STRAIGHT AS A QUESTION MARK
By Len Richmond
(Excerpt from “Naked in Paradise”, Sybaritic Press. Published Sept 30, 2007. Available on Amazon)

Who knew that my high school sexual fantasies would some day come true?

Who knew that the same sort of high school bullies that once called me “faggot” would secretly want to be bullied by a “faggot”?

Who knew that so many straight men would respond to my L.A. Weekly ad?

Of course, they don’t want their wives or girlfriends to find out, so they leave me nervous voice mail messages, using phony names, pager numbers, and strict instructions to call only between certain hours. Mostly, I meet them in the middle of their workday, so their spouses don’t get suspicious.

And what attracts so many heterosexual men to my gay classified ad? It turns out to be the “No experience necessary” I put at the very end.

Bobby is my first straight date. Thirty, with hard, chiseled muscles, long Fabio hair, and a locked-up, watertight bubble-butt.

Bobby’s hot but indecisive. When we make our dates, half the time he cancels out at the very last minute. Then when we do get together, he keeps having second thoughts, and will suddenly shout, “Stop, STOP!”

“Huh?”

“Slow down you’re going too fast.”

I swear all I’m doing is stroking his designer pecs, I’m nowhere near his erect penis. But being straight from Boston and brought up Irish-Catholic, Bobby’s paralyzed with papist guilt. So I stop. We sit. We talk. We watch some of my old pre-condom porn. I start to touch him again. He gets hard. He’s breathing heavy. This is it. We’re going to do it now! I unzip his pants—

“Stop!”

“What?”

He jumps to his feet and zips up.

“Are you sure you wanna do this?” I ask.

“Yeah, but nobody’s willing to go at my pace. They always want to rush things. We’ll get there, but we gotta go slowly.”

I don’t usually hang in there when it’s more tease than tickle—but ah, those muscles, that porno-grade bubble-butt.

So I say I’ll call him again. And he grins, I guess grateful that I’m not as impatient as all the other gay shmucks, whose ads he answered.

*

Vinny is a beefy, curly-haired electrician who’s a dead ringer for Mac Davis. He lives with his girlfriend in the Valley, and together they pick up couples off the Internet for suburban swinging sessions.

“I’m more into it than she is,” he confesses, “but she does it for me.”

Vinny will occasionally service the other straight guy in the foursome, or get oral sex from him—all very edgy for Burbank.

As Vinny nervously sips his second beer, he admits that when he read my L.A. Weekly ad, it stirred up a