A is for Ay-rhabs

I’ve had a penchant for Arabs for many years, and make no bones about it. I’d reached the period in my life where my preferences were strictly for giving blow-jobs and getting screwed, and our Arab brethren were ideal for both activities, provided you didn’t want love, that is.

Most people get very grand and object that you usually have to pay. So what the hell do hets do when they want a bit on the side? If they aren’t paying cash, they are certainly shelling out for meals, drinks, holidays, gifts etc. What’s the difference?

Some Arabs may not be the most honest either (always hide your wallet in the fridge or somewhere else unlikely) but the most appreciated thing about them is their pathological cleanliness.

They’d leave their shoes outside the bedroom to avoid polluting the atmosphere, and they’d always take a shower both before and after sex. The day I became conscious of the importance of the issue was when a bit of regular Tunisian, in Bagnols in the south of France, asked me if I didn’t think we ought to be using condoms. I bought some the following day. (This was in the early 80s when AIDS was just becoming an important issue.)

But my first strong attraction was for O, from the suburbs of Tunis, who was a semi-illegal immigrant in Chambéry, in the Savoie, when I first met him in the very early 70s. He was brought to my first little flat in Geneva by a young Frenchman from the same town. The Frog was already fixed up for sex with a Yank in Geneva, so O and I were left alone. Before long he was screwing me gutless.

Unlike most of his "brothers", he was not overhung, but it would do for the time being. We pursued the relationship desultorily, until one day I suggested to him that he came with me for New Year in St Remèze, near Montélimar, where friends of mine ran a gay restaurant and night club.

O and I had a room in a nearby small hotel. He fitted in very well with the crowd, which included my great best friend, M, his new paramour, spoilt rich A and P a Yank from Denver, Colorado, P.

Our hotel room was so cold that I left the electric fire on all night, and the main source of warmth was O’s body beside me. On the first night (or rather in the early hours of the morning) he took me by surprise by moving into the right posture and then asking me to screw him (“Baise moi! Baise moi!“). This, for me, was heaven on wheels and many were the times it was repeated thereafter (though he also still screwed me, of course).

Sometime later he started driving trucks, and so would appear at my Geneva flat, almost without notice, late at night, which always led to willing adaptation of my existing plans. Neighbours began to wonder who was the owner of the HGV, with French plates, parked outside the block in this distinctly up-market residential district!

One day he phoned and asked me to meet him at the hospital just over the border in Annemasse, France, where his younger brother (oh joy! oh rapture!) was having a broken leg fixed. It turned out that this was a family speciality - O had done the same thing - having your leg broken deliberately (whether or not because of a previous bad setting I was never able