On Being a Paint by Numbers Slut

or The Profound Loneliness of Fucking Around

When I look back to when I was twenty one, what I can recall, for the most part, is the crippling and unending loneliness of living by myself in a city of seven million people. I had moved to London a year prior, full of hopes and dreams and various other things. I remember running the numbers, roughly, trying to work out the percentage chance of meeting someone I could form a deep personal connection with. Number of people in the city, then number of men, then number of gay or bisexual men, then number of people who I would be attracted to sexually or emotionally, then the number of those who would reciprocate those feelings. A pointless exercise and one I think I engaged in primarily to convince myself that the problem was not with myself - that I was not the reason I couldn’t find a partner, but simply that the numbers were against me. I remember this vividly, but I also remember the men I fucked, or allowed to fuck me. I remember the cocks I sucked, and the lies I told, and the wedding rings on fingers I ignored. I remember this vividly. I remember feeling ashamed of my desires, and ashamed of what felt like an addiction. I remember thinking many times ‘this will be the last one.’ But of course it never was. There was always another man standing outside my door at two o’clock in the morning, in an awful jacket, and terrible shoes. They never have nice shoes. Ushered inside quickly, speaking in coded whispers, furtive glances into the dark of the street, and then the inevitable conversation. The exchanges rarely varied, call-and-response, like a cant spoken between members of a cult. “How was your day?” I often asked. “How was your journey?” “Did you find me okay?”. Nonsense really. Mostly I asked questions to fill the silence as we ascended the staircase. Once inside the small talk would continue, awkward and stilted. He would remove those ugly shoes. Sometimes I would help. Most of the time the small talk would continue, even there, with my knees pressed against the cold floor, as I unbuttoned his jeans, or pulled down his tracksuit, and would continue until I put his cock in my mouth.

Once we had finished with the ritual, the small talk would continue, sometimes with implicit acknowledgement of the act, sometimes without. “So do you do this often?” “Would you like to do this again?”. Often as we are putting on our clothes a conversation would occur that would not be out of place on a first date: “What do you do for a living?” “How long have you lived here?” “What are your plans for the future?”. I have had profoundly moving conversations with men I have met once, and could not even begin to put names to, as I wiped their semen from my cheeks. But then, they would leave. I would delete their phone number, and wave goodbye to a faceless icon in my contacts screen next to whatever ghastly screen name they had provided online. I would then, most of the time, masturbate, drink a full glass of water, brush my teeth thoroughly and carefully, shower, and go to bed. I would lie there staring into the depths of the ceiling, and wonder what had happened, and where the intense and powerful loneliness had come from. Sometimes, rarely, I would find cause to see the same man more than once, for whatever reason. Usually it was logistics. They were often free, they lived close by, they didn’t seem to mind the sight of me. I often mistook familiarity for fondness, and I still suffer from that today, ten years later.

I will be thirty two next year, and I am still in a lot of ways, dealing with the emotional ramifications of the hours I spent chasing the affection of anyone who would be willing to provide it. I have had two major relationships since then, and several minor ones. Dozens of flings. All of which, without exception, ended because of me. Either I was bored, or couldn’t make myself emotionally available, or I simply failed to hold up my end of the bargain. I have, in between these, sought after the same alienating and morally exhausting encounters as I had done previously. Now with diminishing returns, but I press on regardless. It still feels like a ritual, but these days the mystique is gone. No longer a naïve initiate into a dark and exciting new world, I am now a seasoned veteran; I know all the moves, but I very rarely have the heart. I am a paint-by-numbers slut. On more than one occasion I have been in the middle of the act, and my mind has lost interest. I’ve ceased to care sometimes even before I begin. Once or twice I have ended the charade and forced a man back into the street, and one time I grabbed my clothes and ran out naked into the street and got dressed quickly behind a hedge. But other times I have just carried on, dutifully, hoping for it to end, just hoping he’ll finish soon so that I can get on with my day.

I am, still, to this day, deeply, and endlessly lonely. It is a feeling that has lived with me for as long as I can remember. A shadow looming in the corner of my mind, always. Sometimes it can be pushed deep into the recesses of my consciousness and for a morning, or an evening, or sometimes a day or a weekend, I can feel wanted and loved and happy. But it always returns, sometimes at night. Mostly at night. But sometimes even when my lover has left the room, perhaps to answer the door, or take a shower, or change, but worst of all when they are sat next to me, pressed into my chest, their warm breath against my skin, or lying soundly asleep next to me in the darkness and silence of the early hours of the morning. It is the great betrayer, my Judas. The loneliness inside me tells me, always, that there is something else out there - someone else out there - that can make me feel whole, and happy, and content. It is a liar, but still I believe it. And then, months later, after I’ve written some sloppy breakup letter, or had an agonising phone call where I pretend I know why I do any of the things I do, I am returning once again to the old ceremony, and remaining deeply, profoundly unhappy. I spend hours staring at disembodied cocks, and torsos, and sending messages, and responding to messages while actually hoping secretly that I won’t have to go through with it. I hope secretly that they will leave me alone, and never speak to me, and certainly not show up at two o’clock in the morning, and ask me the same tired old questions.

All this I do while yearning and hoping for genuine affection, or at least a simulacrum of one. I am always looking in the wrong places. I invariably perform this act with older men, and always have. But it never dawned on me until recently how unbearably sad it makes me that for so many people, being older and queer manifests as bizarre rituals, and brief, fleeting sexual encounters, lined with genuine emotional curiosity. There is always a sullen, unspoken acknowledgment that these encounters will never bear the fruit of an emotional commitment, no matter how open and honest, how vulnerable those conversations after the fact can be.

Many of us, queer men, gay men, bisexual men, have grown up not knowing what a healthy gay relationship looks like. No one talked about them. No one showed us. We didn’t exist on television, or films, in a way that meant something to us as teenagers. But we had so many questions, and we looked for answers in the only place we could - late night risqué gay lifestyle shows on some long lost satellite channel, or the internet. Invariably gay life was framed around sex, and sexuality, and as a young queer boy in a small rural town, that’s all I had to go on. Pornography and innuendo. That was the advice. It was lonely and awful. In hindsight I internalised so many awful stereotypes about what it meant to be a gay person. This was reinforced throughout the culture. When I moved away to university, I joined the LGBT society thinking I was about to learn the secrets of what it meant to be gay and happy, what it meant to have gay friends who were loving and supportive and open. Instead I spent a few nights sat in the corner of a club, or a bar, not understanding anything, not feeling at home, and most of all feeling like I was not welcome. The lack of a real sense of what it meant to be queer and forming real emotional connections, to be queer and in love with someone who loved you back had a devastating effect on me. I had crushes on straight boys, as we all did, I was probably in love with one of them. The yearning to be loved back, to kiss them, to fuck them, to hold them afterwards, naked in the sheets, the longing and the loneliness is what is ultimately what led me to look in increasingly more desperate places. I can’t remember when I lost my virginity, or to whom, and that fills me with deep regret. I hope the past is not my future. I hope for a life for myself, ten years from now, where I won’t still be looking for meaning in a stilted conversation at two o’clock in the morning, with men older than me still, wedding rings on their fingers, or poking out of the pocket of their jeans laying on the floor beside the bed, as we perform the task at hand.