Gay City and Other Stories - Alan Keslian (book recommendations based on other books .TXT) 📗

was gay and living with a lover, so there were not too many awkward questions when he said he was moving again. Even so the lady in personnel seemed to think it quite funny and said mockingly: 'Oh, so you've gone back to Mummy then?'
Life at home quickly settled into an easy and familiar routine of meal times and shared chores. When he first offered his mother the money for his week’s keep, she said, ‘You don’t have to pay me straight away if you’re short. If you’ve got things still to pay at the flat or anything, we could leave it for a week or two.’ He realised then how glad she was to have him back. When he had first left, she seemed to be in a bad move whenever he went to see her because she always said something critical about the way he looked or in answer to something he told her, but after a few weeks she was more relaxed. He thought she must have got used to not having him at home. He was grateful she did not resent him being in the house again.
He did not feel like socialising much, so he spent his spare time reading, listening to music, watching television, wandering around the neighbourhood, or riding his bike. He was not very happy, and certainly not finding much fun in life. Once when he was in the park, a man of about thirty, who was walking a dog, started chatting to him. Ian stroked the dog as they talked, and after a few minutes the man said he lived not far away, on the other side of the park to Ian. Was he, Ian wondered, simply walking his dog and glad to have a few words with someone, or might he hoping for rather more? The idea would not have come into Ian’s mind before Roger had told him about men ‘cruising’ for each other in parks. However, Ian had decided he needed time on his own to get over the break up with Roger, and he thought it best not to be too friendly with this stranger.
At home he relieved his sexual urges with soft pornography, and comforted himself with his hands so that he could sleep at night. After a few weeks his mother said to him 'You ought not to spend so much time on your own. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to persuade you to try a girlfriend again, I know you don't want that, but you ought to have someone, if its only a friend to go with to the pub or somewhere once a week.'
She had always been so good to him. He was all she had since his father had died. He knew that nothing would please her more than for him to marry and give her grandchildren. He had tried to be straight by going out with a girl, but when the time came for kissing and cuddling he knew that for him it was just a pretence; he could not make his life into a sham, however much he wanted to please his mother.
What he could do for her now that he was living with her again was to fix various things around the house. He unblocked a drain, fixed a dripping tap, screwed back a shelf which had come down, and re-painted two ceilings which had gone rather yellow from cigarette smoke. Once, when he was putting out the rubbish, he noticed she had thrown away a bottle of tablets labelled 'hypericum'. He knew the name, a weird kid at school had tried to sell him some once, they were anti-depressants that you could buy in health food shops. Were they the reason his mother had seemed less irritable a few weeks after he had left to live with Roger? If that was true, then she might become depressed again if he went away a second time.
Ian himself was less miserable than he had been in the last days of the flat share. He had been thinking about his future, and whether to try for a better job, or to go part time so he could study at a college, or even with the Open University. He though it could be quite a long time before he was ready to try to find a boyfriend again.

The next day when he left work to go home, he was startled to see Roger waiting outside in the street for him. 'Hello, how's it going?' he asked. Ian shrugged his shoulders, looked away and walked on towards the station.
'Aren't you speaking to me? We can still be friends. Come and have a drink, just one, there's a pub over there.'
He told Roger that he had to go back home, that his mother would have a meal waiting for him. As the words came out he realised how weak and immature he must have sounded, and he wished he could have made up something clever to say to Roger, or that he had just told him to go away and leave him alone.
'Meet me another night, then, any night, you say when. I got some great stuff in this really cool club I’ve been going to, it gives you a fantastic high. Defadrine, they call it.'
‘”Defadrine”? Doesn’t make you go deaf does it?’
‘Don’t be silly. “Make you go deaf” - what are you like?’
'I expect you're very busy, you won't have time another night.'
Roger hurried ahead and turned to face him so that he had to stop. 'What’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to have a good time? Give me a chance, this is the second time I've waited for you outside work. I hung around for ages yesterday, I must have missed you. Say you'll come for a drink with me, you chose when.'
Ian let himself be persuaded. Roger, who had a car now, said he would call for Ian at his mother's house at half past eight. They went to the same quiet pub they had used sometimes when they shared the flat, and brought each other up to date, though Ian did not have much that he could say. Then Roger brought out a defadrine tablets and offered it to him, moving up very close and putting his hand on Ian's arm. 'I’m really glad to see you again,' he said. 'have one of these. It will soon cheer you up and we’ll have fun just like we used to.’
'But it all finished between us. The last two months we had the flat you didn't even look at me.'
'I know, but moving in together was a mistake, you were too young. If you’re gay the most important thing is to have fun, that’s what being gay means, isn’t it, having fun? Don’t go all serious about things on me.'
Ian wondered if Roger had been different, and spoken to him about wanting - at least - to be a friend, he might have weakened and agreed they could start afresh. The trouble was that if what he wanted was to have fun with aid of a chemical stimulant, he could do that with anyone. The two of them would not be special to each other in the way he wanted. This time he was more experienced, and though he was unhappy to, he turned Roger down and went home.
Later, in his room he finished his bedtime drink, put out the light, and settled down to sleep, knowing that in the morning his mother would give him his breakfast as usual. He wished that he could please her by getting married and having children, so that she would always be happy without having to take pills; and he wished too that he could share a flat with a boyfriend again, and sleep in the same bed with him, and make love to him every night. Would he ever be experienced enough, and strong and clever enough, to do both?

The Month Rule

Since I first became sexually active, fourteen years ago when only seventeen, the month rule has shaped and guided my love-life. I learned it from my first ever conquest, who found me walking my dog in the big London patch of suburban woodland around Ruislip Lido. My thoughts were concentrated, as they so often were at that time, on what was becoming an undeniable fact: that a powerful sexual urge drove me not to the opposite sex, but towards other men. My first ever lover was sitting on a fallen tree trunk beside the path, watching my approach with a friendly gaze, and when I was within a few yards asked if I agreed that it was good to get away from busy streets into a wood with large mature trees. With an amiable manner and an ease that even now, when I think back, surprises me, he progressed from pleasantries to having me sit beside him, putting an arm around me, and taking me back to his car, where I shared sexual pleasure with another human being for the first time, while my poor old dog called Wooffs - I know, I know, but I was only a kid when I called him that - had to wait nearby tied to a fence on a long lead.
My first lover worked in building construction, and about eight months later when the new supermarket he was engaged on was complete he had to move on to find work elsewhere. Despite his repeated warnings that his line of work meant he could never settle in one place and therefore I must not become too fond of him, I pined desperately after he went. He had assured me that, with my looks, someone else would soon come along, but that I should be wary of highly promiscuous gay men. He said that for him one simple rule had been his constant and sure guide to avoiding the emotional and physical problems that plague so many. This rule requires that, in any period of thirty days, you restrict yourself to one sexual partner. The rule has no precise logical or mathematical basis, for there is no clear reason why a month should be the period rather than say, three weeks, or a lunar month, or six weeks. At times its application can seem arbitrary. What do you do if you meet someone you are strongly attracted to, but the thirty day period since you last held someone in your arms is not yet up? You can hardly say: ‘Would you mind meeting again in a day or two, I can’t go with you today because of my month rule.’
Such situations can make the rule, though simple enough to state, sometimes difficult to apply. Fortunately, if you want to, you can devise ways around some of the drawbacks. For instance, if you have gone without for a complete month, you could allow yourself to carry forward one entitlement to a sexual encounter, permitting yourself two in the following thirty day period. Similarly, whilst strict observance might appear to forbid threesomes altogether, you could decide that, if you had one regular partner for a period of two months, you and he would be entitled to participate once in a threesome. Not that I am saying I frequently indulge myself, I do not, but you get the idea. However if you make this type of exception you must avoid allowing so much leeway that you end up in the situation you are trying to avoid: that your sex life makes you feel as though you are serving in a fast food store, - you become trapped into having sex once with so many strangers that you never get to know or care for any of them.
Though libertines might scoff, the month rule is not as