Randall, the Muscle Bear with the Pierced Penis

Rock Island, December 25th, 1990

My boyfriend Lane and I have an open relationship: bedroom activity with other guys is fine, as long as we are both present, "sharing" or at least watching.  In emergencies, like when I'm back in Rock Island for two weeks, a close friend can substitute.

So on Christmas Day, I call Lane and tell him how my friend Dick and I went to JR's last night and hooked up with the Ginger Boy.  And he tells me about how he went to a bear contest at the Faultline, and got the phone number of the winner, Randall.

"You should have seen him!  A classic muscle daddy, in his 50s but not grey, a military haircut, a short-cropped beard, thick arms, nice muscular hairy chest!  I groped him -- feels like a gigantic Kielbasa down there!"

"Sounds hot," I say.  Not really my type though.  I just turned 30, so I'm not into the over-40 crowd.  I figure if they date, I'll just be the "watcher."

"And really into S&M: mummification, water sports, you name it."

I like some minor bondage, but Lane isn't into it at all.  What does he see in this guy?  "So, when is the big date?  You can bring Max along to share, if I'm still in the Midwest."

"No, we'll wait until you get back.  How about if we have dinner with him on the 5th?"

West Hollywood, January 5th, 6:00 pm

I expect Lane to drive me to a West Hollywood address -- San Vicente, Crescent Heights, Fairfax, La Brea.  But instead we get on the 410 and drive south for 45 minutes, to Long Beach!

The other side of the world?  What does this guy have that the 20,000 gay men in West Hollywood don't?  

Long Beach, 7:00 pm

We meet Randall at a restaurant on East Broadway, in the heart of Long Beach's gay neighborhood.  He is very attractive, very dynamic, in spite of being 23 years older than me.  Maybe I'll do more than watch.

I start bringing out my best stories.  I spent a summer in Japan.

"Really?  I lived in Japan for five years, after I got out of the navy. Nihonjin dansei ga miri kitekidesu!"

How about my celebrity boyfriend?

"Oh, I met him at a party a few years ago, when he was still in that tv show.  He let me tie him up, but I couldn't do anything else.  You know who's really into S&M scenes?  I'll give you a hint -- he's on Murphy Brown!"

Ok, my writing career.   "I worked for Muscle and Fitness for four years," I tell him, omitting the fact that I was a proofreader.  "But now I've moved into freelance.  I just had an article published in Frontiers [the local gay newspaper]."

"That's great.  I write a monthly column on the leather world.  You've probably seen it -- Randall's Ropes?"

Grrr.

10:00 pm

After cruising at the Mineshaft, a local leather bar, we go back to Randall's house, a square Spanish colonial flanked by palm trees.  Not much furniture: a nearly bare living room, a playroom with a pool table and a fireplace, a study with some paperbacks leftover from his college days.  But a well-stocked basement dungeon.

"Who's up for a scene?" Randall  asks.  "Boomer, you look like a bottom."

"Nope, a top.  Lane bottoms on occasion, but he's not really into it at all."

"Not tonight," Lane says.  "I want to try the dominance thing."

"Come on, Boomer -- you can't say no to two tops.  At least let us put you in my new leather-braided restraints and play with you a bit."

So I take off my clothes, and Randall wraps my wrists and biceps in tight leather bands.  He fondles my chest, and Lane goes down on me.  

But I'm not used to restraints, and it's very, very tight.  "Enough, enough!" I exclaim.

"But I was going to put clamps on your nipples!"

"Let me out of this thing!"

He unties the braids.  "Would you be up for a midnight swim instead?   In my pool, not in the ocean, so there will be no fish to nipple on your toes"

11:00 pm

Randall strips, revealing a nice muscular chest and a gigantic Kielbasa -- with a Prince Albert, what looks like a 3" thick metal hook through his glans.

Lane and I follow him upstairs and into the back yard.  It's January in Long Beach, 53 degrees out, jacket weather.  I assume that his pool is heated.

No.

Randall and Lane dive into the deep end.   I climb carefully into the shallow end and stand there, shivering.

Randall swims over and gropes me.  "Hey, Boomer, have you ever gone down on a guy underwater?"

Put my head under that ice shelf?  I don't think so.

I climb of the pool and go back in the house.  Randall follows.

"Sorry, you're from the Midwest, so I figured you wouldn't mind a little chill.  Let me warm you up."  He slaps my back -- vigorously. It hurts!

"Ouch!  Get away!"

"Sorry!  Well, let's get busy."  He grabs Lane, pushes him down on the couch, and starts aggressively kissing and fondling him.  His gigantic Kielbasa becomes aroused.  Who am I to turn down a Kielbasa?   I kneel and go down on him.

It feels like I'm going down on one of those old-fashioned hitching posts.


"Could you take that thing out?" I ask.  "It's breaking my teeth."

"Well, I prefer leaving it in.  Oral sex is much better that way.  Try this -- it will help you relax your throat."

He shoves a poppers vial at me.  I refuse.

Tired of getting my teeth knocked out, I move over and go down on Lane.

"Shall we go to the bedroom?" Randall asks.  He doesn't wait for an answer -- his fully aroused hitching post leads the way.

He sits on the bed, his back against the headboard, and Lane crawls between his legs and goes down on him.  I sit next to him.  We kiss for awhile.  Then he opens a carved wooden box and pulls out a homemade cigar.  "Want to get high?"

I don't drink.  What makes him think I do drugs?  I've never even seen marijuana before.  "Um...no, thanks."

"How about you, Lane?"

Lane looks up.  "Thanks, but I'm high enough as it is.  It's not every day that I get to go down on someone as big as you."

"Hey, he's not that much bigger than me!"  I exclaim.

"Just keep working, boy," Randall says, patting his head.  He lights up.  An acrid-sweet smell fills the room.

After awhile, he pushes Lane away and tries to turn me over onto my stomach.

"Um...I'm not into anal."

 "Just relax, boy." He spits on his penis and pushes it between my legs, while I'm facing the wrong way.  After a few dozen thrusts, he finishes with a yell.

All in all, a less than optimal evening.

But Lane loved it.  Randall was like a bigger, more accomplished, more adventurous version of me.  We visited him in Long Beach, or invite him up to West Hollywood, every couple of weeks until we moved to San Francisco in 1995.  And after we broke up, Lane and Randall became roommates.

Today Randall is 78 years old, still living in that house in Long Beach, still inviting Cute Young Things over to swim in his pool, try out his dungeon, and break their teeth on his Prince Albert.

See also: A Golden Boy for Christmas; Darren, Cary Grant, and Groucho Marx in the Same Bed.

Summer 1974: Engaged at Summer Camp

Manville, Illinois, Summer 1974

I have a confession to make: during the summer after 8th grade at Washington Junior High, shortly after my boyfriend Dan and I decided to run away to Saudi Arabia together, I got engaged.  To a girl.

Manville, our Nazarene summer camp on the prairie, had church services every morning and evening, with altar calls, sports, and jump quiz practice in between. 

 In Tuesday morning's chapel, I happened to sit next to a short, rather husky girl who bore an extraordinary resemblance to Jimmy on H.R. Pufnstuf: rounded features, red lips, houlder-length black hair. During the altar call, she glanced over at my Bible and saw Psalm 2:8 marked with the initials S.A.: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”

“Who’s S.A.?” she whispered.

“Saudi Arabia,” I said.  I was framing our escape as a missionary endeavor. “God’s Will is for me to become a missionary to the Bedouins of the Empty Quarter."

“No, I don’t think so. God didn’t say anything about Arabia. He said you should go to West Germany."  Her voice was calm, matter of fact, as if she had said “No, the test is on Chapter Three, not Chapter Two.”

Germany was a bona fide Nazarene mission field, all Lutheran or Catholic.  Still, I was astonished.  “When did God tell you that?” I asked.

“In the service last night.  I was...um...looking at you, and God gave me a vision of you preaching in a big stadium in Munich.  You were leading an altar call, and hundreds of people were Praying Through."  She began to sing "Just as I Am," our altar call hymn, in German. “Oh, Gottes Lamm, Ich komme. . . .Ich komme.”

All Nazarene kids knew that God had a specific Will for us, usually a career for the boys and a marital partner for the girls.  He might reveal it through "a small still voice," or through "opening a door," or, most dramatically, through a Vision of Our Future.

"Why would God give you a vision of my future?"

“It was for both of us," she said.  "I was playing the organ, so obviously His Will is for you to become a missionary in Germany, and me to be your wife."

“No, I already heard His Will," I protested.  "It's to go to Saudi Arabia with my friend Dan.  Definitely with Dan."

"He told me Germany.  And who knows, this Dan guy might be there too, with his wife."

"That's crazy!  We're not going to have wives!  We're going to be missionaries together, like Paul and Barnabas."

The altar call was over, so I walked out with the others into the heat of mid July. The girl -- her name was Sarah -- followed me toward my Bible study class.

"You can't be a missionary without a wife!" she said.  "You have to go to the field as a team, like Adam and Eve."

I laughed.  "You're crazy!"

 But I found my cabin counselor, Brother Dino, who was my Sunday school teacher back home (the one whose sons became male strippers later).  He went to the office and dug up a list of requirements for the Nazarene ministry.  You had to be male, at least 21 years old, saved and sanctified, never divorced, never a Roman Catholic -- and married!

So, in order to escape to a "good place" with Dan, I would need a wife!  God said so!  Later I met Sarah in the snack bar and gave her my grim consent to our future wedding.

Manville Camp, with the woods on the right

We were engaged for part of Tuesday and all day Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.  We ate our meals together in the camp canteen, sat together in chapel and the evening service, and even walked through the woods behind the tabernacle where boys and girls went to kiss -- though we never kissed.  Sarah hated "that mushy stuff" as much as I did.

I enjoyed being engaged -- being seen with a girl got me endless triumphant shoulder-pats, thumbs up, cries of "Awright!," and approving grins.  It meant absolute, unwaivering acceptance, none of that awkward confusion or the deliberate refusal to see that happened when I was with a boy.  Not bad!

Why did we call off the engagement?

On that last night, we were walking back from the kissing woods.  Someone was listening to the radio in the distance: John Denver's  "Annie's Song," which was at the top of the charts:

Come, let me love you

Let me give my life to you

Let me drown in your laughter

Let me die in your arms

Let me lay down beside you

Let me always be with you

Come, let me love you

Come love me again

That's how you were supposed to feel about "The One" that God intended for you to spend your life with.  You were supposed to dissolve into them, lose your soul, your individuality, become one.

I looked at Sarah walking beside me.  We were just reaching the girls' cabins.  I could go no further.  "Thanks, see yah," I said, and ran as fast as I could to my own cabin, and jumped under the covers of my bed and prayed for God to give me Dan.

My First Real Date: Fred the Ministerial Student

Rock Island, December 1979

On December 16, 1979, shortly after I returned from Germany, I wasn't interested in the Catholic church anymore, so I started looking for liberal Protestant churches.  Like the First United Methodist Church in downtown Rock Island.

A young, cute preacher was preaching on homelessness during the Christmas season.  Social justice!  Just what I wanted!

I nabbed him during the coffee hour after the service.  His name was Fred; he was 27 years old, a new seminary graduate, and he was working as a student intern while looking for a pulpit of his own.  I told him about my interest in finding a non-fundamentalist church, and he invited me to dinner next Friday night to "discuss theology."

I spent the next week agonizing over what I should wear, trying to think of questions to ask about Methodism, and wondering:

Was he gay?
Was it a date?

We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Davenport, Iowa, across the river (not the one in Moline where Bruce and Leanne sniped at each other).  I tried hinting around to determine if he was gay or not:

Me: Is it hard to get dates, being a minister?  People thinking you're going to judge them?
Fred: Just the opposite, really. Lots of people have a thing for ministers.
People, not men or women!

Me: Nazarenes are complete prudes.  No sex outside of marriage, no divorce -- and they're really against gays.
Fred: Methodists realize that we're fallible. I'm divorced, but that shouldn't be a problem in finding a pulpit.
Divorced!  So he was straight!  Or did he divorce when he realized that he was gay

Me: I heard something weird about that hymn, 'In the Garden': he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own.  If you didn't know it was about God, you'd think it was about two gay guys!
Fred: Yeah, you can find some crazy interpretations of those old hymns.

When the waiter brought out the check and fortune cookies, Fred said "Forget the fortune cookies.  I have dessert and coffee waiting for us at my apartment -- devil's food cake."

Straight or not, I never turned down an invitation for cake.

Fred's Apartment Building

So I followed Fred to his tiny two-room apartment in a terrible run-down building in Davenport (I know, it's dangerous, get to know the guy first).

I scanned his bookshelves for books with the word "gay" in the title, checked the pictures on his wall for beefcake.  Nothing!  We sat side-by-side on his couch, eating cake, and I still didn't know if this was a date!

"Do you want to watch tv?" Fred asked.  "I think The Rockford Files is on."

"Sure.  I love James Garner.  He's very handsome.  He should take his shirt off more often."

"Yes...he's a fine actor."

This was getting ridiculous!

I decided to make a move -- he was a minister -- the most he could do would be to grab a Bible and start screaming.  So I tried the "yawn and stretch" maneuver for putting my arm around him.

He was gay.  This was a date.

We dated for the next six months.

See also: I Learn What Greek Active Means and Fred's Nine Loves