In closing

After two years confessing the intimate details of my sex life in a public paper, I still get asked consistently, Is that true? Did I actually throw up on a guy and then try to hide it? Did the cabbie honestly get a blowjob and still ask me to pay the fare? Did the clerk at Mr Submarine really do me behind the counter? Yes, yes, and yes.

I only invent the boring details. The juicy events write themselves. The challenge I gave myself each time I sat down at the keyboard to write a column was to answer the question, What don’t I want anyone to know?

And that’s what I wrote, because it’s my conviction that we’re not alone. I can’t be the only person to have puked in the bedroom? Contracted crabs? Sold myself short? Barebacked with a stranger?

I can’t be the only one with ideas about why I do the things that I do and how to do them, or not do them, better? I approach my sex life like a recipe book. Recipes I share in the hopes someone will have an idea how to make each meal taste even better.

Last month I gathered a dozen of my poems together to read at an event titled A Place Where You Feel Safe. To my surprise, I hadn’t picked the sweetest poems. I’d chosen the most graphic and embarrassing ones. I feel safest, it seems, when I’m at my most vulnerable. I am safest when I have less to hide.

It’s a simple enough idea-it’s one of the advantages to coming out, isn’t it?-but I’m always relearning it.

In the short term it’s so easy to remain secretive, furtive, and embarrassed. It’s so easy to stay silent. As a kick in the ass, I’ve developed a motto to remind me to speak up and take action: Pleasure Over Fear. I remind myself that I am in the pursuit of pleasure, happiness and joy despite what frightens me, despite my discomfort with feeling exposed, and despite what people may not understand.

The social stigma of being attracted to men didn’t end when I came out. Sexual prejudice won’t be overcome until my horny practices-kinky, vanilla, gay, straight and in between-are as everyday as what I eat for breakfast.

That means being as comfortable with my sexual acts in deed and in word as I am with gardening tips. I wasn’t born with a green thumb for sex. But with a lot of experience, some helpful outside coaching and an open mind, I’ve learned how to stick that thumb right where it needs to be.

*Miss Cookie wishes to thank her readers for their inquiring minds, their willingness to be uncomfortable, their candour and their generosity. One last plug: she’s doing a Fringe Festival show in September called Good Morning Gaytown! with the very gay Morgan Brayton.