THE AIR IN the cell was warm with evaporated piss and sweat, so eventually I took off the leather jacket I’d been wearing. Someone sitting on the bench—a young, coffee-colored guy with fat red lips tattooed on his neck—jabbed the guy beside him and pointed at me.Well, it’s about time, I thought. Read more Read it in print

MY FRIEND ERIN is the girl who gets one-liners from men at bars. The do you come here oftens of slurred solicitation that she brushes away with a derisive laugh and a flip of her blond hair. My friend Danielle gets the CSI variety of creepy lurkers, and she’s found her personal antidote in a keychainbound can of mace and a black belt in Aikido. Another friend gets the drunk dials, and still another gets the exes that return in the middle of the night like housecats. It’s been said that every woman has the potential to bring out the worst in men. I summon forth the cock pictures. Read more Read it in print

“DO YOU WANT to see my work?” “Yeah!” I sounded way too hyper. It had been two years since I first met Sylvain and began having spread-eagle fantasies about him. It was the summer of 2005 and I was 20 years old, a virgin from California passing the summer in Paris after a year abroad in Bordeaux. Read more Read it in print

AT AGE 17, people still called me “pimple beard.” My mouth was filled with braces and while my scoliosis developed better than the doctors expected, I still had a slight hump. The only thing greater than my physical monstrosities was my sex drive. Despite being hobbled by social anxiety disorder—when I got nervous around people I licked my wrists—I was determined to finally get laid. Read more Read it in print

OCTOBER ALREADY, CAN you believe it? My doorbell rang this morning—a deliveryman saying he had a package for me. I was so excited I skipped down the stairs thinking it was a package from you. It was actually a box of purple suede go-go boots I bought online last week and then forgot about. I was a little disappointed that the package wasn’t from you, but then I tried on my new go-go boots and kicked around the house a bit and felt better.They have zippers! I’ve since put them back in the box, however. Read more Read it in print

I crave hot dogs the way crack heads crave rock. My preferred dealer is the Gray’s Papaya at West 72nd Street and Broadway. Last April, I decided to give into the hankering before a hair appointment. After injecting two dogs (well done, no kraut, no onions) I exited Gray’s wearing the afterglow of gastronomic pleasure. At the corner, I noticed an older white man noticing me. His 1980s navy blue Members Only jacket read retiree. Read more Read it in print

A FRIEND ONCE said that it was too late for us...too late for love. She said that if we hadn’t met anyone at college, we never would. Ridiculous as it sounded, once I landed my first post-college job and became resigned to the daily NY/NJ commute— stepping onto the bus in the predawn and returning home in the dark of night, motion-sensored porch lights flickering on at my approach—I began to believe her. Read more Read it in print

"I WANT YOU guys to get up there and grind on each other and give each other boners.” Those were Ronnie’s instructions, the promoter at the Hell’s Kitchen club where Brian and I were dancing. Read more Read it in print

If you love music so much, why don’t you mold it into the shape of genitals and fuck it? This is the reasoning behind sound-activated vibrator Freestyle, the latest gadget to up the ante in the race to see who loves their iThing the most.While some focus on the toy itself to a degree approaching objectum sexualis—bringing to mind many people’s desire, circa 2008, to grease up the sexy new iPhone and make love to it with an orifice— when I first heard of it there was but one name on my lips: Morrissey. Read more Read it in print

I WAS IN my early twenties, and on the rebound from a jazz bass player, a cad I adored all out of proportion and with whom I’d had heady, cathartic, atom-changing sex that invariably culminated in sweeping post-coital promises and lots of mutual weeping. Reeling from that relationship’s end, I decided in a moment of Xanax-addled logic that the best way to assuage my anguish would be to immediately replace The Bass Player with another jazz musician. It was simply too painful to consider that it was The Bass Player himself that I ached for, so I convinced myself that, really, it was jazz that I loved and jazz that I would love again. Read more Read it in print