The Benefits of Old-Fashioned Anonymous Sex

And a word of warning: You might fall in love.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

Paul Cadmus, “Finistere” (1952) | © Estate of Paul Cadmus

This essay is adapted from the solo show Pearl Necklace: A Gay Sexcapade, which Jamie is performing at Pangea NYC on Feb. 20 & 27. Click here for tickets.

---

You don’t have to remember his name or even know it: benefit number one and the definition of anonymous sex. I’m not talking about an in-home hook up born of Scruff or Grindr, the gay bars of this century. Those hookups only happen after a near endless exchange of body parts (photos starting with genitalia and ending with headshots) and the tedious bait and switch of what you’re into, what you can deliver, and what you expect. You must market yourself like a whore who won’t get paid.

I’m talking about old-fashioned anonymous sex between strangers on the neutral playing ground of a public place such as a park, a bathroom stall, a rest stop, or a subway platform. All you need to do is show up, make your pick, consummate, and walk away. It’s the fast food of sex but completely calorie free. Gay men are akin to Bonobo monkeys for whom a blowjob is the equivalent of an introductory handshake. Sex now, introductions later. Or never. In fact, the men in these situations can be as bestial as monkeys as they lurk in bushes and under trees stroking themselves, visual mating calls. Anonymous sex is part of the benefits package included with being a gay man. Straight me would pay double what they spend on drinks, dinner, and a movie for entrance to a park of roaming, ravenous women whom they could fuck for free and never promise to call in the morning. And the idea of a lesbian standing topless in the bushes caressing her nipples while her pet Labrador pants at her feet is pure fairytale.

It can be as sizzling as a porno come to life or merely need-satisfying like a good piss. When that instant animal attraction combusts, your temporary lover can metamorphosize into any fantasy you project: a sailor on leave, a closeted executive with a wife and kids on the New Haven Line, an actor you’ve seen on Law and Order. The fantasy is rarely a middle-aged man who still lives with his mother. You’re not people, not men, but mere objects of desire.

When the sex is done, there’s no obligation, except maybe a perfunctory, “Thanks, man.” You don’t have to pretend to care that his mother’s collection of Precious Moments figurines is one ceramic kitten away from hoarding, that the gray paint with the hint of lavender in his living room is more lavender than hint, that his new blue jeans don’t make his ass look fat (they do). You don’t have to care. And if he opens his mouth (after sex) and speaks with a Bronx accent so harsh it could de-silver your bathroom mirror or a hillbilly drawl so thick you wonder if he signs his checks with Xs, you exit as coldly and abruptly as a cat from your lap, knowing that you never ever have to see—or hear—him again.

My sexual scrapbook is filled with snapshots of perfect sex with strangers. One blazing summer afternoon I left the beach and disappeared behind the dunes into the Meat Rack, a maze of sandy trails through eolian pines that open to bald dune pits kissed by sun and moon. The Atlantic Ocean roars south, the Great South Bay laps north. A notorious trysting ground, it’s the cream in the middle of a sandwich created by The Pines and Cherry Grove, Fire Island’s gay communities. That afternoon it looked like a kicked-over anthill, except the ants crawling around were horny men in Speedos like me. At the top of one piney, scrub brush hill, I call “the balcony” because it overlooks the main cruising ground, I found a redwood of a hulking daddy. We locked eyes. He opened his arms to me. I fell into him and rested my head on the tawny fur of his sweaty, sun-soaked chest. He pointed his head to a “boxed seat” in the balcony, a bald spot on the hill with a little driftwood bench some volunteer Meat Rack decorator had wedged between two trees. Redwood Daddy stepped out of his Speedo and sat on the bench. I slipped out of mine and dropped to my knees and blew him, but the magic came when I sat on his cock, my sweaty back sealed to his hirsute chest. His Daddy arms encaged me as his fingers worked my nipples hard just like I like. We were in perfect sync, our bodies sizzling in the burning sun. My neck twisted like Odette so our mouths could meet in a deep kiss as we came together. I remained in his arms until my breathing calmed. I stood and kissed him as I stepped into my Speedo. I brushed the sand from my knees and walked away. No names. No words. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, a perfect anonymous sexual encounter is like a delicate fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

Anonymous sex does have its downsides: STIs. It’s good form to alert your sexual partners if you contract an STI, but how do you alert your anonymous partners? Tack a sign to a tree in the vicinity of the park where you met? “You: looked liked George Clooney when I squinted. Me: looked like Eric Stoltz on a good day. (It was a good day.) You topped me. FYI, I have the clap. Thought you’d want to know!”

But STIs don’t count as true cons of anonymous sex since they can attach themselves to name sex as well. The real downside of anonymous sex is the gene pool in any given arena and the Darwinian cruelty of the selection process. In my prime, I was neither Adonis nor troll, but I was occasionally an Adonis to some and a troll to others—depends on who’s looking. Anonymous stomping grounds attract the desperate and the trolls. Sometimes that means you. Your profession, your bank account, your address, or the sheer force of your personality won’t get you laid. When it’s mating season all that matters are the colors of your tail feathers and whom they attract or repel.

Those days when you fail to attract can leave you not only with blue balls, but a crushing blow to your self-esteem, even self-worth. Just as the euphoria you feel on the days you score passes, so too does the dejection. However, it can leave nasty skid marks.

And a word of warning: You might fall in love.

When I was twenty-two, I stepped into the Ramble, the fairytale forest of Central Park, at dusk. In the six weeks I’d been in New York, I’d already explored its fecund hunting ground. The pickings were often good, since this was a solid decade before hookup apps eroded that kind of playing field when we no longer had to vacate our beds to hunt fresh prey. After nearly an hour of cruising, I hadn’t scored. Night was closing in. The streetlights began to glow like fireflies along the bosk’s labyrinthine sidewalks. Out of the nascent dark woods stepped a blond wearing a gold shirt, jeans, and a black suede backpack. He leaned against a newly lit streetlight, a Paul Cadmus painting come to life. The blond smiled. I smiled. He motioned me up the hill with his head. I followed.

There was a tenderness to the sex I’d never experienced in an anonymous hookup—and a raunchiness. He gave me a pearl necklace. When it was over, rather than an abrupt departure and an awkward “See you around,” we stood hugging each other. Intensely. For a long time. Neither of us wanted to let go. When we finally did, we stared into each other’s eyes in the semi-dark of the new night. I told him my name: Jamie. He told me his: Michael. We walked hand-in-hand out of the park. Under the streetlight he looked at my hair, “Oh, you’re a redhead like me.”

I looked at him. “You’re not a redhead. You’re blond.” I wasn’t picking out china patterns yet, but if this was going beyond the Ramble, we first had to straighten out who the real redhead was.

“Strawberry blond,” he conceded.

We broke the cardinal rule of the game and exchanged names. Just as quickly as our libidos had erupted, we started to care. I left a stain on his black suede backpack that he never cleaned. We haven’t stopped caring. In fact, for the past thirty-five years we’ve shared the same carved, mahogany wood bed that birthed three generations on my mother’s side. When Mom gave it to us, she quipped, “I guess this is the end of the line.” Not completely. We shared it with a Russian blue for ten years and a Tabby calico for eighteen. And we haven’t stopped foraging in the proverbial park of anonymous sex.

Once, after a quick romp with a new stranger on the old, abandoned (now long gone) piers near Christopher Street, I slipped and introduced myself. After my trick broke his anonymity, he unloaded a fusillade of his petty problems: “I’m not sure if I can keep working in this same unfulfilling job. I mean, is this why I came to New York? To push paper behind some desk? I could be doing that anywhere and live a lot cheaper. And my apartment is so noisy…”

I wanted to say, “I already have a boyfriend.” Instead, I waited for him to finish, gave him a perfunctory, “Thanks, man,” and walked away.

---

This essay is adapted from the solo show Pearl Necklace: A Gay Sexcapade, which Jamie is performing at Pangea NYC on Feb. 20 & 27. Click here for tickets.

---