have sexual experiences at that time or was that something that that came later?

Alexander Cheves (07:07)
No, I did start at, I mean, I started really young. My first sexual experience was when I was 10. And then the next was like 13, which was like, 13 was actually like full sex, which is just kind of crazy to me now in hindsight, how young I was. And then in high school, I…

It’s kind of the story of my life. I started these very problematic and in hindsight, probably they were probably predatory relationships. There were these older men in town who…

I knew they were gay and they knew I was gay and they knew I was in the closet and they worked at the local. There were two that I had different relationships with and they were a couple and they, one of them worked at the local gas station near my high school. And they were much older than me and they introduced me to like douching and cigarettes and drugs and like kind of gave me the crash course about everything. And we’re really.

Looking back now, I can realize they were probably really messy, dark people. But that ended up kind of being the tenor of my sex life for a while, is kind of falling in with these, in hindsight, probably not the best people, but always much older and much more advanced and experienced. And so then I became pretty advanced and experienced at a relatively young age. So.

Trevor Hoppe (08:42)
And how did you, did you, do you feel like you pursued those experiences or like how did they come to be?

Alexander Cheves (08:50)
I met them in like attempts at dating. And I don’t honestly remember how I met the guy at the gas station. I think I probably just filled up my truck there after school and he was probably just there working behind the counter or something. Yeah, I don’t think anybody introduced us. There were a couple of situations where like,

a teacher who knew I was gay who recommended this other gay student in this other county and I wasn’t going to go all that far away and they were my age and I wasn’t interested in guys my age and I don’t know I liked older guys I liked men you know and at that time especially and I kind of fell in with this guy 10 plus years older than me who worked at the local Flying J.

And that’s kind of how it happened.

Trevor Hoppe (09:46)
I love it. And this is pre – well, internet existed at this time, but it sounds like maybe you weren’t on there looking for sex.

Alexander Cheves (09:55)
Not at all. We didn’t really have, we lived really literally in the middle of nowhere on a 500 acre farm. I didn’t have internet that wasn’t dial up until I went to college, which was in 2010. And even then on the internet that we did have at home, which was dial up internet, my parents had installed this parental blocker system that was released by, do you know Promise Keepers?

Trevor Hoppe (10:02)
Mm.

Alexander Cheves (10:23)
sort of Christian men’s organization. My dad was a big devout member and they had this, they recommended Net Nanny, which was like this parental blocker for your internet and nothing got through it. So I would try to like find dial -up porn, which is very hard as it is. And nothing could get past this, internet blocker and it pinged your parents if you like attempted to do something. So yeah, it was.

Trevor Hoppe (10:25)
Mm -hmm.

Alexander Cheves (10:50)
Yeah. So, so basically like porn didn’t happen or, and I didn’t even know that the internet was a tool to find sex until some time into college. I mean, and this was 2010, like this was late and like, this is recent history. like the year that Grindr hit the app store is the year that I realized that the internet has chat rooms and porn.

Trevor Hoppe (10:57)
Wow.

Yeah.

I love that. I mean, that’s like, you had like a very like almost pre internet experience even in the kind of world of it. So it often kind of differentiates, I think us like how we like the internet facilitates a certain kind of bandwidth to learning about sexuality. And when you’re, you don’t have that, you know, it means, yeah, you you’re meeting folks at gas stations and kind of learning in a very different way, you know, what, what this world is like.

Alexander Cheves (11:17)
Right.

I mean it was kind of cruising. You know?

Trevor Hoppe (11:47)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s like a.

Alexander Cheves (11:50)
Like in high school, I was without even knowing what these terms meant or their sort of historical meaning, I was kind of meeting guys the old fashioned way. Yeah, it was nice.

Trevor Hoppe (12:03)
That’s amazing. Yeah, totally. And so once you’re in college, you start experimenting. How did you find sex to be? Like what were the experiences that you remember that were like defining that you think back and like this was kind of a seminal moment in my sexual development?

Alexander Cheves (12:25)
Defining.

I don’t know if any sexual experience was super defining in terms of my understanding of sex, but a conversation about sex was very defining. Kids didn’t really talk about sex you just kind of had sex and didn’t talk to other kids about the sex you were having or how much. And I remember the first, really the first conversation I had with other people my age.

about sex was outside on the lawn of the sophomore dorms. And it was me and a bunch of other kids my age, you know, my peers, and it was very much a mixed crowd. It was, my friends were very mixed between straight and queer at that time. And I remember we started asking each other how many people we had sex with. And…

Trevor Hoppe (13:17)
Hmm.

Alexander Cheves (13:18)
I was the first person to answer and thinking that I was giving a very normal answer I said, at least a hundred.

Trevor Hoppe (13:26)
Mm.

Alexander Cheves (13:27)
And, and I don’t actually know if that was true. I don’t know how far off from truth it was, but I was like, yeah, I mean, I’ve, I’ve hooked up a lot. Like what else do you do on the weekend? You know, like it had already been two years in college by that point. In fact, that might’ve even been a third year of college. and I’m not really sure if that was my sophomore, junior year, but I, you know, I had been in college for a couple of years. I had discovered.

Trevor Hoppe (13:38)
Hahaha.

Alexander Cheves (13:52)
apps and sex and cruising and going to the bar and having sex in the toilet. And I discovered sex really quickly and very aggressively. And I kind of assumed that everybody else was having sex to the same amount. And then I remember kind of saying, okay, I estimate like about a hundred and the group just fell quiet. And my friends, I remember the two girls were like, just…

beside themselves and my friend Leah said, Alex, that’s really dangerous. Like you should really slow down. Like that’s a lot. And it was the first time that I actually felt shamed for the amount of sex I was having or even realized that there was such a thing as slut shaming. It was the first time I learned that people walk around having this idea about what is a normal amount of sex and might.

Trevor Hoppe (14:21)
Ha!

Mm -hmm.

Alexander Cheves (14:48)
judge somebody who has a different amount. And that shaped me a lot because I remember being really toying over that in my mind thinking like, this felt so normal to me and yet it’s abnormal to people who are my age and why is that so? And that was, I kind of think the very seeds of what later ended up being my career.

Trevor Hoppe (15:11)
Right? Yeah, it kind of planted that seed for sure. And you are now paving the way to breaking down that shame, which I obviously love. I think that’s amazing. But that’s really real. I love that kind of naivety of just like not understanding that a hundred is a number that most people don’t reach in their lifetime. And it is, it is jarring sometimes to talk to straight people, you know, generally straight people, not all straight people, of course, but by and large,

you know, there are big differences in lifetime numbers of partners. Oh my gosh. And they kind of, they’re like, holy cow. So at that time, as you’re kind of figuring out what you like, it sounds like you hit the road pretty quickly. What were you using terms like top or bottom to describe your own sexuality?

Alexander Cheves (15:44)
See you guys soon.

Yes, I was. And I initially described myself as a total top because of shame. I’m very, very sure it was because I kind of had this idea that being a top was one click closer to being straight.

Trevor Hoppe (16:09)
Mmm.

Being a man.

Alexander Cheves (16:23)
And being a man, yeah. And that was born of shame. But I ended up having sex with this really hung, he was a cop, which didn’t bug me then, bugs me now, but he was like my first regular sex partner. And he was very closeted. I mean, when I say like country boy, I mean, he had like grizzly chewing tobacco in his truck, lived like,

Trevor Hoppe (16:25)
Meh.

Alexander Cheves (16:52)
and the marshes outside Savannah. His idea of going, of having a good time was going to Charleston because he could kind of be out there. Cause he was totally DL and hung like a horse and he, in hindsight, he didn’t really know how to top. He just kind of jackhammered, but he was my first like regular sex partner and he was a total top. And I was like, okay, I guess now I have to learn how to bottom. And did

Trevor Hoppe (16:56)
yeah.

Alexander Cheves (17:19)
And that was the first time that I thought, I think I like this.

Trevor Hoppe (17:22)
That’s exciting. So I mean, you have this experience, it kind of changes your relationship to these terms. How has that changed over your life? It sounds like you were a top, then you does that mean you started to identify more as a bottom over time?

Alexander Cheves (17:37)
I kind of went from total top to total bottom and things got muddled when I kind of started doing sex work, which started at a very young age. Like I wasn’t even old enough to go to a bar yet. I was going to bars under a fake ID. So I was 19 when I had my first client, although I wouldn’t have called them a client. I didn’t really even know what sex work was. It was just…

Trevor Hoppe (17:49)
Hmm.

Alexander Cheves (18:05)
here’s money for sex and I wanted money and I was a kid. And I did that kind of casually for several years. And then in total, my total sex work career was over 10 years or right at 10 years.

With sex work, I mostly topped. I found it was easier, I mean, a lot of sex workers will tell you, like, it’s just easier to find work, especially in cities like LA, New York, San Francisco, cities that I lived in after college. Sex work required me to keep my hand in the topping pool. And over time, I felt that those terms split very much for me because work was topping.

Trevor Hoppe (18:29)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Alexander Cheves (18:47)
And so my personal life was bottoming. And when I quit sex work, which only happened, what, in 2021 or 2022? So I guess last year, the year before, was my last year working in sex. And I had to kind of re, and I’m still in the process of rediscovering my topside.

as it exists apart from sex work. Because it became so closely, topping became so closely connected to a job and bottoming became so personal that they didn’t have any overlap. And I would never top if I wasn’t getting paid. And now I’m actually learning that I do like to top, but it’s a new discovery for me. It’s a new journey.

Trevor Hoppe (19:39)
Yeah, I mean, I guess there’s something about bottoming that also just feels, I don’t know, maybe this is just my own, maybe I could pose this more as a question. Like, do you think bottoming is more intimate, feels more intimate and personal than topping almost necessarily? Or I don’t know necessarily is the word, just it’s something about it to me in my experience that just hits home in a different, I can’t even express it. It’s like, I don’t have the words, you know.

Alexander Cheves (20:07)
Yeah, I’ve wondered that too. I think that it’s easier to do detached topping or to perform literally to perform to fake as a top. Whereas bottoming, the amount of work and preparation that goes into it, like it’s a commitment that I just don’t see anybody faking bottoming unless they really, you know, want to.

bottom, which is why I think sex work and topping go so well together. A lot of sex work is a performance. A lot of it is acting. And as part of that performance, you are delivering this fantasy of a top. And I don’t know, you’re right, bottoming does, I feel like bottoming is harder. So it puts, you have to like really want to do it to do it.

Trevor Hoppe (20:55)
Yeah, I don’t –

right? And when I’m watching porn, I feel like I can, there’s something about how the bottom is reacting and experiencing it that I can be like, they’re, they’re actually a bottom and they’re actually enjoying it or like, that’s a porn star who is like muddling through somehow.

Alexander Cheves (21:13)
yeah, yeah, you can tell.

Trevor Hoppe (21:14)
You know, I don’t know, maybe you really, I feel like I can tell, but maybe it’s like gaydar, like it’s not real and it’s just in my head. But so, I mean, speaking of like not being able to tell or performance and kind of faking it, like part of my kind of mantra and thinking around sex is that part of figuring out what you like is figuring out what you don’t like along the way.

maybe just to start, can you think about a time going back as far as you like, where you walked away from an experience feeling like, you know, that was bad sex?

Alexander Cheves (21:53)
my God. I mean, so many, so many like.

Trevor Hoppe (21:57)
I know, right? I know. The list is probably long.

Alexander Cheves (22:00)
Well, I mean, also with you factor in sex work, it skews the data so much because clients, especially when I was younger and newer to sex work clients, clients believe that they have by virtue of paying you, they believe that they have unlimited access to your body and that consent no longer applies after cash is handed over and.

Trevor Hoppe (22:26)
Hmm.

Alexander Cheves (22:26)
they are surprised even like, you know, progressive experienced, nice clients are still surprised when you do exercise your no, even after transaction after deposit, after planning. and there was a time when I certainly, and I think I still struggle with this. I still, I still deliver a soft no. It’s something that I learned from 10 years of sex work. I

It’s an American, I’m not realizing living in Europe, it’s a very American thing for me. I don’t have a blunt, hard no. I try to let people down gently. I think that comes from sex work. I spent a long time just kind of trying to shrug off and play off unwarranted and unwanted touch and unwanted affection. And with clients, a lot of sex was bad because they…

would get really physical or really aggressive or move really fast and do things that I wasn’t comfortable with and that I didn’t want to do. And I didn’t know then how to say no. And I didn’t think I could because I was a sex worker. Most of the non -consensual and just flat bad sex came in sex work. I’m really lucky to say that. I think that in my personal life, I’ve had mostly…

Mostly good sex and good sex partners. I mean, there is just bad sex every now and then. Like you can’t get fully clean or guys, you know, maybe there’s just no connection, but the experiences that were legitimately scary and were legitimately lessons and taught me something about bad sex, like we’re always the ones that involve clients. Like I’ve had guys.

put drugs on their dick and then get me high without my consent or awareness during sex. And then they get more time, because I get high and I don’t realize that they’re getting me high. And then they get, you know, they pay for two hours and I’m there for six because I’m high. And I mean, that has happened more than once. You know, those are the kinds of experiences where I left those realizing like, yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (24:39)
That’s f***ed up.

Alexander Cheves (24:40)
Yeah, like that’s bad sex Yeah, like scary sex. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (24:44)
So it sounds like for you, a lot of it was about figuring out how to draw those boundaries with clients in particular.

Alexander Cheves (24:52)
Yeah, and still is. I think I’m still in it.

Trevor Hoppe (24:54)
And do you…

And so I guess over time, is there a way that you found, and I guess this could be applicable, I’m sure, both to people doing sex work and people not doing sex work. How do you draw those boundaries with partners in advance?

Alexander Cheves (25:09)
Hmm, well…

I do tell sex workers to enforce some very specific rules. No drugs. That will get you less clients. A lot of clients want to be high when you meet, but you kind of just…

To avoid those situations, you do have to kind of say like, no drugs, and if any evidence of drugs, I leave, and you know. But,

Trevor Hoppe (25:33)
Mm -hmm.

Alexander Cheves (25:35)
Yeah, I mean, in one’s personal life, you know, I don’t know if the no drugs rule has to apply. I mean, I don’t fully abide by that in my personal life, but…

You know, it does take time to learn what you do and don’t want. And I think that most people in that journey of learning what they do and don’t want will.

only learn their boundaries by having experiences that cross them. You know?

Trevor Hoppe (25:59)
Right, yeah, I think that’s kind of a key and it’s complicated, right? Because you wanna protect yourself from those invasions, but you don’t always know what those invasions are. So it’s hard to kind of preempt them. Yeah, exactly. what tips I guess would you have for young queer people who are trying to find that…

Alexander Cheves (26:09)
Until they happen. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (26:21)
to get to the best sex and they feel like they’re just having bad sex, right? They’re like, how do they cross that river to get to the good side?

Alexander Cheves (26:31)
Hmm, I get a lot of questions, you know, both on my blog and through social media from people who I think are at the early stage of that. And there’s no easy answer because you learn how to have sex over time and it’s a big learning curve.

And that’s surprising to people because you think that sex, we all operate under this myth when we’re young, that sex and pleasure, because they’re natural things, they’re natural human behaviors, should come naturally to us. And they don’t. That’s a myth. That’s not true. You have to learn how to have good sex And the body isn’t, bodies aren’t just synchronized. You know, sex isn’t just…

sex, it’s communication and experience and expectation and expectation management and, and it’s sex is a skillset that you learn over time. And you really have to put in the time and the work and the practice and the failures in order to get to a level where you can be like, okay. Now I’m good at sex Now I’m having good sex I think you do have to get through some bad sex to learn how to have good sex And,

You know, I think sex is one of those areas like any other form of learning where you need a lot of practice and you need to accept that there will be mistakes and there will be failures. And I don’t know if you can or even should avoid all of them because that’s kind of how you learn, right? I hope that nobody gets hurt. I hope that nobody gets, you know.

I became HIV positive at 21. So now I tell everybody like, it can happen, you know, use a condom, get tested, or take PrEP even better, which wasn’t really available when I was 21. But, you know, that requires access to a clinic that requires.

some knowledge of sex going into it that requires you to do a little bit of research. And if you’re in a conservative place or in a place where no one’s taught you about sex, how can you have this knowledge? How can you make these decisions? Sex is a difficult thing to learn. I think that’s why many people only grow sexually confident and proficient late, because it just takes years of learning and missteps to kind of get there. And I don’t think there are any shortcuts.

You know, maybe reading or, you know, internet research or reading the right blogs or listening to the right people can help, but you don’t, you know, I get a lot of questions from guys who want to be very advanced bottoms and they want to start taking fists and huge dicks and huge toys like as quickly as possible. And I tell them like there’s no shortcut like, and, and any attempt to do that any faster than is natural will get you hurt.

That’s where injuries come from. You kind of have to put in the time and put in the training and put in the toys and go slow, and learn you and like handle the speed bumps when they come. Cause they will come. You will get anal fissures. You will get, you will go too rough. You won’t use enough lube. Like you need that’s true of all sex, not just bottoming, but bottoming is a good example. You do need this slow build over time to get to a level of confidence. And I.

I don’t think there’s a shortcut to that.

Trevor Hoppe (30:02)
Yeah, it sounds like patience is a virtue and I hear that fully. It’s kind of shocking when you think about it that like, cause the quantity of sex that you’re talking about, right, is more, exponentially more than most people will have, many people will have in their lifetime, right? And so you think, gosh, is everybody else just walking around having, do people never get to the good sex? Right? It makes you wonder, it makes me wonder, certainly. Like, and I know that, yeah.

Alexander Cheves (30:29)
Most people.

Trevor Hoppe (30:31)
I know. So I want to be an evangelist for getting to the good stuff.

I’m just curious, if you have an encounter with someone that you feel like for whatever reason goes bad, are you willing to go back for seconds?

Alexander Cheves (30:48)
Yes.

Trevor Hoppe (30:49)
Hmm. And what about an encounter would make you willing to do that?

Alexander Cheves (30:51)
No.

Hmm, that’s a really good question. That actually gonna happen recently. I’m really into fisting and I would say that now like 75 % of my sex life is fisting, if not more. And, fisting now is gonna skew my answer even more than like regular sex, cause I feel like a bad top.

is only going to be so bad. Like, you know, like, you know, like a bad top might be too, might not be good at sex, but he’s not going to physically risk injury. He’s not going to like risk really hurting you. Whereas a bad fist top can send you to the emergency room, can send you, can, you know, and every fister who’s been fisting for any amount of time knows guys who have been sent to the ER, who have had, you know, colostomy bags like.

I know guys with their abdomen stitched up. So, you know, it happens, you know, and you, you learn, you know, people to whom this happens. So the risks are higher when you, when you have a bad fist top And so I’m more critical of bad sex when it comes to fisting. I’m, I’m less permissive of somebody. I’m less permissive of just basic ignorance and incompetence.

Like with, with regular sex, if someone’s a beginner and they are just kind of playing and experimenting, I’m not a beginner anymore, but I’ll play with the beginner. I feel like with regular sex as a top or as a bottom, I might be able to teach them something and you know, give them, or just give them, give them that practice, give them that experience. I’m not that permissive when it comes to fisting because my, my body, my health is on the line. And very recently.

recently as in a few months ago, I played with a fist top who was so rough and so aggressive that I actually left without finishing and I sent him a text message and a very long text message and I tried to word it very carefully in German and because he didn’t speak English and I texted him, you know,

You’re lucky that I was as advanced as I am because I’m, I’m fine. Like you went too rough and too fast for me. And I’ve been doing this for 10 years. If you do this, if you did what you did to me, to somebody who’s brand new to fisting, you’re going to send them to the emergency room. You’re going to really hurt somebody. And you might not realize that. I think that he eroticizes the roughness and the aggression, but you can’t do that. You know, these are people’s, this is people’s health that is on the line.

this is surgery, you know? and you can’t do that. And that started a dialogue and started a discussion and that wasn’t the last time we spoke. And I told him like, look, he was very sexy. I think he did fist a lot. I think he was just way too rough that time. And I said, okay, you know what? I’ll, I’ll meet again, but you kind of have to agree to certain terms. Like you, you have to go slow. I’m not really into.

XYZ. I have to, I basically had to state the terms of interaction for our next encounter and he abided by them. So I gave him a second chance and ended up being really great sex. So, and it’ll definitely happen again. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (34:24)
I love that. That’s fabulous. And I think that feedback is oftentimes we’re really scared to offer that honest feedback, I think, or at least I know I am with partners because you, you know, you just don’t know how guys are going to take it. And sometimes guys take feedback really poorly and they get angry or whatever. But, you know, men are not the best at like hearing that they’ve done something wrong, right? Or admitting that or taking accountability for it. So.

I think the future men who get fisted by this guy, thank you, right, for that feedback, because I’m sure it’s really critical for them to get better at what they’re doing and to hear that, just like to hear that someone had that experience, especially in that, when it gets rough stuff, like they think it’s, I don’t know, you get attached to these porn fantasies or these kind of scripts from erotic stories or

or Tumblr, whatever, but fantasy is not reality and you have to kind of remind people of your body, the reality of that. So I think that that’s great. And that transitions really nicely to talking about the best sex, right? Because it kind of became a good story for you thinking back, is there a partner or an experience or context where you think this is where,

Alexander Cheves (35:33)
Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (35:52)
you know, this is a time or a context where I had the best sex.

Alexander Cheves (35:55)
OOF

I don’t know, I’m really lucky, I’ve had a lot of really good sex. Well…

Fisting, I love more than regular sex, and so I put the whole category of fisting over, you know, what I call regular sex or dick and ass sex. I used to be very kinky. Like I used to be, when I say kinky, I mean like into like bondage and leather and BDSM and, you know, sadomasochism and I had like really…

Trevor Hoppe (36:12)
Yeah.

Alexander Cheves (36:30)
Especially for that age that I was then I had like really kind of heavy serious kinks and I actually evolved out of that which You never really don’t you don’t hear a lot of people say that you hear a lot of people say I became I’ve become really kinky and now I feel like there’s a lot of people who don’t want to say too loud that they aren’t as kinky as they used to be and that’s certainly me I’m not as kinky as I used to be. I’m just into fisting I’m not into leather or

You know, I’m not into like corporal punishment or, you know, isolation or any of the heavy stuff I used to do. So my sex has only gotten better the more I’ve, the more I have learned to do just what I love and not, cause when I discovered fisting, I discovered fisting as part of the sort of fetish BDSM world.

It was lumped in with alternative sex, right? And so I thought that to be into fisting, I also have to have a leather fetish and be into rubber and be into whipping and flogging and paddling and all this other stuff. And that they all were kind of this like lump community. And I had to kind of sample all of it. Well, I did sample all of it and I actually realized, okay, I’m actually just in the. so and coming to Berlin two years ago,

Trevor Hoppe (37:24)
Mm -hmm.

Hahaha.

Alexander Cheves (37:51)
Like if my sex life was kind of cruising along, it like jumped up a level in Berlin because I feel like Berlin’s just, not only are there, not only is kink and fetish and fisting in particular so widespread here, but I think that people, because Berlin has a reputation for sex, people move here to play at a more serious level, to play at a heavier level. And it’s had that reputation for a while to where now,

The benefit, one benefit of moving here is you do find a large community of people who are playing at a more, you know, at a more serious level. And so Berlin has, so my best act has happened in the last two years. And I can’t zero in on one particular encounter. There’s been some really good ones. There’s been some really funny ones. Yeah, I mean.

cause, cause fisting is ridiculous and stupid and it doesn’t make any sense. And why is it hot? I have no idea. Why does it work? I have no idea. and then when you add in a language barrier, it becomes even more non sensical sometimes. And, and yet here in Berlin, it’s just been fisting is, just think is great in Berlin. I have like a few, a handful of.

Trevor Hoppe (38:58)
Ha ha.

Ha ha ha.

Alexander Cheves (39:14)
you know, fisting regulars that I would collectively call my best sex. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (39:20)
I love that. That regular thing, I heard you say on another podcast that that’s kind of new for you, that you didn’t used to have regulars and now you’ve kind of cultivated that for yourself. What do you think changed? Why do you think now you seek out that kind of regularity?

Alexander Cheves (39:32)
Yeah.

For a very specific reason, because with fisting, every time you play with somebody new, you kind of have to relearn their body and relearn their limits every time. So you’re kind of starting from the beginning every time you play with somebody new. Playing with somebody new every time holds the risk that you’re going to encounter like a crazy person, you know, somebody who has no knowledge of safety or limits or boundaries and…

And so it’s actually just safer if you want to advance and, and, and I’m trying to advance and really, you know, focus on my fisting life. that has required regulars, just to kind of like, cause then it becomes almost like training, you know? So.

Trevor Hoppe (40:25)
Yeah, yeah, there’s almost this relationship to the kind of intensity of the play and that desire for or not even desire the, it’s not even convenience. There’s something else to it of just the regularity allows for probably a deeper level of exploration that would be possible with a newbie.

Alexander Cheves (40:47)
Yeah, yeah, like with a regular partner, they know where I’m at. They know my ability level. They can push me more safely. Like if I wanna try like, say I buy like, well, like this happened recently. I bought this big new toy and…

It’s bigger and longer than anything I’ve bought before. And it was kind of like an impulse purchase. And I was really surprised when I could actually like sit on it. and I was so proud of myself and I brought it to this regular fisting playmate that I have who has like 30 years of experience. He was fisting back in the seventies. And so he was truly like a fisting pro. And I was playing with him.

Trevor Hoppe (41:17)
hehe

Alexander Cheves (41:33)
And I was telling him to use the toy and like, and I was like, go harder, go deeper, like all the way, all the way. And he stopped and he said, I’m sorry, I have to interrupt the session. You’re not there yet. You’re telling me to push further than what I, he’s like, he’s like, I hear what you’re saying, but like I’m in your body right now. I’m reading your body and I know that you are pushing it. You’re trying to like.

go further than I know you can go to. And he said, and I’m telling you this as a friend and as someone who cares about you, slow down, you’re gonna get hurt. And he was like, you’re not immune from injury just because you’ve been doing this for 10 years. And he was like, I have friends who have been doing this for 20 years and they do get hurt. And he kind of schooled me. he put me in my place and he said, I’ve played with you many times. I know where you’re at. You need to…

Trust me and let me take over rather than telling me what to do because you’re telling me to go harder than what you can take. And it totally killed the mood. In hindsight, I texted him after and I said, you know, thank you so much for doing that. And you can only have that conversation with a regular, somebody who knows your body.

Trevor Hoppe (42:55)
Exactly. Yeah, it’s just someone who knows your limits and you trust. I think that trust thing is really key to being able to trust someone in that context is critical when the risks are more potentially high. So, I mean, it sounds like regularity has been one strategy to find that best sex, right? For you and to specifically within that fisting context.

Alexander Cheves (43:18)
review.

Trevor Hoppe (43:23)
Is it important to you or your partners whether people have orgasms in the context of your sexual encounters?

Alexander Cheves (43:31)
Whether I do or whether my partners do.

Trevor Hoppe (43:34)
Yeah, either one.

Alexander Cheves (43:35)
I still kind of always want my partners to cum. I might have a fisting orgasm, which is totally different. With fisting, I often don’t like ejaculate cum. In fact, a lot of times I don’t even get hard, but I do kind of always want my partners to cum just because I want to. That’s almost like a…

I think it’s almost for like my own validation to like, okay, I need evidence that you had a good time. So yeah, yeah, but I’m not, I’m not, I tell everybody, like, I’m not hard set on coming for myself. It’s not, it’s not a necessity for me.

Trevor Hoppe (44:07)
-huh.

And tell me about this fisting orgasm, because I heard you use that term in another podcast, and I don’t think people are familiar with that. So what is that experience like?

Alexander Cheves (44:28)
Whew, that’s a great question. One that I have been asked before. You should ask like 10 different fist bottoms to describe a fisting orgasm because you will get 10 different answers. People are surprised to learn that you can have an anal orgasm. And I’ve had anal orgasms from anal sex before where I orgasm from, you know, getting f***ed

They feel similar. The first time I had an anal orgasm was from fisting, but since then I’ve had anal orgasms from, you know, dick sex too. And they feel similar. Just the fisting orgasm feels a little bit more intense because it’s a bigger thing inside me. It’s more pressure. Me and my friend, Kellen, both describe ours very similarly. Kellen, on the internet, he’s known as Falcon Punch.

Trevor Hoppe (44:54)
from prostate simulation effectively. Yeah.

The pressure, yeah.

Alexander Cheves (45:20)
and he’s a fister in Chicago and we both can’t catch a breath and our whole body like shakes. I’m loud. He’s loud. We like yell and moan. and it’s just this like weird full body orgasm that may or may not, like I, we rarely ejaculate. There’s really like ejaculation. Most were not even hard, but it’s a full body kind of shaking, roaring orgasm from anal stimulation. And it’s very intense. I mean, I almost don’t like to do it in public. So like at like a sex party or in the back room of a club, because I’m so loud that like, it sounds like someone’s giving birth to a cow. Like I’m, I like yell. So I don’t like to do it at an event because people will like turn and look and be like, are you okay? I–No, I’m fine.

but yeah, that’s a, that’s a lot of people pee. So yeah, cause it’s definitely, yeah. Yeah. Cause if you think about it, yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (46:21)
yeah, you kind of lose control of bodily function. Yeah, yeah, it’s all near each other.

So do think, so I am not trained in tantric, like sex, that is not something I’ve ever taken classes in or really that familiar with, but that experience sounds almost kind of similar to the way that tantric gets talked about, that it’s like this sort of full body can become like a full body orgasm moment that’s not about your dick at all. I think that’s the thing that’s hard for

many men to understand is that our concept of the orgasm is so rooted in their phallus, right? And this is an experience that is rooted in your ass, right? It’s different.

Alexander Cheves (47:10)
Well, I think that that’s changing. I think that like sex toys for men, especially like prostate stimulation. When I worked for a sex toy company, the highest selling, the highest selling group of, you know, class category of toys were prostate stimulation toys, which aren’t really dildos. You know, a dildo might stimulate your prostate, but

It’s not really designed to do that. Whereas P -Spot toys, which are only as new as like the last, you know, 30 years, like they, they are a rapidly selling branch of the toy market. And that tells me that men who probably wouldn’t necessarily have anal sex are discovering that there’s a whole pleasure locus point in the a**

that, you know, through the prostate that’s only achieved through anal penetration. And I, and so I do, I hope that men are learning that there’s more ways to orgasm than just shooting a load. I mean, I would hope so. I, I feel like with the age of the internet, that’s that information is getting out there more, but maybe not. I don’t know.

Trevor Hoppe (48:26)
Well, it’s tough because you watch porn, right? And like, there’s only one depiction of, I mean, really, I mean, I don’t know that I’ve ever, I’d have to think about it. Have I ever seen an anal orgasm, a true anal orgasm in porn? I don’t watch fisting porn, so that’s, you know, I haven’t seen, I don’t know, is that something depicted in fisting porn? I’m really actually curious.

Alexander Cheves (48:48)
Actually, no, I don’t think so. I mean, well, because it might not, probably some fisting porn, but the problem with an anal orgasm is that it rarely comes with the visual of ejaculation. I feel like ejaculating is such a graphic visual. It’s literally called the money shot in porn. I mean, if you just kind of quiver and moan,

You’re feeling something amazing, but I don’t know if it’s that exciting to watch on camera. So no, I think there are a lot of, you know, orgasms on camera, which is a shame because, you know, I wish we saw that more, but that’s, that’s like one of the beautiful things that you see in real life that I don’t think porn could ever capture.

Trevor Hoppe (49:31)
Well, it’s kind of like the female ejaculation, right? It’s like this kind of mythical thing to some, I think. They’re like, does this really exist? And is it real? Is it just performative? And I think you’re here to say that it is real. It is not performative. And I am here for that because I think getting in touch with our butts is always a good thing, for sure.

So thank you for that, because I think many men need to hear that message for sure. So I think I kind of have a sense, but I’m curious if you had to put words to it, if you were going to like build a bear, a fantasy partner, like what would be the elements of them that would be the foundation to having the best sex

Alexander Cheves (49:59)
Thank you.

A partner as in like a sexual partner or a romantic partner?

Trevor Hoppe (50:25)
sexual partner.

Alexander Cheves (50:28)
because I would first clarify that for me, those are two very different things.

Well, I’m, I’m, I’m more bottom than top. Not 100 % bottom, I’m not a total bottom, but I am more bottom than top.

I guess someone who is a top who is not only physically attractive to me, but is someone I’m very attracted to people I can learn from people who have more skill than me or at least as much skill as I do and can now communicate as competently in sex as I can, but can.

back that up, you know, so guys have been, you know, guys have been fisting for some years, you know, or been topping for some time and they, you know, I mean, not even necessarily a fist top, although I would certainly put fist tops in like the dream category, but, but, but tops that have been topping long enough to kind of.

Trevor Hoppe (51:34)
Yeah.

Alexander Cheves (51:41)
have some some years on them you know they they have they’ve been doing this a while they know how to make a butt feel good

I mean, let’s face it, there’s no lighter way to say this. Like I’m a fist bottom. So if a guy is like looking for like a brand new type virginal hole, you know, I can’t, I’m not gonna be that. And when I meet a guy who I’ve played with guys and you know, they don’t want to say it, but you can, I know the look now in their eyes where they’re like, can you like…

Trevor Hoppe (52:02)
Ha ha ha ha ha.

Alexander Cheves (52:18)
squeeze, you know, and yeah, and I’ll just be like, well, this makes me feel, you know, sorry. I mean, I can’t change it. It’s my body. And, you know, and, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a sign of a novice top, but there, but you know, if a top knows how to like, please a skilled experienced hole and that’s certainly.

Trevor Hoppe (52:18)
Tighten up.

Alexander Cheves (52:42)
That’s certainly higher value to me than somebody who doesn’t know what to do when they start having sex with me. And I have enough of those that make me feel like, like it is, it is a point of insecurity. Like I’ve been having sex when I’ve been asking somebody like, does it, does it feel good? You know, and they, to their credit, they try to answer nicely, but I can tell they’re being nice and, and that’s not, I’m not interested in those guys. So.

Trevor Hoppe (53:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, amen. It sounds like because there’s all this rhetoric around tops and bottoms that bottoms kind of worship the top. But I wonder the way you just talked about it, it sounds like you actually also want a top who kind of you say make a butt feels good, but there’s there’s kind of a element of reciprocal. Worship is one word. Maybe you would use another word, but something like that that.

in a kind of ideal context that it’s kind of, there’s a circuit going on where it’s a feedback loop.

Alexander Cheves (53:46)
I want someone who wants to make me feel good. Yeah. And I want to, and I think that’s a really beautiful way to describe it. Good sex happens when both partners are committed to the other person’s pleasure. And there is this whole top worship thing that goes on that is absurd because, you know, sex that’s fully focused on the top’s pleasure.

won’t actually be good for the top. That won’t be satisfying sex You know, people are turned on by pleasing other people and you want to meet in that synchronicity where I’m trying to please him and he’s trying to please me and that feels really beautiful. And the thing is I like rough sex and even degrading sex and even in kinky degrading sex where there is…

a degree of power exchange, that doesn’t mean that I want someone who isn’t trying to make me feel good. Like you can be a dominant playmate and be in charge and be in control and still be focused on your bottom’s pleasure. In fact, I feel like the bad tops, the scary tops fall into the category of dominant tops who aren’t interested in bottom’s pleasure.

I’ve had plenty of those and they are not repeats. So…

Trevor Hoppe (55:11)
Yeah, yeah, that’s fair. Like, and good for you for knowing how to draw that line. Cause I think as a bottom, there’s just so much rhetoric around there that like your pleasure doesn’t matter. And it’s a fantasy, right? And I think people have a hard time differentiating the fantasy from the reality. Like, you know, actually I should be having sex that feels good, right? Like even if I’m participating in this degrading scene where that’s not.

on paper supposed to be happening, like that is happening in real life. So I appreciate that because I think especially in this gay world where top bottom gets so, people just get so caught up, it’s important to remember the reality of it. Cause why else are we having sex if it’s not gonna be good, right? Like, what’s the point? I don’t know. What…

Well, I think we’ve covered it to an extent and maybe, you know, it’s just something we’ve done. But just to nail it home for us, what would be your top tips for people listening to find the best sex?

Alexander Cheves (56:23)
My top tips.

There’s a few. Bottoming is very hard. And I don’t think that you necessarily learn how to be a better bottom by having more sex. Sex toys exist for a reason. And I think that they are… they are seen as kind of accoutrements of sex. When in fact, I think that beginner bottoms should shift their perspective of sex toys and see sex toys as…

solo toys that are primarily useful for training and for, you know, learning, learning your own body. I mean, God, it all goes back to RuPaul. If you can’t love yourself, like, which if you can’t please yourself, if you can’t know yourself, what feels good to your own body, then how are you ever going to be able to communicate that to somebody else? I think that’s.

as true with love as it is with sex And that’s why sex toys are so valuable, to know what sensations feel good in your own butt. And, you know, I don’t know how that would necessarily work for tops, but I mean, tops should cultivate a strong self -pleasure life. I think, you know, I know tops that, I do know a few tops that like,

Trevor Hoppe (57:28)
Hm hm.

Alexander Cheves (57:41)
mostly are having sex and they’re not heavy masturbators, they don’t watch a lot of porn, or they don’t have a solo seggsual relationship with themselves. I don’t think that they tend to be the best. I think that the best sex seggsual playmates have a strong seggsual relationship with self first, whether you’re top or bottom. And to cultivate that is this really rewarding life journey that I think everybody needs to go on. So…

Really prioritize self pleasure. Really learn your own body first. cause then you know, it feels good. and beyond that, I mean, that’s kind of the number one tip that I would say. I would say number two,

to have a lot of sex and to not silo yourself into this or that category. because sexual prowess, sexual confidence comes from years of experience. learn from partners. It’s okay to be ignorant about something. It’s okay to ask questions. Every sexual encounter can teach you something and should. and if you have partners that.

don’t like want to talk about sex, they just want to do it. I don’t know if you’re ever going to like get very far with them. You know, sex is just as much a dialogue and discussion as it is an activity and you want to learn from the people you’re playing with. And if you can find those people who can not only have sex with you, but also discuss the sex and assess the sex and discuss ways to make it better. I mean, really keep them, hold on to them. Cause those are the, those are the sex partners that you’ll grow from and learn from.

Trevor Hoppe (59:13)
Mm.

Alexander Cheves (59:17)
and that might not be a random grinder hookup, you know, there’s no way to face it, but the guy who walks in and f***s you and leaves might be fun, but you’re not going to grow from that encounter. you know, and I don’t think any, I don’t, that’s not to say that I think people should not have hot, intense, anonymous sex. I still do. I love that there’s a time and place for that. But when I was growing sexually, I needed people that I could grow with.

I think that’s how you get better. And then you just need time. You just need years. Another point would be… I mean, I feel like this is said enough, but it deserves saying again, porn is porn. It’s a fantasy. I’ve directed porn. I mean, even porn stars don’t have sex like this. Like, I have cleaned off so much shit and so many messes from porn sets.

that get totally edited out. Like porn stars don’t have perfect sex. There is no, like nobody has sex like this. It’s all editing. It’s all performance. And if you judge your own life by what you see in porn, especially with how easy porn is findable on Twitter, you will feel very defeated and you’ll feel very unadvanced. And I think that that doesn’t necessarily, it can be hot, but it doesn’t help anybody learn.

how to cultivate sex, good sex in real life. I fall into that trap. I follow all these fisters on Twitter. And when I, if I spend any amount of time on fisting Twitter, I think that I’m the most unadvanced 10 year fister I know. And that’s because the algorithm makes people who have these insane videos, you know, it seems like.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:57)
Yeah, it pops. Yeah.

Alexander Cheves (1:00:59)
Yeah. And, and I think a lot of the fisters on Twitter that are really famous are competing and are playing to a dangerous level and they will get hurt. And they are trying to kind of like out impress the other by going deeper and harder and faster. And that’s not only not realistic, but dangerous. And I think that’s true for a lot of sex So don’t compare your sex life to what you see online. Compare it to.

Like, are you better than, are you, are you enjoying sex more than you did two years ago? I think that, and if you, and if that’s a yes, then you’re on the right track. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t seek any other validation than that, but you know, am I enjoying sex more than I used to? Yes. Okay. Keep going. yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (1:01:32)
Hmm.

toy, have a lot of sex, have sex with people you can grow with and don’t compare yourself to porn. That’s pretty fricking good rule book to live by. I love that. Thank you. So I’m going to end every interview segment with my favorite little ditty, Sordid Lives and Untold Tales, S.L.U.T. for short. What’s the sluttiest thing you ever did?

Alexander Cheves (1:01:56)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What’s the sluttiest thing I ever did? Yeah, my god. The sluttiest thing I ever did.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:14)
That’s a hard one for you.

Alexander Cheves (1:02:21)
Well, okay, I…

I used to go to Black Party in New York a lot. This was before I actually started working for the Saint at Large for a little bit, which puts on the Black Party. Back when I was just an attendee, I went to the Black Party that everybody seemed to hate, which was, the theme was Dark Matter It was the last one, I think, that happened in Manhattan. And I think it was the one, it was the Black, it was Black Party 2017 or 2018. I can’t remember which.

And I had a marker with me and so I actually did my own load count, my own load tally. And I took a lot of drugs and some, some that was back when my life was a little, it was a bit messier than it is now. And so I had a less healthy relationship with drugs than, than I do now. And I did a lot of drugs and I was there literally it’s like a 24 hour party, if not longer, like it lasts for two days.

And I was there literally from the beginning to the end, like when the lights came on and I later tallied up the tally marks and it was 44. And I was like, I was like, all right, like I’m really, really proud of this. I think most people probably, you know, some people, I had sex in one event, then more sex than what some people have in their whole lives. And so.

Trevor Hoppe (1:03:28)
Yeah.

Alexander Cheves (1:03:43)
And at the time I was not proud of it, but in hindsight, especially here in Berlin, I can tell that story and guys are like, okay, sure. Whatever. but, yeah, I out Dawson’d Dawson. So yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (1:03:51)
Yeah. You out Dawson’d Dawson.

I love that. I mean, I just try to add that bit to the end because I think we all have these stories that, as you say, in the moment, you might feel some kind of way about, but we should celebrate those moments of achievement, if they may be, or just pleasure or whatever. And so thank you for sharing that,

Alexander Cheves (1:04:00)
Thank you.

Trevor Hoppe (1:04:17)
Thank you Alexander Cheves for making the time and sharing your stories. I am so grateful.

Alexander Cheves (1:04:23)
Thank you so much. I’m so grateful for the work that you put out into the world. It’s so inspiring to me. And it’s been a pleasure in the past working with you and I’m so happy that you’re doing this podcast.

Trevor Hoppe (1:04:35)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, if you’re not having your best gay sex, I can help. As a sex coach, my services can help you identify and overcome barriers that are standing between you and your best sex life. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Thanks again for listening. Till next time.

OVERVIEW: Dr. Trevor Hoppe sits down with long-time HIV activist and community organizer Alex Garner for a candid conversation about gay men’s sexual culture, cruising, and the journey to sexual liberation. With over 30 years of experience in queer advocacy and living with HIV, Alex shares intimate stories about his early sexual experiences, from the cruising spots of 90s West Hollywood to the impact of seroconversion on his sexuality.

Alex discusses the nuanced realities of condomless sex, the performance of masculinity in sexual settings, and the transformative power of sex beyond the shadow of HIV. They delve into topics like public play, sexual sherpas, and the evolving landscape of queer sex post-PrEP and U=U.

Raw, unfiltered, and insightful, this episode explores how embracing pleasure and authenticity can help create your best sex life yet. Don’t miss Alex’s take on why being a “slut” is something to celebrate and his most “Dynasty-worthy” sexual exploits. Tune in for an episode that challenges norms, celebrates liberation, and dives deep into the politics of pleasure.

TRANSCRIPT:

Trevor Hoppe (00:09)
Hey, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is about liberation. Fun fact, before it was called a Pride Parade, each year our communities would gather to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City with a march. And we called it a Gay Liberation March. Liberation was our way of saying, as a community, to straight people,

We’re not changing for you. Two kids and a white picket fence? No thanks, we don’t want that life. Gay liberation dreamed of a radical future where we didn’t depend on marriage for access to healthcare or basic civil rights. Crazy ideas, right? Today’s guest knows a thing or two about liberation. I’ve known Alex Garner for almost 20 years.

We even co-wrote a play together called The Bottom Monologues. Right? It’s amazing, you should check it out. He has never compromised his radical sex politics in the service of anyone else’s comfort level, and I truly admire that. Today, Alex is bringing his uncompromising radical sex politics to his work with MPact Global, spreading the word and raising awareness about gay men’s health and queer men’s health.

in a way that is truly sex positive. And he’s doing this around the world, from Mexico to Taiwan. Let’s listen in.

Trevor Hoppe (01:47)
Alex Garner, welcome to the Best Gay Seggs Podcast.

Alex (01:50)
Thanks so much, Trevor. I’m happy to be here.

Trevor Hoppe (01:52)
I am thrilled to have you here. You have been at the forefront of gay men’s seggsual health activism and thinking in my mind for many years now. But for folks who don’t know you, tell us a little bit about kind of where you’re from and the work you do now.

Alex (02:09)
Sure, sure. So I grew up in Southern California near Los Angeles and I’ve been working as a community organizer activist since the early 90s when I was 21. I’m now 52 almost, so I’ve spent my entire life working in some element of queer organizing and HIV, HIV in particular for queer men of color.

I’m positive, been positive for 28 years now, and that also has informed a great deal of the work that I do in particular, how to represent and advance the issues that are important and unique to queer men living with HIV. And I’m a writer as well. I’ve written articles, a couple of plays with some interesting collaborators. Shout out to the bottom monologues.

Trevor Hoppe (02:59)
Mm -hmm, bottom monologue, yeah.

Alex (03:05)
And currently I work for MPact Global. Impact is a global health and human rights organization focused mostly on gay, bi, queer, trans folks, rights and health. So I’m happy to be here and talk about this exciting topic, which I’d love to talk about.

Trevor Hoppe (03:30)
Yes, the best gay seggs. Everybody loves gay seggs. So you grew up near Los Angeles. When you say near Los Angeles, what proximity are we talking about?

Alex (03:39)
So I grew up in the Inland Empire. So most people probably know what that means. I .E. if you will. And then left there when I was 18 and go to college at UCSD. Spent eight years in San Diego and then the 25 I moved to Los Angeles to West Hollywood, the heart of the heart of gayness. And it was also a really, really good

Trevor Hoppe (03:43)
out.

Of course.

Yes.

Alex (04:08)
way to sort of an exciting time to have gay seggs in the 90s as a 25 year old in West Hollywood. It was fantastic.

Trevor Hoppe (04:13)
Ha ha.

And were you, so were you a little queer boy before you came to West Hollywood or was that part of your seggsual kind of awakening?

Alex (04:27)
I was very much a little gay queer boy before I came to West Hollywood. I came out in 91, 92. So I was 20 years old in San Diego. I was president of our, back then it was called LGBA, the Gay and Lesbian Association. So I was out and an activist before I moved to West Hollywood, but West Hollywood certainly allowed me to dive full.

face forward into the sort of seggsual culture of Los Angeles. And the circuit culture was also happening at a time that I was a part of. And I was doing seggs work then too. And so seggs was an enormous part of my experience those early years of West Hollywood. And it was back then when you could like walk down the street and a car would pull over and say, hey, where are you going?

Trevor Hoppe (05:16)
Yeah.

thinking about that. So how would you typically meet guys back then? Like what was the sort of protocol?

Alex (05:24)
So it was right when the advent of the internet was happening. So I think back then you had the traditional ways. So I went to a gay gym, which was in the middle of West Hollywood. It was men only. It was super, super gay. You could work out with your shirt off. They had an enormous sauna, steam room area where of course everyone was fooling around. They had a pool and a jacuzzi. And then they had a tanning area on the roof, which was clothing options.

Trevor Hoppe (05:36)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (05:53)
So you can imagine how that was. It’s great to have a good workout and then sort of get relief afterwards.

Trevor Hoppe (06:02)
And is that kind of like public play, has that always been part of your repertoire? Has that changed over time?

Alex (06:10)
That’s always been part of my repertoire. And I think I actually have thought it was so ingrained in me that when, before I even came out as gay, but I was starting to have seggs with men and I was at UCSD, for some reason I knew this, maybe it was genetic gay knowledge, I don’t know. But I knew that if I went to an adult bookstore, I could meet guys and have seggs with them.

Trevor Hoppe (06:31)
Hmm

Alex (06:38)
and there were adult bookstores that were quite popular in San Diego at that time that I could go to and meet guys. So that element of seggs and cruising was really sort of integral to my development. And we also had one of those bathrooms that was notorious for their glory holes, so notorious in fact that it was listed in the Damron guide if people still remember what that is.

Trevor Hoppe (06:39)
Mmm.

Alex (07:08)
Hehehehehe

Trevor Hoppe (07:10)
Like Fodors for gays, yeah.

Alex (07:12)
And so it was really popular. And I don’t know how I knew that it was there, but I knew that it was there and I went there. And so that style of seggs and cruising has always been special to me, I guess would be a sweet way to describe it, but certainly also informs the pleasure and fulfillment that I get around seggs because I…

Trevor Hoppe (07:20)
Yeah.

Alex (07:40)
From the very early age, I wasn’t ashamed of it and I understood why it was fun and exciting to me.

Trevor Hoppe (07:48)
And what’s special about it? You say special.

Alex (07:50)
Well, it holds a special place in my heart for me, I guess, guess, a little young gay person who was just discovering how seggs worked and how cruising worked and how you look at someone to indicate that you’re interested or how you respond to them and how you use your body, all of those sort of nonverbal cues that we have to master in a cruising setting. It amps up the excitement.

Trevor Hoppe (08:18)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (08:19)
When the time comes that you sort of, you know, if if use hunting as a metaphor, you sort of find the thing that you want and you think that they’re hot and they’re interested in you. And then you have this intense seggsual connection and all of that dance beforehand helps make that seggsual connection for me, all the more powerful and pleasurable and fulfilling.

Trevor Hoppe (08:43)
And do you remember your first time cruising?

Alex (08:46)
Gosh, it’s so, it was long ago. It was very long ago. I remember elements of like first, around the first times. Like I remember in particular, I remember being at the college, it was a lab, a science building, it was in the basement. It was very active. And I remember this one time in particular where there were like multiple guys in the bathroom at the same time at the urinal cruising in the store. It was like a porn.

Trevor Hoppe (09:13)
Mm.

Alex (09:16)
at the urinal cruising, in the stalls cruising, someone was literally sort of standing with their back against the door as sort of making sure we knew that someone was coming. And it was one of those old fashioned buildings where they have the double, there’s like a door that you enter and then there’s a little bitty sort of vestibule and then another door. So you could always hear the first door and know that someone was coming in. You know, gays, we have it all figured out.

Trevor Hoppe (09:16)
Damn.

The Watchman, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, the architecture of cruising. I love it. That’s fabulous! Is this something you like, did your friends at the time, college friends know that this was something you were doing or is this like a

Alex (09:54)
No, I hadn’t come out yet. And so no one knew I was doing it. When I came out, I still did it. Like I’ve never been this type of person. I’ve never really held strongly to this belief that like cruising in public seggs is only for people who haven’t sort of embraced their sexuality fully. That devalues the act of it, right? So after I came out, I still did it. In fact, I did probably more of it because I didn’t.

Trevor Hoppe (09:56)
Yeah

Alex (10:12)
Hehehehe

have any concern that someone might bump into me and figure out who I was, blah, blah, blah. I went to other bookstores. Like I usually only went to the one that was close to the university. But then I discovered, there’s other places. And I talked to friends about going to these places. I had a friend that I would sometimes go with, right? And it was sort of, yeah, it was, it was fun because we were part of the currency attached to cruising in these public seggs spaces.

Trevor Hoppe (10:39)
Really?

Alex (10:50)
is masculinity, of course. And so I understood how to fabricate my masculinity to get what I wanted. And it always amused me sort of how people would respond to what I would feel was a sort of obviously an authentic masculinity. The friend that I would go with was also exactly like me. Even physically, we sort of were the same and he was a big girl.

Trevor Hoppe (10:52)
-huh.

Right?

Alex (11:18)
the big queen. And so it was always sort of funny to see us transform the minute we passed through those little plastic things that hang in, you know, those bookstores because we knew how to use our masculinity to get what we wanted, right? It’s just that we all have our tricks in our bag.

Trevor Hoppe (11:19)
Yeah.

Yeah, it was a way, I was just curious, like what are those tricks? Like what is the fabrication for you? I mean, you are what, six four? Yeah, people watching cannot tell that, but that’s part of the effect, right? Is height, I think adds to the element, kind of broad shouldered. But so there’s physical attributes, but like, you know, obviously you’re talking about something that’s more performative.

Alex (11:45)
Uh huh.

Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, so obviously, even right now, I move when I talk, I use my hands when I walk, I walk in what has always been considered a gay way. So if I have to be masculine, then I lower my voice or talk as little as possible. I move as little as possible. I don’t move my hips. I change my gait in terms of how I walk.

Trevor Hoppe (12:23)
Ahaha

Alex (12:28)
All of those things, and it creates a certain mystique if you’re sort of moving less and moving less and talking less. It creates a little sort of distance intrigue or whatever. So I figured out I knew how to do that. I don’t do it, obviously, in my daily life, but if I need to get what I want, we all do that. Like if you go to the supermarket and you have to be nice to someone to get a return.

Trevor Hoppe (12:47)
Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah, you don’t really want to be nice to them, but you have to. Like, yeah, of course, it’s always performance, right? We are always sort of moving through. And I think that rubs up against this idea of authenticity today that, you know, people are like so invested in. And it’s like, OK, well, there are limits to that. But I guess I wonder, I’m just curious, because you used that word, an obviously inauthentic manifestation of masculinity, right?

Do you ever wish you could be desired without that?

Alex (13:20)
I mean, I think that I am. I think that there are plenty of people who desire. I think there are people that are actually attracted to what I would consider my feminine side, right? I think actually part of it, and this is where I sort of feel affection towards it. I think part of it is a game. And I understand it’s a role that you play and it’s a game that you play. It’s sort of stepping into the spotlight or onto the stage. And you know how it works.

Trevor Hoppe (13:22)
Yeah, right, like, of course!

Yeah.

Alex (13:51)
And like I said, we do the same thing. Like if we’re talking to our ticket agent and we hope that they’re going to upgrade us to first class, right? You create something to get what you want. And I think that when it comes to seggs, as long as I’m in on the illusion, then it’s not sort of confining me or controlling me. If I can see it as sort of ridiculous and laughable.

Trevor Hoppe (13:58)
-huh.

Alex (14:16)
then it’s not sort of gonna feel oppressive to me. It’s just something that I can use to get what I want. And it also doesn’t, I think when it comes to seggs, what will frustrate me is this idea that men will often expect me to play a particular role sexually. Like they really want like a super dominant masculine guy who’s gonna like f*** them really hard.

choke them and you know and I never really get into that it’s so much work. And so that’s the only that would I think would be the only frustration is that they they they come to believe it so much that they expect certain things as a result.

Trevor Hoppe (15:01)
Yeah, isn’t that funny? This is a theme that keeps coming up, is just this like, this inability for people to detach from the fantasy. They’re like, so invested in the fantasy, they think the fantasy is reality. And it’s like, babe, of course it’s not reality. Like, what are you thinking? Can you think of a time where like, that has really gone south, where like, you just feel like,

there was this complete disconnect between what someone wanted from you and what you were wanting to offer them.

Alex (15:29)
I mean, I think the the example would be, I remember I met this guy and he was was super cute, hot, I would say, super hot. And I was like, really into like having seggs with seggs And we met up, I went to his place. I was living in DC at the time. And when I met him in person, he was even hotter than I expected him to be. But he was into role play.

Trevor Hoppe (15:54)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (15:54)
And so he was so invested in the role play that after five minutes, I guess, wanted to say, scene, bring the curtain down, let’s stop, take a break. Because he was like, he had this elaborate fantasy in his head. I was his dad, he was my son, I was having seggs with him, we shared this secret, no one could know, we couldn’t tell mom, it was only a little secret mom couldn’t know. And then from there it was this.

Trevor Hoppe (16:12)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (16:23)
idea that he had constructed that we had a cabin in the woods that I would take him to and we would have seggs there and then I would invite all my other adult male friends over and they would have seggs with him too and it was just it was so elaborate that I was just exhausted that it’s too much. Scene.

Trevor Hoppe (16:45)
Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe if it was a seggs work context and this was someone paying you, then there might be some kind of… But yeah, that’s kind of a lot to ask of someone you’ve just met. Like, hey, could you… Wow, that had so many nooks and crannies with the mom and the cabin. That is interesting.

Alex (16:50)
Precisely.

Trevor Hoppe (17:08)
Would you feel differently about that if that was a client?

Alex (17:11)
well, yeah, if it’s a client, then it’s performance. I mean, this whole notion of masculinity is currency when it comes to being an escort, right? I mean, I think the biggest things that clients wanted, at least back then, big dicks, masculine, controlling. I mean, those were the things that they would pay a higher premium for. You know, it’s all sort of supply -side economics at the end of the day.

Trevor Hoppe (17:21)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (17:38)
And so if a client wants that, then of course I can do that for an hour and I can pretend and perform to be the most interested person in the world.

Trevor Hoppe (17:48)
Right, for a price, exactly. No, yeah, I get that, totally. So, you know, it sounds like you, a lot of people have expectations of you being a top. Is that like something, a term you relate to, identify with? How do you feel about that term? How do you feel about these categories generally?

Alex (17:52)
It’s always for a price.

Yeah, I mean, I’m sort of classic in terms of these categories, you know, sort of in that 70s, blue hanky sort of way. So I would, I, yeah, I call myself a top and I put top in my profiles and blah, blah, blah. I also understand the sort of ridiculousness of it. Like it’s just a indication of the fact that I will want to be the one f**king but it doesn’t mean anything else or it shouldn’t mean anything else. And,

Trevor Hoppe (18:20)
Mm. Mm -hmm.

Alex (18:41)
But it, of course, comes with expectations in terms of people who want to have seggs with you. And I’ve been living in Mexico City for the last few years. And so it’s always funny to get a message on Grindr or something. And the first thing they say is, “Ay macho.” That’s what they want. And at certain times, I can be in that mood. But I want to do it when I want to do it, not when they want to do it. do it.

Trevor Hoppe (19:05)
Yeah, do you feel like that’s something you’ve learned over time? Like only doing it when you want to do it or?

Alex (19:13)
Certainly, I mean, I think I’ve learned it. I’ve learned to sort of, I hate to use this sort of phrase or term. I’ve learned to sort of set my boundaries in terms of what I want, will and won’t do. Whereas if I was 21 years old, it’s just so much easier to do it. Even if I don’t feel like doing it, I’m still going to have a good time.

Trevor Hoppe (19:29)
Right, the mechanics are different, absolutely. You can get hard at, my God, yeah, exactly. I can understand that. Before we get to the best seggs, I guess I’m curious about the sort of learning process. And so I was trying to sort of think about how you learn to set those boundaries. And I guess if there were some experiences where, that were transformative in terms of

Alex (19:34)
Exactly.

Trevor Hoppe (19:58)
like, oh s**t like this was really bad. I need to course correct in the future.

Alex (20:06)
I mean, I think that when I think about any seggs that I would consider really bad, I don’t think it was, I think it was more circumstantial than anything else or maybe communication. And so you sort of learn, you learn immediately. It’s less of a course correction and it’s more of a sort of little tweak, right? I think that the things that, I think the two things that informed my seggsual development the most were,

Trevor Hoppe (20:17)
Hmm. Mm -hmm.

Alex (20:35)
seggs work and HIV, being HIV positive. Seggs work because it helped me really distinguish between seggs that was for work and seggs that was for my fulfillment. And that was valuable because most of us don’t have to think about that. And so it forced me to say, this is recreational seggs and this is work seggs.

Trevor Hoppe (20:38)
Mmm.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Alex (21:01)
and they’re different and I can enjoy them in different ways. And there were times, certainly many times when I was doing seggs work and I enjoyed it with the person in a different way. But it helped me really have to think about what I consider pleasurable and fulfilling seggs. So that.

Trevor Hoppe (21:18)
Yeah, because you’re using your time to find that. So you want to like get what you want out of it. What’s the difference for you in terms of, I mean, it sounds like the seggs work stuff came with that baggage of expectations and but.

Alex (21:33)
Well, you know, it reminds me of the bottom monologues because one of the characters that I created was Big Dick Escort, right? And so he had this whole sort of seggs life as a top, dominant top with his Big Dick, but his real, fulfilling seggs life was at the bottom. And my seggs life was still as a top.

Trevor Hoppe (21:38)
hehehehe

Mm -hmm.

Alex (21:58)
but it was sort of my relationship to the person that I was with, my relationship to my body and the seggs that I found satisfying recreationally, that was the, I think the big difference because when you’re doing seggs work, it’s so much about oftentimes it’s like, how can I just get this over with?

Trevor Hoppe (22:17)
Ha ha.

Alex (22:19)
And there are great clients that would be done in 15 minutes and they just want you to c*** And so then you’re like focusing on the end results, right? So you get there, you know that you’re done, hours over, they pay you and they leave. And so in that sense, it’s so transactional, not in a bad way, but it’s so transactional that it helps you sort of have a clearer sense of it. Whereas if it’s seggs that you’re having just to enjoy, then you can…

relax and you can sort of explore and you can sort of, you know, there’s a dance and a rhythm to it that you can lean into that when you’re performing it, it’s just not the same.

Trevor Hoppe (22:57)
Yeah, sort of letting your hair down, so to speak.

Alex (23:01)
Yeah, that could be a good way to describe it.

Trevor Hoppe (23:04)
Yeah, no, I can understand that. Like, there’s just, there’s not, you’re not in your head as much about thinking about, as you say, the end result or time, especially, I’m sure, as part of it. So, you’re identifying at the top, you’re having these experiences, and you say that bad seggs,

for you was circumstantial, what do you mean by that?

Alex (23:30)
Well, I mean, it’s also difficult to define what bad seggs is. Like, did I have a bad time? Did we stop midway through? Did what, you know, there’s all these different things that were they bad kissers? I think for me, fundamentally, if I’m with someone and they’re a bad kisser, then like, and I just can’t. That’s an index. For me, that’s sort of bar.

about seggs has always sort of been set around, I mean, kissing is probably one of the most important indicators, but it’s also the sort of sense of passion, like, you know, you don’t don’t to, what’s the expression, wet fish or whatever. So I think that’s, that for me has always been a good way to sort of indicate what the seggs seggs going to be like with them. And then I think, when I think about

Bad seggs, sometimes it’s, like, I want to be careful about describing the word bad because it’s not about the person per se, right? So like, if you have a seggsual experience with someone and, you know, s**t happens, it’s no one’s fault, of course, but it can break the mood, right? And so it’s a bad experience. And sometimes you can have a bad experience of that part. It really, really breaks the mood.

Trevor Hoppe (24:51)
We’re talking literally s**t happens here it sounds like. Yeah, okay.

Alex (24:55)
Exactly, exactly. And so that’s just par for the course, but it can make things, you know, it can make the experience sort of come to an abrupt end.

Trevor Hoppe (25:05)
Right, yes.

Alex (25:07)
Other than that, I think sexually, and this is where I sort of try to set this out when I’m meeting people. I think the other thing that I tend to prefer is someone who’s experienced, right? And so someone who knows what they want, someone who knows what they’re doing. The thing that will annoy me the most in seggs is when someone either gives me direction,

or asks a lot of questions. Like, are you enjoying this? Can I do this for you? Should I do this? I feel like those things don’t need to be articulated if you’re good. You can figure them out, right? And so I think that helps me understand. Like if I have seggs with someone, I don’t even care if we speak the same language or not. You have a connection with them. You don’t need to say a word.

Trevor Hoppe (25:36)
Mmm.

Alex (26:04)
in terms of knowing where the seggs is gonna go and how you can make them feel good and how they can make you feel good. That for me becomes certainly fits into the category of some of the best seggs because it’s so physical, it’s so much about chemistry and pleasure.

Trevor Hoppe (26:23)
So it sounds like bad, part of bad for you is someone’s inability to read your body language and kind of vibe. I’m like, God, am I using that word? But it’s real, it’s a thing. And when the vibe isn’t there, or when someone just can’t feel the pulse, I guess.

Alex (26:36)
you

Yeah, yeah, they just sort of want to lay there. Like, like, there are times when I’m in the mood for like, a lazy bottom, but usually I’m not right. And sometimes I want to be a lazy top. it’s been a long day. And so, but they’re often, and there are often people out there who are more than happy to comply. So, that’s not, that’s

Trevor Hoppe (26:55)
Mm -hmm

Mm -hmm.

Absolutely.

Right. Comply. That’s a hot word right there.

Alex (27:15)
Precisely. So that’s not the big issue. I think for me, as we’ve been talking for weeks about this sort of idea of best seggs and good seggs, especially when I’ve had 30 plus years of gay seggs, it’s hard to put my finger on one or two. It’s always so…

dependent upon sort of the circumstances of my life at that time or the circumstances of that seggs. And I think there are certainly some that immediately come to mind, right? Some of it has to do with sort of the seggs that you have, like when you’re on ecstasy and you’re dancing at a circuit party all night long and then you go home and have seggs with someone. That is certainly enhanced because of the ecstasy and because of your attraction to them and you’re like in love with them for that.

Trevor Hoppe (28:00)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (28:09)
12 hours, whatever. But I think the important thing on that, in that part in terms of sort of love, right? I think that you can love someone for 30 minutes and have the seggs that’s the most intense, incredible. I don’t like to qualify it and say you’re in love with them, but I think we need to sort of expand our context of concept of romantic love because it’s so heteronormative.

Trevor Hoppe (28:10)
Yeah, it can create this heightened experience.

Alex (28:38)
And I could love someone I met in the subway and had seggs with, you know, in the bathroom. I’d never see them again.

Trevor Hoppe (28:42)
And never see again. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s like we need, we need 17 words for love or something like whatever. People say there’s, I can’t remember what other language has many more words, but you know, the old saying. Yeah, definitely there’s, there’s kismet. I don’t know what the word is. We don’t really have a language. There’s some kind of connection that can form that is, it’s kismet.

Alex (28:52)
Yes.

Trevor Hoppe (29:11)
What is it? I don’t know. It can, as you say, can heighten the experience. It can just create this intimacy. And even that sounds heteronormative to me. It sounds like, you know, you know.

Alex (29:21)
Yeah, I use that I use that word as default, but it’s also so you know, heteronormativity values certain words like love and intimacy. And and we’re sort of confined by our language. And so maybe that’s sort of our next project is to figure out better ways to describe these things. But I think part of that connection, going back to the other part is part of that connection, particularly

Trevor Hoppe (29:31)
Right.

Alex (29:49)
in the 90s and early 2000s was around HIV. And so there was, it’s so difficult to articulate or for people to understand what it means to meet someone when you’re positive who’s also positive and have seggs with them, particularly before PrEP and undetectable were as common as they are today. Because you had…

Trevor Hoppe (30:06)
Mm -hmm.

You mean positive people had seggs back then? Oh my god! Yeah, exactly. People often don’t understand that that, yeah, exactly, sorry, continue, yeah.

Alex (30:19)
Yes

No, I mean, I think think part of it, right? Part of it is this is is advancing narrative that not only were we having seggs and lots of seggs and good seggs and seggs parties and all these sorts of things, but it became this extra sense of connection when you could find someone who was also positive. And also often that would translate sexually into not wanting to use condoms. Right. And so that way. And so, you know, not wanting to use condoms and

Trevor Hoppe (30:49)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (30:54)
c inside them or seeming to exchange all of that sort of stuff, which was forbidden and in many places still is. Culturally, people still feel that way. To be able to do that, you know, Eric would use the term outlaw, I think sometimes to describe that sort of seggsual, Eric Rofes sorry. And so this idea of sort of being a seggsual outlaw in that context, I think also, also

Trevor Hoppe (31:00)
Mm -hmm.

Eric Rofes our friend and late mentor, yeah.

Alex (31:23)
contributed to feelings around seggs. But I think that there’s also, every positive person sort of has this moment or multiple moments experience where you meet someone and they’re like, I’m positive. And you’re like, me too. And then everything changes, right? Like right before you’re about to have seggs, that happens. And it’s like, you know, the lights come on, it’s like this hallelujah moment. And that really…

Trevor Hoppe (31:35)
Hmm.

Alex (31:49)
really had an impact on sort of my seggsual development, right, to sort of form these connections with other positive guys and have this sort of seggs that we were having that we were very much enjoying, even though it was considered bad or wrong or irresponsible. And to, you know, foster this sort of seggsual community or seggsual network of positive guys at that time, that’s sustained, you know, to today, I think for many of them, but I think

That certainly helped me better understand what I saw as valuable in the seggs that I was having and how I articulated why it was valuable to me as a person living with HIV, not just as my right to have seggs that’s pleasurable and to control my own body, but politically that all seggs that we have is political and to sort of embrace that can also make the seggs better.

because you understand the power of it.

Trevor Hoppe (32:48)
Back then, would you mostly have seggs with positive guys?

Alex (32:53)
Yes. So I think before prep, almost exclusively, my seggs partners were other positive guys. And if you were negative, I like wouldn’t even bother. I’m not going to have seggs with you. If you wanted to use a condom, get out. So I had very, not necessarily, but usually, yes, usually it was a positive guy. It was a 90 % chance that there was going to be no condoms. And sometimes they would be the ones that would want to use it.

Trevor Hoppe (33:09)
Did you see those two things as synonymous?

Alex (33:24)
But, and there were plenty of negative guys who didn’t want to use condoms, but I sort of didn’t want to bother with them. So that was, that was the, I think the big distinction. And then PrEP happened and all of a sudden I started having seggs with negative guys that I’d never had seggs with. And so that simply sort of expanded my field of opportunities.

Trevor Hoppe (33:43)
So what is it about, I think people, I have an understanding of probably what you’re looking for, but just to put a pen on it, because I’m curious, like, condomless seggs, what is different for you?

Alex (33:57)
I mean, so most basic part of it is just sort of the feeling that you have sensation wise when you’re having seggs with someone and it’s skin to skin as opposed to condom. That makes an enormous impact and it’s my ability to enjoy it. It also impacts if you’re a top, your ability to sort of be as hard as you want to be and to be able to f* them and c** inside them.

Trevor Hoppe (34:18)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (34:24)
is radically different than just c inside a condom. Those are sort of the basics.

Trevor Hoppe (34:28)
Yeah, what is it about that? What’s c inside? Because I’m just curious, like, what does it mean to you?

Alex (34:34)
I mean, it’s one of my favorite things to enjoy doing. And I think the meaning is really sort of that moment when you’re with someone, literally inside someone. And that moment of sort of climax and they’re responding to it. Some bottoms.

Trevor Hoppe (34:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alex (34:59)
swear that they can feel it and all of these sorts of things, right? Some bottom say no. That’s a whole school debate.

Trevor Hoppe (35:05)
Yeah, yeah. Not always, I guess, in my experience, but yeah.

Alex (35:11)
But they respond as if they do, right? So whether it’s performance or not, there’s this idea. Exactly. And so I think that moment when you’re sort of so uniquely and supremely connected to someone makes it great. And I also think that, at least for me,

Trevor Hoppe (35:13)
sure, yeah of course, you always say you can, yeah!

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Alex (35:38)
even if I’m witnessing that moment, right? Like if I’m watching the bottom get f* and someone’s f*** him and that to me is incredibly exciting and pleasurable. I don’t need to be the participant per se if I enjoy looking at it or if I’m part of that group, if you will, there’s a group activity happening. So, but it has that.

moment of connection that becomes heightened because of it.

Trevor Hoppe (36:09)
Do you think that that heightened nature is because of the history of HIV around that?

Or something else?

Alex (36:18)
I think that it’s sort of innately physical, chemical, animalistic at its core. But it’s impossible to detach 40 years of HIV from that. So I’m sure it has had some impact subliminally, if you will, in terms of our relationship to that. But I think at the end of the day, it really is this sort of animalistic.

Trevor Hoppe (36:26)
Hmm. Mm -hmm.

Alex (36:48)
chemical, physical thing. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (36:52)
animalistic. Yeah, I hear that. I have friends who, well, you know, the whole language around getting people pregnant, you know, it’s so funny because obviously we’re not getting pregnant, right? But, but they’re speaking to to I don’t know. Some kind of base desires. Yeah, there’s, I hear that. I don’t know what it is either. Like there’s just something.

Alex (37:00)
you

Trevor Hoppe (37:22)
Mmm, root, root chakra kinda, fundamental stuff happening.

Alex (37:27)
Well, yeah, it’s also the sort of breeding culture, right? That’s a big part of it. And that feels very animalistic, maybe in an animal husbandry sort of way.

Trevor Hoppe (37:40)
Yeah, totally, definitely. I have friends who joke about the way that someone else’s dick is shaped is like, it’s built for getting a deep end there and coming and they go into this deep level of fantasy about it that is fascinating to me. And I get it, it can be hot.

As someone who’s been working in the HIV field, right, like that’s the lens I see through fundamentally, but then, you know, I’m trying to like put that aside. And I think PrEP has given, and U equals U has given us the tools to put that aside and think about these other meanings that are not dependent on health, I guess.

Alex (38:31)
Well, I think that’s the challenge. And I would say that’s certainly my quest, right? Is how do we recenter seggs so that seggs is about pleasure and my fulfillment and my connection with a person and not about HIV and not about risk and not about health. And I think this is where being positive allows us that experience, that negative men will never experience.

Trevor Hoppe (38:37)
Yeah

Yeah.

Alex (39:00)
because they’re negative, but as positive people, we have the benefit of having been negative at some point and then having been positive at some point, knowing the difference. And when you never have to worry about HIV again, then the seggs that you’re having is just about the seggs that you’re having in the way that gay men did before HIV. And that can radically transform your relationship to your seggs and sexuality and what you find pleasurable.

Trevor Hoppe (39:20)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (39:29)
and how you articulate what you want and how you have all these connections because you never have to worry about getting HIV again.

Trevor Hoppe (39:36)
Do you remember having seggs for the first time after you seroconverted

Alex (39:40)
I don’t remember if it was the first time, but it certainly wasn’t the first months after. I think I probably went to a sauna and I wanted to have sort of a buffet of seggsual experiences. Exactly.

Trevor Hoppe (39:57)
Vegas buffet, baby.

Alex (39:59)
All you can eat. So for me, it was really like, you know, my God, now the floodgates can open and I can sort of dive into this pool and, you know, that I distinctly remember. The act itself, I probably don’t. But the idea that now I can do this and now I can have this sort of seggs with guys that I really wanted, I was having before, but it was still caught up in fear and anxiety.

Trevor Hoppe (40:14)
Mm -hmm.

Alex (40:26)
but now I could have the seggs and that’s where this liberation narrative comes in because getting tested with, getting a positive diagnosis with HIV is liberating. You don’t have to worry about getting HIV ever again and your seggs can just be the seggs that you’re having. And as perverse as that might sound to people, there is an overwhelming sense of liberation attached to

testing positive, and it’s almost entirely around the seggs that we’re having.

Trevor Hoppe (41:01)
Do you think negative guys on prep now come close to that?

Alex (41:07)
Certainly, I think negative guys approach it, right? They get to like the 10 -yard line, if you will.

Trevor Hoppe (41:10)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Alex (41:14)
But it’s something that they’ll never be able to do, right? You just can’t do it until you’ve got there. But for me, that was always the most attractive thing about PrEP. less interested in the sort of prevention narrative, the sort of bulls**t prevention narrative that started around PrEP. And I was more interested in the idea of like, well,

Trevor Hoppe (41:33)
Wait, is it bulls**t for real? It does work, right?

Alex (41:38)
Well not bullshit, like, bull, like, it’s not true. I mean, like, I mean, this sort of bullshit cliche narrative of like, be a good little gay boy and take your pill because now you can have seggs and not worry about HIV, but you should still use a condom most of the time because you don’t want to get STI. Like that sort of bullshit that came out of Unprep. And for me, I didn’t give a s**t about communicating that to anyone because it was sort of incidental. What I was interested in is like, now you’re, you can get

Trevor Hoppe (41:40)
Hahaha

Still use a gun on me honestly.

Alex (42:07)
to the 10 yard line. Now as a negative guy, you can have the seggs that you wanted to have and you can do these things that you wanted to do. And we’ve seen that happen, like the explosion of like come dump bottoms online. There were plenty of them there that were there before that were positive before PrEP, but once PrEP happened, now it’s become this thing. And I think I wrote this in an article, you know, there used to be a time when

Trevor Hoppe (42:20)
Yeah

Alex (42:38)
having bareback seggs was radical. And now it’s an average Tuesday.

Trevor Hoppe (42:41)
Mm -hmm.

It’s just seggs. Yeah. I mean, does anyone still use the website Bareback RT? Like, it’s, I don’t even know if it’s, it’s still up? Okay. Yeah.

Alex (42:51)
Yeah, it’s still up. I still have an account. I still have an account. I check it every once in a while.

Trevor Hoppe (42:56)
Yeah, it’s just funny to me because it’s like, I mean, you know, it’s just, you find that everywhere now It’s not a thing, so to speak. So you’ve got this, you know, you have this liberation transformative moment. Hopefully that’s a gateway. It sounds like that’s a gateway to having your best seggs. What does that best seggs look like for you?

Alex (43:23)
You know, I’ve been thinking about that. It’s hard. It’s such a hard thing to sort of nail down because it, you know, best can be, it’s like, it’s like going to a restaurant. And that’s the best analogy. Food is the best analogy for me because sometimes you go to this fantastic, delicious, wonderful, luxurious restaurant and you have the best meal you’ve ever had.

Trevor Hoppe (43:24)
you

Mm -hmm.

Alex (43:48)
And sometimes you’ve been out all night and it’s three o ‘clock in the morning and you go to Burger King and it’s the best meal you’ve ever had. So seggs is the same. And I think for me, when I think about the best seggs that I’ve had, there is probably, I’d probably have to put them in different categories. One of them is certainly like there, I can think, immediately think of sort of seggs that I had with someone that I had such an insane.

Trevor Hoppe (43:52)
It’s slaps, baby. yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Alex (44:17)
chemical attraction to that even like just when we touched each other, even just our fingers, it was like electricity, for lack of a better term, so that the seggs was just intense and, and, you know, passionate and, and hot and all of those sorts of things. But, and that was great, right? And so that was that was dependent upon this chemical interaction. And I mean, I think probably people would

considered the seggs that we had pretty basic in the sense it was just like, you know, kissing, oral and f**king like sort of standard seggs, but it was the connection. And then I think that there’s seggs that happens that I would put in that sort of cruising category where you’re like, cruising for seggs. I was just in Brazil and had seggs with this guy that I met at some seggs club there.

And he was physically gorgeous in terms of what I want in a guy. And the seggs that we had was great. The sort of connection that we had was great. We sort of cruised each other before, then we went into some cabin. And I can still sort of almost physically sort of have the physical memory of touching his chest as I was f**king him. And it’s waist holding his waist.

And all of that sort of stuff made it a great seggsual experience. And I would put that sort of in that sort of cruising category. And then there’s also sort of seggs that like, I can think of like the best couple seggs that I had. And that was because one, I was super attracted to both of them equally, which is rare when you have couple seggs.

Trevor Hoppe (46:02)
not someone you were dating, like you having seggs with a couple.

Alex (46:07)
Correct. It was a three way. It was a three way. There was a couple and there was me. And so there’s always that challenge when you’re having seggs with a couple because invariably one, you’ll be more attracted to one than the other and vice versa. And in this situation, it was sort of the chemistry was perfect for all three of us and that was, it was equally distributed. And while we were having seggs,

You know, when you’re having seggs with a couple, you have to sort of worry about like the dynamics and any of those sorts of things sometimes, who might get jealous and insecure. But I remember with this couple, what made it so good was that that seems to not be there. So much so in the sense that like, you know, it’s f**king one guy and the couple was like saying in Spanish.

Trevor Hoppe (46:40)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Alex (46:58)
you know, enjoy it, enjoy it, it’s really nice. Like it was really into the fact of like watching his boyfriend getting f**ked It was really into the idea that his boyfriend was enjoying it, right? And supporting that. And I think that heightened the experience because it let free those concerns around like, I’m gonna couple and someone’s gonna feel left out or blah, blah, blah. That would certainly count as one of my best seggsual experiences.

Trevor Hoppe (47:26)
Yeah, those dynamics can always be difficult to anticipate. It’s almost like surprise. Like the enjoyment is the surprise that it’s actually good. You’re like, wow, this is great.

Alex (47:35)
Totally.

Trevor Hoppe (47:43)
I totally can appreciate and understand that. What do you do, what are your like strategies for finding that best seggs, whatever category it may be in?

Alex (47:59)
I mean, like my seggs strategies now tend to be more, instead of having them come to me, I go to them. And what I mean, I don’t mean Grindr like in and out. I mean, like, instead of like playing the Grindr game and trying to meet some guy and then like waiting for him to come over, waiting him to be on time, they never are, you know, getting the, you know, prepared or whatever.

Hehehehehe

It’s much easier just to go where there’s a lot of them, right? Like a salt lick or something like that. So a seggs club… So like a seggs club or a… I know salt is, well, I guess literally it is. Literally it is very salty. So it’s like a salt lick.

Trevor Hoppe (48:30)
Lord have mercy.

Pfft!

So the seggs club is the salt lick I got it.

Alex (48:51)
So like a seggs club or a sauna or some sort of cruising space where it’s easy access to a lot of people at once. That to me, and as I said earlier, that dynamic has always appealed to me. And then I think part of that dynamic is also the cruising element. And then there’s also this sort of going back to this theme of performance, right? When you’re in a group public setting,

then you can sort of perform and put on a show and be part of that show that’s happening. And that can be very pleasurable and fulfilling as well.

Trevor Hoppe (49:29)
little bit of an exhibition.

Alex (49:31)
Yeah, I would say exhibitionist and voyeur. So I certainly like to watch and I certainly like to know that I’m putting on a show for someone.

Trevor Hoppe (49:40)
Yeah, definitely. So is most of what the seggs you find today, is it mostly through those kinds of spaces, like clubs, et cetera?

Alex (49:49)
certainly if I’m traveling, like I’ve ever been a city, like I was just in Brazil, Sao Paulo and Rio. And I’m like, I can sit in my hotel room and get on Grindr and, and look for a guy, or I can go to a space where there are lots of guys. And so in that sense, it’s so much easier when I’m traveling. That’s sort of, it’s a more direct route to get what I want. and I think that, so that for me.

works because sometimes at the end of the day it’s just simply a time saver. I feel like a working mom, right? It’s like my time saving tip.

Trevor Hoppe (50:24)
Yeah.

For listeners who are not in cities with those kinds of establishments, because unfortunately there’s a lot of places in the world, especially here in the United States, without seggs clubs, what tips would you have for folks for finding their best seggs in those kinds of spaces, or without those kinds of spaces?

Alex (50:50)
So I would have two tips for that. And I think one is more aspirational and one is more practical. The aspirational one is we have to create those spaces. So I always admire and am fascinated by the idea of a guy that went to a bathroom and created a glory hole. Like how the f*** did you do that?

Trevor Hoppe (51:13)
whittled that thing in the wall, yeah.

Alex (51:15)
How did you do that? Do you have a power tool? Do you need an extension cord? How does that work? I want, I want there to be like a, there needs to be a podcast or a documentary about how a glory hole is born. Someone needs to do that because it fascinates me. I love the person who did that, who took the time and the energy to do that.

Trevor Hoppe (51:24)
EEEE E

Alex (51:40)
So if those spaces don’t exist, then we’ve got to create them. And that’s aspirational because obviously not everyone can create them and there are certainly risks that go along with it. But I think the more practical one is that if there aren’t those spaces, then this is where the value and the importance of seggsual networks comes in, right? And I think HIV is the sort of most obvious one, but.

Trevor Hoppe (51:44)
Get some power tools, baby.

Hmm.

Alex (52:10)
If you’re able to create a network of people that you have seggs with, whether you call them f*** buddies or whatever, then that saves you the rigmarole of Grindr and looking for something. You’ve had seggs with them, it was good, you know each other. I think that’s a good, can often be a good dependable way. And you have a connection with them in different ways. Those would be my sort of two key.

suggestions.

Trevor Hoppe (52:38)
Yeah, build the seggsual community. I hear that and that is oftentimes a tip that I have for people too. And I don’t know why some people are so averse to it, but I think it seems like just sort of reading the many gay men that I encounter that some people just, maybe they’re too scared or I don’t know. But maybe they will never have the best gay seggs because they can’t.

because of that fear or something that’s holding them back. I don’t know, you gotta let go a little bit.

Alex (53:10)
This, see, this is where I think, for lack of a better phrase, we need like a seggsual sherpa. Because, so in seggs spaces or in cruising spaces or even like a naked pool party, right? There always has to be someone who starts the seggs.

Trevor Hoppe (53:19)
ha!

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Alex (53:36)
Because there are tons tons guys who want to do it and they’re afraid or they’re nervous and they don’t. And then there’s always a couple of them that know like, we’re gonna start this, we’re gonna get this to make this happen right now. Those are the seggsual sherpas

Trevor Hoppe (53:51)
I live for that idea. It’s sort of like the first, you got to be the first person on the dance floor if you want, you know, you got to bring people, create the world you want to live in. So you got to take a risk there. How do you, I mean, I guess you just have to like, just do it. But like, I think I am not, I am not a brave person in that way, but I know I have many friends who are, and I admire that very much, but it’s, it’s takes guts.

Alex (54:19)
I would never call myself brave in that regard. But I certainly have done it. And part of it is there’s an excitement to it, right? There’s the excitement of being the person who’s going to do that and sort of rope people in and the guy that you’re gonna do it with and your, it’s performance, of course. All of that can even make it more exciting and more fulfilling because you’re the

you’re the one sort of leading everyone along, right? And I certainly do it and I certainly have enjoyed it. And I think the way that you do it is that people just have to sort of dive in and I guess the pool is the best analogy. You said to throw yourself in and if you do and we’ve all had that experience where we did it and we didn’t think we were gonna do it and then we’re like, my God, it was so fantastic, I did it. And so we have to go for that moment.

overcome that fear or anxiety or nervousness around it and then you do it and then you see the the nice thing about that is once you see the results you’re more likely to do it again. And so that we yeah you need to maybe that’s your next podcast creating seggsual sherpas.

Trevor Hoppe (55:31)
actual sherpas.

I will take that concept with me for some time, I’m sure, because it’s such a fabulous concept. And I hear exactly what you mean.

Alex (55:42)
Thanks for watching.

Trevor Hoppe (55:49)
So I always like to end with my favorite segment, Sordid Lives and Untold Tales, S.L.U.T. for short. What’s the sluttiest thing you ever did?

Alex (55:59)
that’s so hard because I’m a total slut. And so what I consider like normal everyday experience, probably the rest of the world thinks is slutty. gosh, I mean, like in an old fashioned sort of like 80s dynasty Alexis Collins, Joan Collins, Alexis Colby.

Trevor Hoppe (56:02)
Because you are a slut!

Yeah.

Carrington yeah.

Alex (56:27)
I remember I was 21 years old and I got one of my first jobs writing for a magazine and had seggs with my boss, who was the publisher, on his desk in his office while his husband was home with their daughter. That to me is like old fashioned dynasty style slutty seggs.

Trevor Hoppe (56:47)
my god!

Definitely, that’s some soap opera drama right there. And did you get like a promotion out of it?

Alex (56:58)
I didn’t get a promotion but I got more money.

Trevor Hoppe (57:03)
okay. Get that coin. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I think just sharing these experiences and putting them out there and being frank about the real seggs we are having is key. So I appreciate your willingness to come with me on that journey today. Thank you very much. If people want to learn more about you,

Alex (57:10)
.

Thank you.

Of course.

Trevor Hoppe (57:31)
and or MPact Global, where can they find you?

Alex (57:34)
So for me it’s Alex Garner LA on Twitter and Instagram and for MPact it’s MPact Global on both Twitter and Instagram. So yeah, and I would…

Trevor Hoppe (57:46)
And that’s just impact, no I.

Alex (57:49)
Yes, sorry, it’s M-P -A -C -T global. So yes, thank you, Trevor.

Trevor Hoppe (57:55)
Great. Fabulous. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Alex. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to learning more about seggsual sherpas from you in the future.

Alex (58:04)
Thank you, Trevor. I was so happy. It’s been a pleasure.

Trevor Hoppe (58:07)
Yay.

Trevor Hoppe (58:08)
That’s our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. And remember, if you’re not having your best gay sex, I can help. My coaching services are designed for gay, bisexual, and queer men to identify and overcome barriers that stand between them and their best gay sex life. Find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Look forward to hearing from you. Till next time.

Overview: On the premiere episode of The Best Gay Sex Podcast, Dr. Trevor Hoppe interviews Damon L. Jacobs about his journey as a gay men’s health advocate and how he centers pleasure in his work. He reflects on the impact of the AIDS crisis on his sexual awakening in the 1980s and the fear and stigma associated with being gay back then. Damon also talks about how PrEP transformed his sexual health and mental well-being. He emphasizes the importance of putting pleasure first when talking about sexual health, urging listeners to move beyond traditional labels. Damon concludes by discussing the challenges of seeking validation through sex and the importance of embracing pleasure without fear.

Transcript:

Trevor Hoppe (00:10)
Hey, welcome to the Best Gay Sex Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Trevor Hoppe. Today’s episode is all about pleasure. Why can’t we talk about that? If you ask the average American to describe what they learned in sex ed, you could almost bet your bottom dollar that pleasure was not part of the curriculum. They teach boys to not get girls pregnant and girls, well, they just learn how to not get pregnant.

Maybe they throw in some scary pictures of STIs for just a pinch of fear of God on top. This episode and in truth this entire podcast is all about pleasure. In today’s episode, I talked to therapist Damon L. Jacobs, who I have had the pleasure of knowing for many years. There is advocacy promoting PrEP back in 2012 and 2013 when nobody was talking about it. And I mean nobody.

But we knew it worked. We knew that it stops HIV dead in its tracks. But public health was scared of PrEP because it gave queer men the power to have the sex we want and the way that we want with the partners we want. Damon understood that from the jump. He understood that PrEP is a tool of pleasure. And that pleasure, gosh darn it, is a human right.

Although Damon’s now thriving in his 50s living in New York City, it wasn’t always so easy. He came out in 1988 right smack dab in the middle of the AIDS crisis. Let’s take a listen.

Damon L. Jacobs (01:49)
So I am originally from Los Angeles, California, actually Culver City. My background is in mental health, so I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, both in the state of New York and California. And to me, as someone who came out as gay at the age of 17, which was 1988,

in the midst of the AIDS crisis, but also very dedicated to wanting to be part of healing and therapeutic movement in this community. It seemed imperative not to be the traditional clinical model of mental health, where you just kind of sit on your ass and people come in and they talk about the past. They talk about their mother, their father, their dead dog, Rover. To me, it was really important and imperative to serve the community in a way that was more immediate, that was more urgent, because the AIDS crisis wasn’t something in the past.

It was something that was acute and it was something that was traumatic and it was impacting people in the here and the now. And it wasn’t, so it really called upon a different set of clinical skills. That’s where advocacy came in for me, that mental health is a form of advocacy. The way we use our minds, the way we use our hearts, the way we use our souls, the way we use our bodies to connect is a form of resistance and a form of health. And that was the basis of how I’m ending up in having this conversation with you.

back in the 80s and 90s is when I started. Most recently now in the last 13 years, the form that’s taken on is learning about PrEP in 2011, deciding for myself that I wanted to use PrEP in 2011, began using it, and then started realizing, wow, this is like this amazing thing. For the first time in my life, I can have the kind of seggs that I want, i .e. bottoming without condoms, without fear of getting HIV, and…

Isn’t this amazing? This is not only helping my sexual health, this is helping my mental health. This is like this incredible burden that’s lifted and I didn’t fully comprehend that the burden had been there for most of my life. The fear of HIV and AIDS was lifted and what that made space for spiritually and emotionally once that fear was gone was phenomenal. So I was like, this is the most amazing thing. I want everybody else to learn about this.

Trevor Hoppe (04:00)
Hahaha

Damon L. Jacobs (04:01)
And it was bizarre to me that no one at the time, not the media, not the agencies, not the organizations, not the press, would talk about PrEP. So I started talking about PrEP. I started speaking about it, teaching about it, and then starting this Facebook group about it so that anybody in the world starting in 2013 could learn about PrEP. They could see the data, the science, the facts, the information, and have discussions and questions and doubts and even debates.

about perhaps efficacy and effectiveness and how we could integrate this into a new HIV strategy that involves pleasure at the center.

Trevor Hoppe (04:36)
I love that. A pleasure at the center is kind of key to my philosophy as well. But sort of, and we’re going to get to prep, but before we get into prep, let’s go back in time to the 1980s because you are coming out, as you say, in Los Angeles in the 80s. What was it like to have a sexual awakening in that moment, in that context?

Damon L. Jacobs (04:59)
It was clouded by AIDS and I didn’t even know that I was, I didn’t know what seggs was or what anal seggs was or what even gay seggs was before I learned about AIDS. I remember my mother, she and I would like read the afternoon paper. There was like a newspaper called The Evening Outlook that would come to our house. And sometimes she would go over stories with me. And one day it’s like, this was 1981 or 82.

She showed me this story about all these homosexual men that were dying of a gay cancer. And she was saying, this is really sad. And I was like, yeah, this is really sad. But I didn’t really understand the implications of what that would mean in my life. All I knew is, you can’t be gay. You can’t be homosexual. Because if you are, you’re going to die. Not only are you going to die young, but you’re going to die a really painful, tragic death.

And so the more pictures that came out, the more the media did start covering it, the more once Rock Hudson was outed as he was dying of AIDS, the more the message was embedded into me, you can’t do that. If you do that, if you have seggs, that’s gonna be you. You’re gonna look like Rock Hudson someday. I was like, no, I don’t want that. So that was at odds with my teenage hormones revving up. I have always been a huge soap opera fan.

Trevor Hoppe (06:15)
Yeah

Damon L. Jacobs (06:18)
And NBC was very kind to show a lot of male skin, specifically like Harry Men ruled the roast in the 1980s on daytime soap operas. You had Days of Our Lives, you had Bo Brady, you had Peter Love on Another World, you had Ted Capwell on Santa Barbara taking off their shirts almost every day. So my teenage hormones were like going crazy. But it was still like, no, you can’t do that because you’re going to die. If you do that, you’re going to die. If you act on that, you’re going to die.

Trevor Hoppe (06:34)
Ha ha.

Damon L. Jacobs (06:46)
The thing that started to pivot my understanding was in 1987, May of 1987, at the end of my 10th grade year, we were gathered into the assembly room at my high school and we were told that we were gonna see a film, but our parents had to sign off on it. And so it’s like, ooh, what kind of film is this? What they showed us was a film about how to prevent AIDS. And Whoopi Goldberg was a speaker and a bunch of other people.

Trevor Hoppe (07:12)
Huh?

Damon L. Jacobs (07:14)
And they were saying that if you have seggs, it is important and imperative you use a condom. That if you use a condom, you can have penetrative seggs and not get AIDS or reduce the likelihood of getting AIDS. And that was when it started to click for me. It’s like, you mean maybe I could do some of those things. I don’t even know what it is I want to do. But if I do it, maybe I could do it and not die if I use condoms. So that started getting into my brain. And I still didn’t act on anything until like,

Trevor Hoppe (07:20)
Wow.

Damon L. Jacobs (07:44)
12th grade and it was still very, very light stuff even through that. It was really hard to find partners, you know, I’m still in the 80s and still, you know, LA was pretty liberal but still pretty hard to find people to be with. But I started to understand, well I started to understand that I could experiment and do these things as long as condoms were used. How did I find partners? It began, so me, I was kind of the freaks and geeks crowd, we were sort of the outsiders.

Trevor Hoppe (07:51)
Yeah.

How did you find?

Damon L. Jacobs (08:12)
We would go to Rocky Horror a lot at the New Art Theater on Saturday nights. And at New Art Theater, there were a lot of the alternative kids. And there was one guy who used to play Brad every week who was openly gay. And it was the first time I had ever known, I had known some gay people before, but they were all very miserable, depressed, and not very nice to be around. This guy whose name is Mike was the first time at Rocky Horror that I saw someone who was out and not hiding it and not ashamed of it.

Trevor Hoppe (08:14)
Ahahaha!

Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (08:40)
and really celebratory about it. And I couldn’t come out to him, but I just sort of fed off his energy by osmosis. The first person I ever came out to was my very best friend Lisa at the very end of 11th grade. And Lisa used to sleep in her closet, and I came out to her in her closet, so I came out of the closet in the closet. And she was wonderfully supportive, but I still didn’t know anybody or still have any friends. Eventually, I kind of skipping ahead a little bit, but eventually I f –

Trevor Hoppe (08:46)
Yeah.

Ha ha ha ha

Damon L. Jacobs (09:09)
found there was another guy in high school at Culver City High who was out and explained to me how to sneak into the West Hollywood bars on certain nights at certain times of the day. I was 17 years, I’m 53 now and I look a little bit younger. Imagine what I looked like when I was 17. But he showed me how to get a fake ID through UCLA, a foreign traveler ID, which we did. And I started going out to gay bars like Revolver and Mickey’s.

Trevor Hoppe (09:12)
-huh.

a baby.

-huh.

Damon L. Jacobs (09:38)
in like 1989 when I was 17, 18 years old. That was when I started to meet and play with gay men.

Trevor Hoppe (09:39)
Wow.

That’s fabulous. I had a similar experience getting an ID in high school. It used to be easier back in the day to finagle your way into these places. So what, how do you remember those first early experiences? Like what were they like?

Damon L. Jacobs (09:55)
Yeah!

So they were, my goodness, so I had kissed many girls, not done much, never had seggs, just kissed girls, and thought, okay, this is fine, this feels nice. Most of my friends were older, and at the end of 11th grade, a whole bunch of us went to the prom. I knew I was never gonna go to my own prom, but I’d go to my friend’s prom who were graduating a year ahead of me. A bunch of us got a limo and got a hotel room at the Bonaventure in downtown LA. And we went to the prom, and we were, it was very G -rated, but we were just like,

Trevor Hoppe (10:23)
-huh.

Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (10:33)
hanging out, drinking, talking, whatever. And at one point during this night, at one point there was a boy, he didn’t go to our high school, he was the date of a friend of mine, a female friend, but at one point I just started rubbing his shoulders, that’s it. And the charge that I got and the erection I got just from touching a man’s shoulders was enough to tell me,

Trevor Hoppe (10:58)
Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (11:00)
You never feel this way when you kiss girls. You never feel this way when you touch girls. That was electric, just to touch a boy’s shoulders. I still couldn’t do anything about it, but that was the information. Nothing else happened in my life until senior year of high school. I was visiting UC Santa Cruz because I was thinking of going to school there. And I was visiting this party with a bunch of fresh people, freshmen.

Trevor Hoppe (11:08)
Wow.

Damon L. Jacobs (11:26)
And this boy named Ken was very flirtatious, but it was still, he was straight. But you know, again, we were up, we were talking, we were drinking, and he just got flirtatious. I came back the next day, told him that I had, I thought I had left my glasses in his room. That was a lie. But I was like, can I go to your room? Because I think I left my glasses here last night. He’s like, okay. We went to his room and we started making out. Like,

Trevor Hoppe (11:55)
Yes!

Damon L. Jacobs (11:56)
heavy making out. And that’s all we did. I mean, I think he touched my penis. I think I touched him, but that’s it. There was no comp. But again, from that experience, I was like, that was the most amazing experience. And that was like, okay, you’re definitely gay. You’re definitely gay. I still couldn’t explore anything, but I was going back and forth and going up to Santa Cruz, because I had friends who were living there, would go and experiment with some of the guys who lived there.

Trevor Hoppe (12:02)
Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (12:21)
And so it started to be this thing that I do when I go somewhere else, still no f***ing, just simply touching penises, kissing, rubbing, just starting to get acquainted with the human with a man’s body. And just like how amazing that felt. And fortunately there was one guy named Stu who explained to me while we were naked and hard, he explained to me what a condom was and how to put it on.

Trevor Hoppe (12:38)
huh.

Wow.

Damon L. Jacobs (12:50)
and how to use it. He said, we’re not gonna f**k but I want you to know how to do this. He did it, he put a condom on himself, then he showed me how to do it, and that was invaluable because he explained things I didn’t know, like you have to pinch the tip in order to reduce the air. He explained to me how to make it feel good if you put a little bit of lube inside. He explained to me how we could eroticize condom use when we’re having seggs, if we’re choosing to have seggs. His name is Stu. Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (12:55)
you

Mm -hmm.

Stu? Stu? God bless you, Stu. You are doing a service.

Damon L. Jacobs (13:19)
God bless dude. So those were the early experiences of being taught about seggs and pleasure, but also about HIV prevention from my sexual partners. And still didn’t do anything sexual, like nothing sexual until, well, exactly like 4th of July weekend, 1989, after I graduated high school and went crazy in West Hollywood and just absolutely went crazy. Started kissing and rubbing, having naked, and eventually, for the first time, had anal seggs as a top.

with a guy who I met fourth of July weekend in 1989. And that was again, like, my God, all of these encounters, all these men, they were mostly older, you know, older at the time was like thirties, forties. But just how amazing that felt, how beautiful they were, how good they smelled and how wonderful it was to be able to share that experience.

Trevor Hoppe (14:12)
So it sounds like it was a lot of play. I mean, it sounds very playful in the sense that like you’re kind of exploring, you don’t really have a strong, were you watching gay porn?

Damon L. Jacobs (14:26)
No, I mean, how would I get it? There wasn’t, there was no internet, there was no gay porn. I didn’t have it, you know, but I had NBC. I had the daytime soap operas. I mean, that pretty much, I was, you know, there were the soap operas and there was the Sears catalog, which usually had a shirtless hairy guy in it somewhere. That was about all I had and my imagination. So that was what I used. There was no porn available at the time.

Trevor Hoppe (14:28)
Yeah. Yeah.

The So Soap Opera! That was your porn!

Mm -hmm

Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (14:54)
And it wasn’t really, again, most of these experiences in the 80s and early 90s for me wasn’t about f***ing. It wasn’t goal oriented. It wasn’t about topping or bottoming. Most of them were about kissing or rubbing or mutual masturbation or oral seggs, but we didn’t really use the terms top or bottom because, you know, again, because of the AIDS crisis and because we didn’t have, remember, we didn’t have HIV testing that was sufficient back then. So.

Trevor Hoppe (15:20)
Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (15:21)
If you went for an HIV test, they told you, okay, the test you’re gonna get today is only really gonna tell us where you were at six months ago. So none of us truly, if we were having seggs and not known to be HIV positive, we didn’t know for sure if we were HIV positive or not. So there wasn’t a lot, at least in my world, there was not a lot of f***ing going on. It was more about sensual play and touch and cum, but.

you don’t taste it or you just like rub it or it was, yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (15:55)
So when do you think… Yeah, I mean, I kind of love that because it’s so different from today where fucking is so like, it’s like so central and I feel like there was a time where that was not the case. When do you feel like that changed for you? When did fucking become more important to you?

Damon L. Jacobs (15:55)
Fucking was not the main ingredient.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Bottoming? I mean, I always enjoyed bottoming from the very first time I tried it in 1989. Well, let me go back, because I think you asked about early experiences. I didn’t, you know, as much as I didn’t know, I really didn’t know anything about bottoming other than use a condom. Other than that, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything about lube, didn’t know anything about cleaning out. I don’t remember ever having conversations about douching or cleaning out ever back in the 80s.

Trevor Hoppe (16:19)
Hmm.

Ha ha.

Damon L. Jacobs (16:41)
There was no education or information that was available for me to know how to enjoy anal seggs. So I have to say that some of the early experiences were rather painful because there wasn’t a lot of communication. There were condoms, but I didn’t realize at the time the way latex scrapes against the anal tissue in a way that’s sometimes really painful and burning and causes bleeding. So.

Trevor Hoppe (17:04)
Right.

Damon L. Jacobs (17:10)
Although these experiences were not physically the most gratifying, they were psychologically and it like amazing. Like you said, I didn’t, you know, where was the porn? I didn’t have porn, but the idea of being penetrated by a man, having a man inside me was exactly the fantasy, the ravishment, the extraordinary experience that I enjoyed so much. Even if it wasn’t physically the most gratifying, it was psychologically so gratifying.

So that became more of a regular part of my sexual practice, I’d say probably in the mid 90s, because I moved to San Francisco. I was living in San Francisco on and off between 90, 93, lived there permanently from 1993 onward and was very much part for a while, part of club life. Club life had a lot of drugs and a lot of drugs meant not always a lot of erections, but I…

Trevor Hoppe (17:47)
Mmm.

Mmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (18:05)
stopped using drugs on a regular basis between 94 and 95. And then it was like, okay, now I’m kind of more into the seggs part and the penetrative part. And it started to feel like culturally, and again, there’s no data, but it just in my own anecdotal experience, it started to feel like people were becoming more comfortable with penetrative seggs again in the mid 90s. Like we had kind of gone through the worst of the crisis.

Trevor Hoppe (18:28)
Hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (18:32)
Maybe not the worst, but it’s like a lot of us were now been coming out during the time of AIDS. We understood how to fuck with condoms and prevent the transmission of HIV. And we were doing it and there was a lot more of it. And so the more experience that I had as a bottom, the more I started to understand how to physically get pleasure from it. The psychological pleasure always there, but also the physical pleasure started to make sense.

Trevor Hoppe (18:55)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (19:00)
as I started to believe more, as I started to have more experiences, as I started to trust condoms more, that if a man’s inside me, because I still have the Rock Hudson programming, if you do that, you’re going to die. Once I started to be able to have regular experiences bottoming with condoms without testing positive for HIV, I started to trust the process more. And of course, we know when we’re trusting the process, our bodies respond in a more affirmative way. Our bodies are wired for pleasure, but some of those

Trevor Hoppe (19:01)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (19:30)
point, pleasure points are closed up if we’re worried or scared. Once we start to eliminate or release some of the scare and the worry, some of the pleasure started to become more available for me on the physical level as well. Once I started to, I still didn’t know anything about douching or cleaning out, but I started to understand my body enough to know that there’s certain times I’m unlikely to st on somebody when they’re f*ing me. And again, that was still with condoms. So like, all right, worst case scenario, it gets on the condom. And worst case scenario, what did happen sometimes.

Trevor Hoppe (19:59)
Yeah, of course.

Damon L. Jacobs (20:00)
but it was still like gradually releasing fear around all of that, all of that. And that was proceeding more and more and more throughout the mid, late 1990s.

Trevor Hoppe (20:11)
Yeah, it strikes me that the treatments for HIV were introduced in 1996 and it’s like, it just seems like that might be a parallel story there that that also might have allowed people to take a breath and to explore a little more outside of that fear. Hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (20:25)
Mm -hmm.

Well, I don’t correlate that. I don’t correlate that, and here’s why. We didn’t, first of all, in 1996, people forget the early cocktail, the ARTs, were not user -friendly. They were not conducive to sexy time. They usually made people quite sick. They had severe side effects. The friends I knew that were on those early cocktails stopped using them, largely because it involved taking eight pills three times a day, 24 pills a day. They had to be done right on time.

Trevor Hoppe (20:38)
Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (20:56)
And they often created nausea and explosive diarrhea. And sometimes the facial wasting and the lipodystrophy. So a lot of people weren’t using the drugs. And we didn’t know how, we didn’t understand undetectable was untransmittable back then. We didn’t understand that there was actually a prevention component to treatment. So I don’t think at that point, the ARTs contributed to more sexual freedom. Not yet anyway.

Trevor Hoppe (21:13)
course.

Hmm? Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (21:27)
I think they started to more in the early 2000s, once some of the side effects became manageable and the quantity of meds became more manageable. That instead of taking eight pills three times a day, it was more like people started needing to use four pills two times a day. It became more relatable with less side effects. And then, yeah, people started getting healthier, feeling more sexy. And then I think that really led to a bit of a sexual renaissance throughout the early 2000s.

But we still, at least I didn’t know as a negative person, how powerful the ARTs were in preventing. I started to learn how powerful they were in saving lives, but not in HIV prevention. That didn’t come till much later.

Trevor Hoppe (22:10)
Mm hmm. And in your story, it sounds like you your first experiences were topping, but it sounds like there was always maybe not always, but a growing sense of a desire to bottom. What is so so just to be clear, it sounds like you identify as a bottom. That is a term you’ve used. Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (22:31)
Identify as a person who loves seggs.

Trevor Hoppe (22:34)
Yeah, that’s good. I love that. Absolutely. So you don’t use that term.

Damon L. Jacobs (22:38)
So for me, huh. You know, Trevor, I just, I’m gonna sound really cliche. I don’t like labels. You know, I’m willing to explain if people wanna know, when people wanna know. It’s like, what is my preferred position? Yes, bottom, absolutely. Preferred position, 35 years now. Ain’t gonna change. I can be versatile under certain conditions. I can be versatile when I’m really attracted to somebody or when there’s a certain kind of energy with somebody. But for the most part,

Trevor Hoppe (23:04)
Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (23:08)
It’s going to be a bottom thing, but I just want to add that, especially now that I’m in my 50s, I’ve come back to exploring and creating ways of connecting and having immense pleasure with partners that don’t involve f***ing. And I like that there’s sort of a menu. You know, when I started on prep,

Trevor Hoppe (23:26)
Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (23:31)
because I hadn’t done the kind of f***ing I wanted to do for like the previous 20 years. It was like, all right, I’m making up for lost time here. Bottom, bottom, bottom, fuck, fuck, fuck. You know, it was like, yeah, it was very goal oriented. No, you’re gonna fuck me or you’re not. Now I’m sort of like, okay, I still love that. And it’s still meaningful. And I still love the psychology and the emotion and spirituality of a man penetrating me and coming inside me. I still love that. That is sacred and beautiful. And I’ve also understood that there’s often ways of.

Trevor Hoppe (23:36)
Yeah. Woo!

Damon L. Jacobs (24:00)
feeling connected and having immense orgasmic pleasure in other parts of my body that are not centered in penetration.

Trevor Hoppe (24:10)
Yeah, it sounds like, and this is a narrative I’ve kind of heard from friends. And so I think you’re putting it into words in a way that I hadn’t quite thought about, but sort of prep and U equals U kind of may have allowed for this explosion of exploration of anal sex in a way that maybe it wasn’t possible before. And now that we’ve kind of…

We did that, like we explored, baby. I feel like many gay men had a lot of fun, queer men had a lot of that. And now that you’re kind of looking for other possibilities, now that you’ve explored that, is that fair?

Damon L. Jacobs (24:46)
Or that I’m returning because that’s kind of again what I was doing most of my 20s was you know, not really penetrative focused saying it would happen sometimes but that wasn’t necessarily the goal or the focus now, you know, a lot of my partners are in their 50s and 60s. So erections are not always readily available for us. Sometimes they are but not always and so it makes sense for us to expand and enhance our experience of connected pleasure and really explore

Trevor Hoppe (24:49)
Full circle.

Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (25:15)
how our bodies can achieve orgasm even when our penises are not directly involved. And believe me, there are ways. But it’s sort of for me like a return to earlier learning. And again, I’m the best, I love PrEP, I love U equals U. I love talking about all the things. I love talking about doxycycline to prevent STIs. The thing I’d wanna make sure we’re not doing

Trevor Hoppe (25:22)
Haha, yeah.

Yes.

Damon L. Jacobs (25:45)
is where I work with younger people who have come out in a time of PrEP and U equals U. And that is so wonderful because I love seeing young people who have never been through the trauma and the fear of losing someone to HIV or AIDS. And I love that. The only seen downside that I’m seeing is that sometimes they are being told or conditioned that they must label themselves as a top or a bottom or now even a side.

Trevor Hoppe (26:07)
Mmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (26:11)
But to me, that’s a quantitative label is the limitation. And I don’t think any of us deserve to be limited sexually in how we give and receive pleasure. So that’s why I’m reluctant to use these labels.

Trevor Hoppe (26:22)
Hmm.

I totally hear that. I mean, I think the label is useful potentially in a moment and then over a long period of time can become, I don’t wanna say a prison because that’s an exaggeration, but can confine you in a certain way. It limits the options. So yeah, I mean, I’m all for exploring and removing limits.

Damon L. Jacobs (26:43)
Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (26:51)
And I think side has opened. What do you think of side? I’m curious because I just met Joe Court, who’s the inventor of side. So we were talking about that. What’s your, do you find that term useful?

Damon L. Jacobs (27:05)
I mean, it’s new and I’m glad if people feel empowered by it, then I want them to use whatever words they feel empowered by. Again, I don’t fully, that’s, when I ask people what that means, it just sounds like, that’s kind of what we did in the 80s and 90s. Okay, well that’s nice and it is nice and there’s a lot of fun there. And I want people to be, you know, for me, what PrEP really means, P -R -E -P, it means ways that we can be proactive, responsible, and empowered.

Trevor Hoppe (27:13)
Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (27:34)
about our pleasure, proactive, responsible, empowered pleasure. So for some, that’s saying, I don’t want to have anal seggs. I don’t enjoy it, or maybe it grosses me out, or maybe I don’t want to deal with it. Maybe it just feels like a big pressure or a should that I don’t want to have to deal with. Great. So if side helps you to open up your mind and your body to all of the pleasure that’s available for you, then have at it. Do it, use it, cite it, whatever. I just still

Trevor Hoppe (27:42)
Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (28:05)
question why we need to have quantifiable labels at all. And again, I’m not saying they’re bad. I don’t yuck anybody’s youngs. But if, like you said earlier, are they limiting the range of possible pleasure? That’s where I come in with that question. I’m not saying that they always do. But when someone says, I’m just this, I’m just a side, I’m just a top, I’m just a bottom I think you’re limiting. It’s like me going into the best Italian restaurant in the world and saying, well, I just eat Alfredo.

Trevor Hoppe (28:08)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Mmm.

Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (28:34)
And that’s it. That’s the only thing. It’s like, well, that’s nice. But, you know, you may also like some other stuff on the menu. You might want to try some other stuff on the menu just to see if you like it. Because if you like, catch a toy, then you might actually find that there’s more than one thing on the menu that you enjoy. And you may not always want Alfredo, so you can try penne or pesto or, you know, there’s a lot of ways to savor pleasure that I want people to remember and to be open to.

Trevor Hoppe (28:37)
I know people like that.

Try the meatballs!

Damon L. Jacobs (29:04)
as we increase and enhance the possibility of quality connections in our.

Trevor Hoppe (29:09)
Yeah, I think, you know, people want to… Is this a human instinct? I don’t know, but we like to have a term to describe ourselves. We like to have these labels for better or for worse. And we see this among, you know, the explosion of categories like aromantic, demiromantic, demisexual. And there is an impulse of me as I get older to be like, gosh, do we need these terms? They’re just…

they’re describing things that have always existed, of course. And yet it sort of gives validation to, you know, people who, for example, aside who maybe feel like anal sex, you know, doesn’t call them in the same way. I don’t know, it’s a tough one. I feel you though. It’s like, it’s a double edged sword and it can go either way potentially.

Damon L. Jacobs (30:01)
It can, and I guess sort of the way around that for me as, again, this is my training, but this is also my humanity, is stay actively curious. Don’t assume. So if I’m getting to know someone or having a real conversation with someone and they say, you know, I’m a side, if that’s what they identify, I’d be like, okay, so may I ask what that means for you? You know, because it might mean something, I might be assuming something. I might being, it means one thing and you might.

Trevor Hoppe (30:23)
Sure, yeah, tell me more.

Damon L. Jacobs (30:29)
think it means something else. And so, okay, I just, you know, I don’t just assume that because you’re using certain terminology like demisexual or this or that, that I always have the same understanding. So I stay actively curious if I’m really intention, if the intention is to really get to know somebody and the way they think and feel and the way they experience the world, then I ask questions.

Trevor Hoppe (30:42)
Absolutely.

Yes, questions are great. I’m so we’re going to get to the good stuff with the good sex, the best sex. But before we get to the best sex, I always like to take a pit stop to talk about how we got there, which usually is through some trial and error. So is there are there some experiences that you can think of of kind of bad disappointing sex that that helped you learn to get to the good stuff?

Damon L. Jacobs (30:58)
Ooh, especially the good stuff.

you know, so I think it’s a… everything is trial and error. I mean, and I think every mistake is a way to learn and that’s how I treat everything. You know, learning my own body, learning how not to st during anal seggs. No one, at least in my world, gives us instructions how to do that. At least I never had instructions. So it was really trial and error. So I apologize to anybody I ever st on in the last 35 years. Didn’t happen a lot, but yeah, it happens sometimes because I didn’t know. I didn’t really know.

Trevor Hoppe (31:34)
Mmm.

Ha ha.

Damon L. Jacobs (31:49)
how to prepare and I didn’t know how my body works that I could have been as preventive about that. So, hey, those were things that did not go well. In terms of other people, the experiences that have not been so pleasant are when somebody’s not, when somebody’s on meth, and I’m really trying not to judge drug use, but for me, sexually, it’s not a turn on because it’s just like we’re on two different.

planets. We are in very different worlds. I don’t find seggs pleasurable when there’s a disconnect for any reason. Doesn’t mean we have to be exactly like on the same page, but if there’s a really clear disconnect mentally and chemically, that to me is not sexy and not enjoyable. And sometimes I’ve tried to just go through with it just to see. And every time I’ve tried when someone’s been on meth, it’s been like, nah, that wasn’t good. That didn’t work out well. I don’t feel good about that.

So that is definitely now a no. Like that’s a clear no for me, a deal breaker. That if someone’s on meth, I just, I can’t. I mean, literally I can’t. I can’t, like my body, like I can’t get a boner. I can’t get into it erotically or, you know, I can’t get erect with someone who is on that kind of planet. It just doesn’t work anymore. You know, the thing that really…

The thing that is like kind of, I wish that people wouldn’t do, cause it’s a turn off for me, is like manscaping in a way that they’re stubble. Because if that’s gonna, you know, to me it’s sort of like, that’s some of the most amazing part of the man’s human body, his body hair. And if he chops it off or scrapes it off or whatever, and then, but if there’s sort of the promise it’s gonna be there and then he takes off his clothes and it’s not there, again.

Trevor Hoppe (33:19)
Mmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (33:37)
That’s an erotic, that’s like a boner killer for me. It’s like, you kind of promise one thing and deliver it on another. And I can’t tell anyone what to do with their body or how to handle their body dysmorphia, but I do wish people, if they’re gonna do it, be open about it. Don’t say you’re hairy if you’re not, or don’t, you know, that would be, so the experiences that I’ve had where people have done that and have gone through with it anyway, again, not trusting my intuition.

Trevor Hoppe (33:44)
It’s a mini catfish.

-huh.

Damon L. Jacobs (34:02)
But I’ve said like, all right, well, he’s here. I feel bad. Maybe I’m being petty. Maybe I’m being silly. Maybe I’m being stupid. Ain’t gone through with it anyway. Have just not been satisfying or gratifying for me. So that’s sort of a no as well.

Trevor Hoppe (34:15)
And so it sounds like in those both the the meth and the body hair, those are things that you didn’t know in advance, but then became apparent when they came over. Is that correct?

Damon L. Jacobs (34:28)
Sometimes, yeah, sometimes they surprise. With meth, sometimes people have been open about it and they’ve been like, okay, well, you seem like a nice person. Let’s just see how this goes. And it just has never really gone well.

Trevor Hoppe (34:33)
Okay.

Let’s try. All right, so in both cases though, it sounds like you’re are, are, how do you prevent that from happening? I guess, like what, what are your tips? Cause, cause this is a common thing, right? People are not finding the sex that they want and they’re having these encounters that aren’t fulfilling in this way. How do you kind of, what advice would you give to people to, to, to avoid those outcomes?

Damon L. Jacobs (35:02)
Well, so when it comes to drugs, or specifically really meth, I have it very clear on my profiles if I’m really scruff or sniffies are the ones I use the most. And it’s very clear, like no, please no drugs, no capital T’s. And that usually filters out most of the people, because usually when people are partying, they usually want to be with other people who are partying. So for the most part, not completely, but that filters out a lot right there. No partying, no capital T’s, no.

Trevor Hoppe (35:22)
Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (35:31)
So, and then I find that people at least are usually kind of polite about it, like, hey, I’m partying, you too? And then I’m like, no, no, thank you. So that helps too. So if somebody tells me they’re partying or they’re using capital T, that’s no thank you. I make, you know, there’s no way to really filter out people who are, have stubble, but I am very clear when I’m talking to somebody, if they’re hairy, I’m like, yeah, I really like your hairy chest. That’s really, you know.

I’d like to touch that. And again, if they’re not hairy at that point, I have found people who have been open like, well I was in that picture, but I’m not now. I’m like, okay, well, then maybe hit me back in a few weeks. Or, you know, it’s like, but I just don’t want to, you know, really, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time at this stage. And, you know, and just like, all right, I have, again, I’m not saying this is a 100 % thing, but at this,

point in my 50s, I have a fair idea of what is turning me on and what’s not. Now, again, that’s not an absolute. I’m not saying that it’s quantifiably a shut door, because sometimes there’s chemistry, and when there’s chemistry, there’s chemistry, and that sort of supersedes all of the things we’re talking about. But if it’s just a casual thing or meeting somebody, yeah, if there’s stubble, it’s kind of a turnoff. And again, one of the ways that you sort of sidestep that is that if you’re meeting in person,

Whether it’s a bar or a club or an orgy, you get to see what you’re getting pretty quickly. You can sort of feel it out or see it.

Trevor Hoppe (37:05)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, in person, obviously, these things are apparent. Online, as we all know, there can be surprises when people get to the door. And there’s no perfect filter. But no, I like that idea of you’re kind of suggesting making clear your erotic attachment to this thing that they have. And so that if that thing is not there anymore or is different than the way they are in the moment, then…

Damon L. Jacobs (37:12)
There can be surprises, yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (37:30)
You know, if they’re blonde in their picture and you’re like, I love blondes. They’re like, I’m not blonde anymore. You know, you kind of make it into a positive rather than a negative. So I like that. You’re like, I’m really into that. And that gives them the opportunity.

Damon L. Jacobs (37:40)
Yeah. And again, sometimes there can be, even online, even like when you’re typing, there can be a chemistry. I can feel the chemistry. And if there’s a chemistry, if there’s an energy that overrides everything, he might say, I want to top and not be able to get direction. Well, if there’s a chemistry, then we’re going to have a lot of fun. We’re going to work with that. He might say he’s hairy and then show up and he’s not.

Trevor Hoppe (37:49)
Yeah, of course.

Damon L. Jacobs (38:04)
But if he’s got chemistry and we have this connection that you can’t describe, but when there’s chemistry, there’s chemistry, we’re still gonna have a good time.

Trevor Hoppe (38:12)
So now I’m just curious on your profiles, do you just leave the top bottom verse blank?

Damon L. Jacobs (38:18)
If I’m forced to identify, I’d say a verse bottom. Or there may be times that I’m feeling more verse than others and I’ll just say versatile. But it’s usually verse bottom.

Trevor Hoppe (38:22)
Okay, alright.

Because I’m just curious, because I think there are people out there who can be into different things depending on the person and the context and their mood. And I think we struggle with that tab sometimes, right? Like, what do I say? And I mean, my solution has been to say what’s the moment. What is the moment? And that changes potentially daily. But.

Damon L. Jacobs (38:48)
Yeah, I mean, look, all the apps have the options that you can change. You can change in any time. Again, when I do that, I’m identifying a preference, not an identity. That’s not my identity, that’s my preference. So I’m comfortable saying that. Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (39:01)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I hear you. I was just kind of curious. So we’ve got these strategies for kind of filtering out. And it sounds like part of that is knowing what your deal breakers are. Isn’t that fair? Yeah, I think it takes us a long time to figure that out. I mean, just in my experience as well, it wasn’t until really my late 30s, 40s where I was like, yes, I’m not into this. And I need to make that clear.

Damon L. Jacobs (39:13)
Mm -hmm. yeah.

Yeah. Well, again, in every other part of our culture, when we talk about savoring pleasure, we make room to try new things. So again, like food. If we go to food, if I was a foodie, they wouldn’t call me a food whore, they’d call me a foodie, right? They wouldn’t call me a food slut. They’d be like, great, let’s create reality shows around you. But if you want to be a foodie and you savor food,

then you’re encouraged to try and taste as many delicacies as you can. So you get to learn more about food and more about what you personally like and what you personally don’t. And we reward people for that. I think we deserve to do the same thing when it comes to seggs. That we deserve to have agency. And when I say agency around seggs, what I mean is the ability with reasonable effort to say yes.

Trevor Hoppe (39:57)
You

Damon L. Jacobs (40:20)
to the things that are definitely a yes, to say no to the things that are definitely a no, and to say maybe to the things that might be a maybe. And the only way we ever get to learning about what might be a yes or what might be a no is through the maybe. So we want to have agency in terms of discovering and savoring different experiences, different

Trevor Hoppe (40:33)
in between.

Damon L. Jacobs (40:50)
different sexual activities, different flavors, different ages, different races, different hair follicle levels, different anything. To be able to understand what you may prefer. And there’s only one way that I know of to ever learn this, which is to try it. Find out. Try it. You might hate anal seggs. And if you don’t like bottoming, hey, there’s like, okay, we don’t need more bottoms out there. But you…

Trevor Hoppe (41:10)
Practice, practice, practice.

Damon L. Jacobs (41:19)
Don’t know unless you try it. You know, you may not ever want to do anal seggs, but you’re not gonna know unless you try it. You may have a thing like no guy’s over 40, but unless you’ve actually been with a man over 40, and I’m not just one, I can say try several, you’re really not gonna know what that experience offers you until you try it. And you may try it and you still may decide, no, I don’t like men over 40. Well, all right.

Trevor Hoppe (41:43)
-huh.

Damon L. Jacobs (41:48)
But then at least you tried it and then you have agency around that decision.

Trevor Hoppe (41:52)
Definitely. Agency is a great concept, especially around sex because we can lose track of it sometimes, I think. Even saying not just the no part, but also the yes. I think the yes is critical that we don’t appreciate as well. Just like leaning into the stuff that feels good and that you like. So I appreciate both sides, you pointing to both sides of that coin.

Damon L. Jacobs (42:18)
Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (42:20)
Before we leave the bad stuff, I just have one more kind of question that I’m curious about. If you’ve had a bad encounter with someone, or bad for whatever reason, are you willing to go back for seconds?

Damon L. Jacobs (42:33)
it’s so funny you mentioned this because like right now in my mind is kind of that experience. I wouldn’t say bad. But like this guy last week who I met on Scruff who is really hot and all his pictures were hot and everything appeared like we appeared to have chemistry. And I got to his place and I worked late, but he let me come over after work. So this is like 12 and

He seemed a little off and just a little something felt a little off. And then he did reveal that he had done cocaine earlier.

And again, I’m not putting down drugs. I’m just saying, all right, well, he’s on cocaine or had been on cocaine. I’m not on cocaine. So that means, sort of explains why there was sort of like, it feels like we’re on two different planets. He’s sort of speaking in a tone and a nuance and a pace that’s different from where I’m at. And sort of his brain seems to be operating in a way that’s kind of different from mine. So it was a pleasant, I’d say it was a very neutral.

Trevor Hoppe (43:18)
Rawr.

Damon L. Jacobs (43:38)
thing and you know we still played together he was very sweet. I am not sure that’s an experience I want to replicate. I’m not sure I don’t. I’m still kind of considering that but that’s an example of like okay that was sort of not a great experience but he seems to be a cool person and I may just say if there’s a possibility of the next time because he may not have felt connection either. I mean you know it’s very possible that he felt the same thing I felt.

Trevor Hoppe (43:50)
Mmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (44:06)
which was like, he’s a nice guy, but we didn’t have much of a connection. If there is an opportunity to have a next time, I will make it clear. I really prefer that you haven’t used cocaine earlier that night or day.

Trevor Hoppe (44:20)
No, that’s helpful. So you’re open to it within the right context.

Damon L. Jacobs (44:26)
Yeah, if someone seems to be a cool person and nice and like kindness goes a long way in my world. If you’re basically a decent person and a good communicator and you seem like you’re kind and you give a s**t about the world you live in, I’m willing to go a second round even if it’s not the best experience because you know, again, in this realm of discovery and play, sometimes we learn new things that we didn’t learn the first time.

Sometimes there’s reason to consider having an experience. And then maybe there’s a second time and you come away the second time saying, yeah, that wasn’t so great. My, you know, the first experience was indicative of the second experience. Well then, okay, now you learn. I think I wish that we had more room in the sexual realm to discover and play. You know, I feel like as kids, we’re often, if we’re lucky, we’re given a lot of room to play. Play means you try something.

Trevor Hoppe (44:56)
Hopefully we do.

Damon L. Jacobs (45:24)
And even if it doesn’t go well, maybe you try it again. And if it doesn’t go well a second time, then maybe you’re like, nah, probably not for me. But at least you’re given permission and space to say, let me see, let me play, let me see what I like, let me see who I like. If I don’t like playing with this guy, if I don’t like playing, then I don’t have to play with him again. But as kids, I feel like we’re given a little more room for that. As adults, we’re so quick to say, nope, nope, nope, keep it moving. And I don’t know if that’s always a beneficial thing.

Trevor Hoppe (45:53)
Mmm. Yeah, that’s fair.

Damon L. Jacobs (45:54)
There may be something to learn and discover the second time around. But I do want to say that if anyone has an experience where they felt unsafe or something where they felt like something was really, really chemically off or something they felt any way physically or psychologically unsafe, then trust that intuition. Because that is your intuition giving you really, really important and valuable information.

Trevor Hoppe (45:58)
I love that.

course.

Amen to that. Yeah, there’s gotta be something to go back for if you’re going back for more. Yeah, definitely. So thinking back on all the experiences you’ve had over the years, like what makes for the best sex for you?

Damon L. Jacobs (46:21)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So it’s weird to think about that because it’s 35 years. I know, 35 years. It’s like my next book might be 35 years on bottom. Because literally, I mean, this is 4th of July weekend. And this was around the time that I started bottoming in 1989. So yeah, that’s like 35 years. It’s hard to say because so much of what makes seggs good or what we describe, what I describe as good seggs, is state of mind. As I get older,

Trevor Hoppe (46:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (47:03)
As I get more mentally healthy and clearer, I feel like my seggs gets better because my mind gets better. I’m also learning now, just now in my 50s, I’m just beginning to learn and understand these tantric principles I described earlier, ways that our bodies are wired for orgasmic pleasure that are not necessarily about penetrative seggs.

or may not happen through penetrative seggs. And some of those experiences I’m having more of lately, because I’m learning more about Tantra, and I have a partner who is really, really into all that, and really, really into anal orgasms, and really into this idea of exploring erotic touch that can be extremely pleasurable, that’s not necessarily about ejaculation. It could, but it doesn’t always.

So the more I learn about that, and the more I have these experiences of orgasming without ejaculation, the more I’m like, wow, this is some of the best seggs ever. And to have that with someone who I really love and really trust is also phenomenal, because that doesn’t always line up. We don’t always have the greatest sexual chemistry with people we love and trust. Or sometimes we love and trust people whom we have no sexual chemistry with. But when you can have love and trust and sexual chemistry with someone,

Trevor Hoppe (48:14)
Mm -hmm.

Mmm.

you

Damon L. Jacobs (48:25)
That is a really, really powerful thing. So that’s some of the best seggs that I’m having today. I would say in the age of PrEP, there’s so many experiences that have been phenomenally, like spiritually meaningful and beyond the glass ceiling of pleasurable. Again, part of that is my state of mind, but part of that is just having partners who are so also exploring the disinhibition of…

Trevor Hoppe (48:27)
Fireworks.

Damon L. Jacobs (48:51)
seggs at this stage, or maybe they’re in their 20s and they never had it to begin with, because I think that’s a beautiful thing too. I will say like one of the most like peak experiences that I’ve like sled experiences I’ve ever had was last year, not this year, but I went to Bear Dip in Mexico in 2023. And part of that was going on this excursion to this sort of gay island where they let you run around like naked for like four hours.

Trevor Hoppe (49:20)
Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (49:20)
And there was this experience that I had with the other travelers. Like, it was this beach, but there was also this cave. And you could go in and explore the cave. And as I’m sure you can guess, you go to Puerto Vallarta and you’ve got a bunch of naked drunk guys, there’s gonna be stuff going on in the cave. I ended up having this experience of being f***ed And three guys…

fing and coming inside me, like each one watching the other and then moving me over to the other one. So it was three consecutive men in a row fing and coming inside my ass. I’d never, some people have had those experiences, it’s a normal Friday. I’d never really had an experience quite like that before. I’d say that far surpasses any porn I’ve ever seen, any fantasy I’ve ever had. It just was phenomenally.

sexually, spiritually meaningful to me. And no matter what else ever happens in my life, whether that ever happens again, whether I can ever figure out how to make that happen again or not, I will cherish that until my very last breath in this body. That again, the sexual, spiritual, emotional, mental freedom in that and the liberation in that is just, yeah, this is I think part of why.

we are spiritual beings in human bodies right now because we’re meant to be spiritual and enjoy this human body in every way, shape, and form possible that’s available for us.

Trevor Hoppe (50:57)
And so do you think that that was like, what is the embodied experience? What makes that? Is it the, do you feel like it was in the moment? You’re like, this is the best. Or is it after the fact that you’re like, this is the best. Like, I’m curious, like, cause sometimes it’s the memory of that experience that’s so erotically thrilling. And sometimes it’s the embodied experience, that moment that’s erotically thrilling. Like what, what in particular about that experience was just like.

You know.

Damon L. Jacobs (51:27)
It was, it was in this, I know what you’re saying because sometimes during an experience it’s not always, there’s still fear. There’s still the fear tape playing in my head. And it’s not until after I look back and say, well, that was amazing. Cause you know, as I, you know, this is my idea of porn, everything fit and nothing st. That’s the point. If I ever did a porn, that would be what it’s called. Everything fit and nothing st. So you can look back on an experience and say, well, that was great. Cause everything fit and nothing s**t. This.

Trevor Hoppe (51:44)
You

Damon L. Jacobs (51:54)
was an experience where I was able to really be in the moment. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid of nothing. I wasn’t afraid of s**t, of HIV, of STIs, nothing. So I was able to be present and fully savor that experience. And what I mean by savoring the spiritual part of it, Trevor, is that I believe fundamentally that we are spiritual energy in human bodies, that in our natural form, we are just like this big blob of energy and light. It’s almost like this huge thing of cookie dough.

Trevor Hoppe (51:57)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (52:24)
But while we’re here in these bodies, it looks like we’re separate cookies. It’s like, okay, you know, you you I have separate bodies, but we’re all part of the same cookie dough. We’re all part of the same energy. And the closest we can ever get to our spiritual form in human bodies is through f***ing The closest we ever get to our natural form of not being separated spiritual energies is through penetration. So when I am being penetrated now at this part of my life, that’s what I am experiencing.

That’s what I am imagining. That’s what I am fully experiencing is like, this spiritual energy is penetrating my body to connect with my spiritual energy and ejaculating as a result of that connection, literally leaving part of himself, his life force within me that I can have, that I can hold, that I can carry, which I did as long as possible. So.

Trevor Hoppe (53:12)
Hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (53:20)
That is what I mean by pleasure, and that is what I mean by savoring sacred spiritual pleasure through fing. So yes, again, this conversation is very much about honoring and loving and experiencing fing in a really important way and how powerful the mind is in that process. And as we said earlier, expanding on the many, many, many items on the menu that also provide connection even when penetrative seggs is not what’s on the menu.

Trevor Hoppe (53:27)
Mm -hmm

Yeah, I really want to make some cookies now. I am going to love that analogy. That’s that’s fabulous. And I think it’s helpful because when I interviewed bottoms for a research study, a lot of them talked about, yeah, that’s just like that semen was like this almost like embodiment of pleasure. It was like they talked about it that way. And so that resonates with me. It’s like it’s like it’s like liquid pleasure or something. And yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (53:52)
Yeah!

Yeah!

Yes.

It’s life. It’s literally life inside my body. And for those of us that we grew up and were affected, A, with an A, by HIV, meaning, you know, so much of my life was shaped and formed by terror of dying of AIDS. To be able now to experience semen inside my body, which was tantamount to su*cide when I was growing up in the 80s, now it’s all pleasure.

Trevor Hoppe (54:40)
Mmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (54:40)
That’s meaningful for me. That’s powerful for me. That is sacred for me.

Trevor Hoppe (54:46)
Yeah, I appreciate that because

Damon L. Jacobs (54:47)
So it’s not just about bottoming, it’s really about that spiritual sacred connection.

Trevor Hoppe (54:53)
Absolutely. And I think for so long, the only way we could understand that practice or whatever you want to describe it was through the lens of HIV, that it was only that was the only way we can interpret that is bare backing as, you know, as you say, kind of suicidal or self -destructive behavior. And now we have the ability with PrEP and U equals U to see it more holistically without HIV kind of, you know, as a lens. So thank you for that.

Damon L. Jacobs (55:21)
Right, and it’s almost hard for some of us to imagine seggs without fear. But this is where I get really hopeful, because I see younger gay people not having that experience, which means they’re very lucky. And it also means we did our work. If there can be a generation of people that aren’t having their sexual health sacrificed because they’re terrified of HIV and STIs, that’s good, in my view.

Trevor Hoppe (55:26)
Yeah!

Absolutely. As I sort of we round the corner to thinking about like skills and advice. I like to think about what would you tell those young people that you just mentioned looking for the best sex like play obviously is a key ingredient for you. But other practical tips you would give give young people for like here’s what my advice would be two or three tips whatever for finding that best sex.

Damon L. Jacobs (56:12)
Yes, that the best seggs isn’t because a man is giving you validation, self -esteem, or attention. The best seggs is when we know how beautiful and powerful and strong we are as spiritual beings in human bodies. And then we seek to expand and enhance that through sexual connection with another person or a group of people. That is where the best seggs transpires.

Trevor Hoppe (56:21)
Oof.

Damon L. Jacobs (56:41)
But if you’re using seggs, or you’re using a man, or you’re using his pnis or his cm as a source of validation or attention for who you are, for your self -esteem, that is a lose -lose proposition. Because A, it’s not always gonna work out the way you want it to. And B, even if you do get what you’re looking for, it’s very temporary.

Trevor Hoppe (56:41)
Oof.

Damon L. Jacobs (57:02)
So please consider sexual connection as a means by which we expand and enhance the internal flame of beauty and power and fire and strength that lies within all of us.

Trevor Hoppe (57:17)
that cuts deep. Because a lot of us are turning on those apps looking for that validation. I certainly know I can be I am prone to that behavior as well. And it’s you know, and I’m 41. So it’s not something that gets easier over time. Well, maybe it gets easier over time. But the temptation is always there. And it’s so easy. So I appreciate that insight. It’s like it’s a little bit of a RuPaulism. You can’t love yourself. How the hell you know exactly.

Damon L. Jacobs (57:19)
Yeah.

Trevor Hoppe (57:47)
So that’s… yeah.

Damon L. Jacobs (57:47)
Well, RuPaul is a very spiritual person and quotes many times from a psychological, sociological, spiritual course called the Course in Miracles. So that’s actually, you know, and that has a lot in common with Buddhism and a lot of Eastern philosophies about the true center of loving ourselves, but almost that’s a false language because there really is no such thing as a me or a you. We again are all part of the same energy. We’re all derivative from the same beautiful cookie dough.

Trevor Hoppe (57:56)
Yeah.

cookie dough.

Damon L. Jacobs (58:15)
And so there really isn’t a you or a me. And when we know that and we own that and we express that and connect from that, that is where there is so much beauty. That is where there’s so much light and pleasure available for us via the human body.

Trevor Hoppe (58:30)
fabulous. I always like to end and I feel like you may have you may have already told the story but I sorted lives and untell tales slut for short. What’s the sluttiest thing you ever did?

Damon L. Jacobs (58:41)
Mm -hmm.

you know, I think probably that thing I described in Mexico. I’m sure, I mean, it depends on how you describe slut. You know, I use that term affectionately, partly because when I started talking about using PrEP in 2011, I got called a slut in a bad way so many times. So I really wanted to take that back as something empowering. But I don’t, you know, I mean, I’ve had the wonderful pleasure to be in a lot of group situations in recent years.

Trevor Hoppe (58:55)
me too.

Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (59:13)
In New York City, there is a lot of orgies and groups that are really, really kind, where people are mostly kind. And in some of those groups have had opportunities to top and bottom with many, many partners at a time. I’d say, you know, that’s probably for me, pretty slutty, but for other people, that’s a normal Tuesday. So it’s hard to describe.

you know, what I think or what anybody else thinks is slutty. I just think it’s like, okay, for me, as many partners as I can experience erotic connection with in a healthy way that I described, for me is a win -win all around. And sometimes that happens a lot and sometimes there’s faces where it’s not happening a lot.

that I may not be in the mood or, you know, we, New York City, we go through, it’s really, really clear when people have seasonal affective disorder, because there ain’t nobody on those apps or, you know, there’s very few people around. There are sometimes droughts in erotic energy around here. So I don’t know, gosh, sorry. Didn’t mean to end on a bad answer. I just, I don’t, it’s such a relative term, you know, but I have been and am open to.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:08)
Hmm.

Not a bad answer. Of course. Absolutely.

Damon L. Jacobs (1:00:27)
loving connection with multiple partners in any way that’s healthy and will continue to be, I hope.

Trevor Hoppe (1:00:34)
Fabulous. Well, if people want to learn more about you and the work that you do, where would they find you?

Damon L. Jacobs (1:00:41)
Well, so I have an interview series, including you. It has an air jet. It’s coming up. But I wanted to, you know, clearly I have a lot of opinions, but I also wanted to interview artists, entertainers, HIV historians, researchers, doctors, leaders, people who I just find fascinating. I do these interviews about mental health, sexual health, spiritual health in my bathtub in Brooklyn. And so people can learn more about that at TubTalksWithDamon .com. TubTalks, plural.

Trevor Hoppe (1:01:02)
Yes.

Damon L. Jacobs (1:01:09)
with damon .com, it’s on YouTube. People can also check out my website, damonljacobs .com, don’t forget the L, damonljacobs .com, where I do some of the writing or, you know, when I turned 50, I did a series called The 50 Lessons of 50, the 50 things that I had learned which was helping me to age with more power, purpose, and pleasure, many of which we just talked about. But I’ve wrote down a lot of those things that are on my website at damonljacobs .com.

Trevor Hoppe (1:01:11)
Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (1:01:37)
People can read, I’ve written two books, not exactly about what we’re talking about, but about mental, spiritual health and wellness. One is right behind me, it’s called Absolutely Shouldless, about learning to question and challenge the word shoulds that harm us in life. The other is called Rational Relating, the Smart Way to Stay Saint in the Crazy World of Love, based on working with polyamorous couples throughout New York City. And those are all again at damonljacobs .com. And I’m on Facebook and Instagram, and if anybody wants to holler at me, just go ahead.

Trevor Hoppe (1:01:43)
Mm -hmm.

Damon L. Jacobs (1:02:06)
I’m pretty open.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:08)
Fabulous. Well, thank you so much, Damen I really appreciate it.

Damon L. Jacobs (1:02:12)
Thank you, Trevor. It means a lot to be in this experience with you. I’ve admired you for so many years, so thank you very much.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:16)
Fabulous.

the feeling is mutual.

Trevor Hoppe (1:02:22)
And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening. Tune in for the next episode where we talk to Alex Garner of MPact Global, talking about sexual sherpas and gloryholes. It will make sense when you listen. I hope you’ll tune in. It’s a real hoot.

And remember, if you liked what I had to say on today’s episode, reach out and schedule a consultation with me to learn more about my services as a sex coach. I would be happy to help you find the best gay sex. You can find out more on my website, thebestgaysex.net. Hope to hear from you. See you next time.