HOMETOWN HOOK-UPS

Returning home to visit beloved friends and family, Jason Armstrong fondly recalls the reaffirming days of random hotel room sex.

How sex with strangers can help you survive your small town.

I LIVE IN THE GAY VILLAGE of a large, eastern Canadian city. Previously, I lived in a small city two thousand miles away and I’m writing this from there, at a small internet cafe, while visiting on vacation. My family picked me up at the airport last week and as we drove into downtown, I spotted a place that caused my soul to lurch with a wave of sentimentality: the Holiday Inn Express hotel.

We kept driving towards my family’s apartment on the fringes of downtown, passing the Westin, the Coast Plaza and the Carleton hotels. As we drove, I did my best to chat and play the role of son, but seeing those hotels recalled a part of me perhaps more authentic than that of son. In each of those hotels, I recalled a hook-up. And it wasn’t just hotels. I lived in this backwater for a decade, hooking up in hotels, homes and apartments dotted across the town.

On this trip, there would be no time or opportunity for men. I was here to visit parents and friends who I hadn’t seen in almost two years. On the plane, I had already begun to slip into the roles I would play. It wasn’t until I saw the Holiday Inn Express hotel that I realised the role I felt most authentic in was the one I played while naked with another man. I looked forward to talking with my family and friends, but I longed even more to be back in room #212, where words weren’t always necessary. Instead, I and another naked man with a matching need would communicate on a visceral level – with words, if necessary, but also with taste and touch.

We continued driving, passing the apartment complex I lived in while residing here. I thought not of the parties with friends, the meals I’d burned in the kitchen, or the view from my 23rd f loor window. Instead, I remembered the men I’d welcomed – some of whom I’d connected with, some of whom I hadn’t, really, but respected all the same. I respected them for skipping the niceties of normal society and baring their need to me. They would leave and I’d be left to wonder what their “real” lives were like, the life in which they put on a mask and returned to being a son, a brother, a waiter, a banker.

During a hook-up, I was so unmasked that I could also be terribly vulnerable. I would sometimes say goodbye to a hook-up, leave his place and feel that I’d left a part of my soul behind on his bedside table. There would be times when I wouldn’t really connect with someone and feel dirty afterwards, as if I had raped myself somehow, my emotions shaken and stirred. But that feeling would subside and I’d be online again looking for the next. I’d look again because often I would luck out and really dig the guy I was hooking up with. I was cognisant that even during the hook-up, I was playing a role (that of sex buddy). But the role did away with worldly pretense and, most of all, hypocrisy. Thus the role felt authentic, at least to me, the by-product being that I felt alive and fully realised.

Living here, I had felt so isolated as a gay man that I believe I hooked-up sometimes

I would sometimes say goodbye to a hookup, leave his place and feel that I’d left a part of my soul behind on his bedside table.

for the wrong reasons in order to feel noticed. Now living in a gay village, I am no longer isolated and therefore less inclined to hook-up out of desperation. I used to think that hook-ups were just about getting off, but if that were so we could all just jerk off. No, we hook-up because we need to be seen. We need our authentic sexual needs acknowledged and accepted. Even if we like being single and feel that we are not the marrying kind, we still need to be touched occasionally (touched gently, if you wish, or slapped hard by a gorgeous, dominant Master).

The new t rend for gays is to resist being ghettoised and to not live in a gay village. But here I am in my old town and the world feels and looks so straight that I feel like a ghost walking through it. I feel a void here that cannot be f illed by terrif ic parents and loving friends. I feel castrated and lonely, and I would sleep with just about anybody just to be recognised as a fellow gay traveller.

I’m ready to go home.