Bio: I like to think of myself as a cross between Diogenes, May West and a professional dirty old queer, good enough to be paid for it. My blog is designed to keep queers honest, horny, amused and sufficiently outraged.
The fools at QUEERCLICK challenged us to post photos of ourselves incorporating their logos. I wondered how an elderly "stocky" bald polar bear could compete photographically with all of the other barely post-pubescent bloggers, hot young studs with abs and tight behinds, not yet ravaged by gravity and decades of self-indulgence. The answer hit me like an Islamic suicide bomber: scare the crap out of all of you.
Remember, I know where you live, each and every one of you. This knowledge magically comes with the white beard and the pot belly. (Just ask Santa.) And like Santa, I'm a stalker. And note to the fools of QUEERCLICK: Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it
And I figured who gives a crap about dignity at my age when there's a cornucopia of free porn to be won.
My guilty pleasures have varied considerably over the years. My earliest memory of a guilty pleasure would be Twinkies dunked in Yoo-hoo. As my tastes and needs and desires have evolved--or devolved--guilty pleasures have included watch and fountain pen collecting, hideously over-priced bed linens, nude bathing in the Caribbean, Chinatown Dim Sum until my tummy explodes, Mojitos and Keith Copley, the most beautiful and sexually attractive idiot I've ever known.
My guilty pleasure du jour (or should I say au jus?) is photographing shirtless (and sometimes naked) men in public places throughout Manhattan. It's a complex pleasure that demands commitment, guts, seduction, subversion, research, deception and will power.
And it's not just a guilty pleasure (even though my penis would tell you so), it's been an intellectual, emotional and artistic adventure.
I've been exploring the synthesis of two of my most persistent obsessions: Manhattan and beautiful men. Initially, I was partly motivated by comments on my photography questioning the absence of people, As a result of that, I started to pursue people, studying men on the streets of Manhattan.
After a while, I then found myself wondering about their bodies. Imagine that. So I started to politely suggest to acquaintances, friends and even random strangers that they should consider supporting my artistic endeavors. I pointed out that I'm very old and could be dead within days so now was not the time to say no. Now they line up to strip on the streets.
Truth be told, I rarely enjoy nude male photography, it leaves me cold. Too obvious. On the other hand, the naked city in all of its hardness, rigid angles and cubist statements is to my eye powerfully masculine and quite arousing. So I wondered if I could use my camera to create some kind of visual and emotional communication between the stone, steel and glass architecture, textures and colors of my adored metropolis and the architecture, textures and colors of beautiful men.
I'm not sure I've succeeded quite yet, but I do feel I am on the right path. And I must confess--not surprisingly--the exploration has been great fun.
Perhaps the strangest part of this experience has been that the sexual and visual pleasure that I've been experiencing during this process of exploration has been unique and extraordinarily intense in ways I had not imagined. Furthermore, the experience has given rise to intense personal feelings that I've not experienced during the actual act of sex. Partly this is because--with one exception--I have not indulged in sex with my models despite the fact that one of the criteria I've used to select my models has been powerful sexual attraction. Limiting myself to the visual experience has opened the door on new sensations and a much more powerful visual experience than I've ever had before.
Have I discovered my inner voyeur? Perhaps, but it is something much more. The combined beauty of the male form and texture and elements of the city has taken me to a very new place emotionally, sexually and aesthetically.
I suppose I've come a long way from Twinkies and Yoo-hoo--or maybe not.
When I was a very young lad of three, bathing costumes hadn't yet been invented. This suited me just fine, but it also gave me much to ponder. As we would frolic in the North Atlantic undertow, I quickly came to realize that wee wees came in many different sizes, colors and shapes. I also came to realize that those creatures called girls didn't have wee wees and that seemed unfair and sad. Touching your wee wee was great fun. Girls had nothing to touch.
But one boy in particular, twice my age, not only had a wee wee, but one that was twice the size of my own and black. His name was Duane and he was black. I became attached to Duane and would deliberately allow the undertow to knock me off my feet so that I could reach for Duane's big black lifeline; and Duane never seemed to mind. In fact, he would smile and his lifeline would even get a little larger. Fascinating. Instinctively, I understood that Duane's dark wee wee was far superior to my own and not just because of the size. I remembered how the men in my family would fight over the dark meat at Thanksgiving. Dark meat, I understood, was far more tasty and desirable than white meat. I envied Duane but was very happy to be in his company. And then there was that other difference.
As my mother was drying me off one day, I asked the question that would change my life forever. "Mommy, my wee wee is missing a piece and is smaller than Duane's." My mother explained that I'm Jewish and when I was eight days old my family had a big party and cut off half of my penis.
I was horrified. "Can I get it back? Can it be glued back on? Where is the missing half?" My mother laughed and delivered the bad news. But having noticed that a few tugs would make Duane's wee wee grow, I started tugging furiously on my own wee wee. My mother slapped my hand, but I protested and went back to work explaining to my disapproving mother that as I was playing in the surf I had discovered the stroking and tugging makes a wee wee grow.
My mother turned to my father and they exchanged one of those knowing adult looks. "Ricky," she said. "You're may only be three but it's time to choose."
"Choose what?" I screamed. "I choose to get the rest of my penis back."
"No," she said, "It's time to choose if you want to be heterosexual or homosexual."
I decided to listen carefully for fear that my parents would make another really stupid choice for me and cut off the rest of my wee wee as they had done when I was a helpless baby.
"We've seen you comparing boys and girls," my father intoned. "And it's time for you to choose.
"I'd like to make an informed choice," I responded. "Please provide the pros and cons, the options and then I'll take this all under consideration and make a choice; something I wish I had been able to do on the eighth day after my birth."
"Well," my mother began, "if you choose homosexual you can look forward to a life of marginalization, persecution, second class civil rights, a lower salary in your chosen career, no spousal benefits, an AIDS epidemic in the 80s, serious flatulence after sex--assuming you choose bottom, an increased threat of violence, being bullied in school, labeled an abomination by most of your fellow citizens and an increased risk of teen suicide, depression and substance abuse."
"And if I choose heterosexual?"
My father smile broadly and explained, "As a wealthy white American male? The keys to the kingdom and dominion over the world."
"What about Duane's dark meat?" I asked.
"No, no more dark meat, no more meat at all," Daddy said. "But you can have all the pussy you want."
By the age of three I already hated cats and was much more of a dog man, so the pussy thing was not a plus for heterosexuality.
And then I asked the most important question of all. "Mommy, Daddy, are you heterosexuals?"
"Of course," they simultaneously declared.
"And it was your decision to cut my penis in half?" They laughed as if this was a joke.
I grabbed my mutilated penis, looked across the beach to Duane's magnificent drumstick, drooled and made my decision. "Homosexual, absolutely and completely homosexual." And I haven't regretted the decision for even one second in all of my 59 years. And neither did Duane.
I was three, Duane was six. Nature vs nurture? It may be the stupidest question ever posed.
One of the extraordinary benefits and terrible dangers of coming out at 40--which was the case for me--is that you find yourself living out your adolescence without parental or societal controls. And, unlike a hormonally-blinded and persistently confused teenager, a 40 year-old-man truly savors and appreciates every moment of the experience and unlike your average teenager, the 40-year-old man is not limited by an "allowance" but rather free to roam and experience based on his rather substantial income. It's a gay libido that would send shivers of Evangelical horror through even the most liberal of heterosexuals. And, to be clear, I was a 40-year-old gay virgin so I wasn't just coming out, I was experiencing real (for me) sex for the first time. I finally understood what love songs were all about and at long last I experienced the joys of jealousy, passion, lust and water sports.
Which brings me to the matter at hand: confessions. I've always been rather forthright on my blog, having confessed much, but this challenge demands something new, some secret never before revealed to my tens of adoring fans. Sure, I could confess something childhoodishly silly like leaving little mountains of sugar on sidewalk cracks at night so that they would be covered by ants in the bright sun of morning. Five-year-old Ricky would whip out his trusty magnifying glass, focus the sunlight and caramelize an entire colony. But no, you're an audience of gay men and want something that plays to your gonads. So, imagine if you will 30 plus years of repressed sexual fantasies, enough to fill the Encyclopedia Erotica, enough to challenge the most esoteric chapters of the Kama Sutra. I gave new meaning to the notion of a practicing homosexual, having more things imagined and inventoried that needed practicing than likely any of you have ever even considered.
Yes, I did that. And I did that. And I even did that and that and that. Now, as many of you have likely learned, reality can ruin fantasy and a fantasy realized is very often ridiculous, sometimes just disgusting and occasionally terribly painful in a not pleasurable way. But try it all I would, and try it all I did. Most importantly the perfection and detail of fantasies evolved and refined over 30 years by a very intelligent and creative queer would mostly be impossible to play out in real life; but it took me several years to come to that sad conclusion. I also learned that the disappointing execution of a great fantasy would render it useless for masturbation. That imagined moment that would always put you over the edge, especially in a situation where you might get caught if you weren't fast and efficient enough--gone forever because you just had to do it. Foolish.
Some of these fantasies led to very unfortunate consequences. As hard as I tried I could not stop laughing hysterically when a dear friend and "F" buddy came crawling into the room naked except for a linen diaper with big yellow ducky safety pins; he pooped his nappies and then expected to be spanked. The visual of a world famous conductor playing out his own fantasy of infantilism was more than I could handle. Spanked! Rather I pissed my own pants as I doubled over in hysterical laughter and lost a friend and great source of house seats for anything and everything at Lincoln Center.
I put myself in a most compromising situation with a television sitcom star who was a suspected date rapist. He was and it took me a month to recover.
And there are German sex toys that should be criminalized. Never is a good word to learn in German if you ever visit Hamburg, Berlin or Frankfurt...or even a particular S&M dungeon at a lovely Wiesbaden gay brothel.
The most extravagant fantasy that turned into a total disaster involved melting $3,000 of the finest Parisian chocolate in a huge vintage bathtub in a suite at the Hotel Meurice. My boyfriend and I had chocolate coming out of every orifice imaginable and thanks to the mother of all sugar rushes, we didn't sleep for two days. Yes, we left the maids a huge tip and compensated the hotel for a new set of $2,000 bed linens. I wasn't able to stand the smell of chocolate for almost five years.
I did learn many useful things about myself. I cannot bear confined spaces. I panic if I'm not allowed the option of breathing through both my nose and my mouth. Cute boys in extreme bondage are awfully pretty but like flowers in a vase just stand there. And certain things that seem hot in theory, smell just god awful and are best left to the imagination--at least in my case. And I don't mean post-marathon natural armpits, those are yummy.
OK one last confession that only a handful of lovers and one night stands have discovered, never before revealed on my blog or any blog: the very skilled and clever among you can bring me to orgasm without either one of us touching Little Ricky if and only if you play my nipples just right. Just right. This was a little thing we learned in a harness in a rather seedy section of London. My friend was rather disappointed since his goal was to keep me begging for hours. Infinite pleasure, indefinitely prolonged ended after 20 minutes. I'm still working on that one.
Conceived on a January beach on California's Monterey Peninsula, sea lions barking in the distance, Richard might well have grown up as an environmentally responsible heterosexual. His father was taking a break from saving the world from Japanese imperialism and his mother had moved to California to rivet and enjoy the occasional conjugal visit from her hero.
But family nagged his parents back to New York and he was instead born on 17th Street and Second Avenue in a building that is now a luxury Manhattan condominium. Repeated visits to City Hall have failed to earn his birthplace Landmark Status or even a bronze plaque. In any case, yanked from his place of conception by demanding grandmothers, Richard came into the world gay, neurotic and incapable of recycling.
Richard experienced his first orgasm at the age of 11 during nude swimming lessons with 30 other boys at the Young Men's Hebrew Association. The incident, involving a pool filter, did not escape the notice of the swimming instructor and Richard was sent to a psychologist who, after nine months of therapy, declared the young boy to be cured of all homosexual tendencies. Richard is still aroused by the smell of chlorine and the throb of pool filtration systems. Upon learning that her son was gay some 30 years later, Richard's mother demanded a refund from the doctor. Unfortunately, the child psychologist had passed away.
In order to avoid Vietnam (yes, he is that old) Richard stayed in college long enough to earn two degrees, one in History and the other in Sociology. These two areas of study well equipped Richard to pursue a very successful career in public relations where at great profit he manipulated the behavior and opinions of millions upon millions of gullible Americans. Have a headache? Take ADVIL. Richard is the guy who conned you into believing that branded ibuprofen is better than generic ibuprofen at half the price.
At the age of 40 Richard determined to commit suicide rather than continue life in the closet. As a going away gift to himself he flew to Amsterdam and threw a farewell party that included losing his gay virginity to 12 male escorts over five days. Unfortunately for those who were anxiously awaiting his arrival in the afterlife, Richard reacted to those 12 men the way some people supposedly react to a certain brand of potato chips: he couldn't stop at just one, he couldn't stop at just 12.
Today, some 18 years and about 1,500 potatoes chips since that fateful trip to Amsterdam, Richard still hasn't found his satiation point regarding salty snacks. In addition to his work in public relations, Richard has today become obsessed with blogging and is also nearing completion of his first book documenting the history of the relationship between three generations of his family, homosexuality and prostitution.
As he approaches his senior years, AARP discounts and Golden Passes at the local AMC Multiplex, Richard, never able to resist a challenge, has set out through his Blog to establish himself as the dirtiest old gay man in America. Few readers fail to notice how this vision informs his daily blogs and passion for photographing naked men. Some people say his blog is NSFW, but if that's the case, he believes, you should change your place of work.
If you want to know more about his blog, go read it. He's way too busy with his goals to grab you by the salty snacks and lead you to the spawn of his libido, imagination and insurmountalbe wisdom--the only thing about him, by the way, that remains insurmountable. And if you're too lazy to click on over to Proceed At Your Own Risk, here's a little taste of what you're missing--in addition to his brilliant insights on politics, religion, art, foot tapping and growing old with a yet to be managed libido.
