(Steven’s Greetings)

Holiday seasons used to be so anticipatory for me. I was in sympatico, for instance, with the Christmas season starting at Thanksgiving, and Halloween excitement building from early October. But as the years have rolled by, more and more I tend to find Holiday excitement only once the holiday itself arrives. Then I coast on that excitement for a few days or so.

It’s worked out kinda well for my two favorite holidays, the aforementioned Halloween and Christmas. Dia de los Muertos comes a day or two after Halloween ... so my sensitivity to the open window between the living and dead worlds is not wasted if I perceive it only once Halloween starts.

Similarly, the week between Christmas and New Years allows me an abbreviated, but concentrated Holiday Season. This year’s was one of the best, and most unique.

I don’t think I’ll use this space to describe how wonderful my Christmas was. (Oi, this is already going to be one of my longer entries ... you’ve been warned.)

Devoid of many cherished traditions of Christmas past, it was perhaps the finest of the new Christmasses my family has been celebrating together for half a decade, and the wonderful less-traditional traditions we have been creating together.

But the week after Christmas is where my fun really began. Yes, I finally started listening to Christmas music, and watching a few of my favorite Xmas movies. But a startling new thing happened between Christmas and New Years ... and it’s made my new year something special.


Basically, it all comes down to one tawdry sentence:


I met a man on the internet.




And I’m going to cut to the chase and say that, ultimately, me and the man - who I’ll call “Tom” - did not end up romantically involved. I don’t want to lead anyone on to assuming I’m in love ... the story is about something else.


So, yeah, I met Tom through the internet. And not in the strictly platonic and group-oriented way I’ve met just about everyone who’ll be reading this el jay entry. I met him through a gay hook-up site. Oh, and not one of those sweet matchmaking websites for innocent dating, but rather one more conducive to establishing relationships of a decidedly kinky, Dom/sub nature. (No, I’m not going to mention which one, or provide a handy link. Heheh.)

Following in a friend’s somewhat-less-than-successful footsteps, I was intending to register with a few more “legitimate” dating sites after the first of the year. But during the holiday season, I revived a long-dormant profile on the Dom/sub site and monitored it quite passively for mild amusement and titillation. I’m really not interested in the types of relationships most often sought there ... either hook-ups for kinky sex or somewhat formalized and extreme involvements oft characterized as Master/slave. Not for me.

BUT ... in finding a new boyfriend, I would like there to be a strong element of Dom/sub in our sex life, at a minimum, and perhaps more than that would be ideal. And while there’s lots of other things I’d put on my laundry list of boyfriend wishes, there don’t seem to be specific sites dedicated to Guys Who Are Within 10 Years of My Own Age This Time -or- Guys Who Are Not Poorer Than Me This Time Around. And instead of trying to find a kinky Dom boyfriend on a site designed for regular boyfriends, I thought I’d first take an off-chance look for a more-or-less regular boyfriend on a site designed for less boyfriendy types of Dom/sub liaisons.


Unexpectedly, and long story short, I started flirting with a guy who I thought - from his profile - would make the boyfriend of my dreams. And pictures revealed a cute Asian guy, precisely my age, with a sexy body and an appealing, expressive face. But the profile also stated quite clearly that he had likely already found the “him” he was looking for, before I even got my eyes on it. And Tom lives hundreds of miles away in San Francisco. Two mortal strikes. (Guys Who Live Less Than 40 Miles Away This Time would also have made my laundry list.)


So I have no distinct memory of why Tom and I started flirting on this site, and sending brief but yummy messages to each other. But I must have felt there was an opening in the previous “him” lock-out, and it turns out the man Tom was interested in (let’s call him “Cole”) was frustratingly, unavailably un-single via involvement in a very protracted separation from a straight marriage. And when I found out that Cole did not even live in San Francisco, but rather right here in Southern California ... I somehow considered the locked door to be open a crack.

But things started moving kinda quickly when Tom emailed me the very next morning and said he’d be down in the L.A. area that very night ... and did I want to meet him for a coffee? He was, in fact, heading down south to meet up with Cole in Valencia to try and light a fire under the wife-leaving. As it turns out, though, Cole didn’t live in Valencia ... but in Palmdale. Um, yeah, a bit of a distance difference. Coffee was off.

Yet there was something about the few hours when Tom and I thought we’d shortly be meeting in person that somehow jump-started our relationship. Over the next few days, there were incessant emails, high-school quantity text messages, constant flirting over the site that introduced us, and late-night phone calls for hours.

And, newsflash ... it was not all about sex! In fact, the phone calls where we communicated most personally were all about two people getting to know one another and finding out they were both intelligent, enlightened, spiritual, humorous, passionate and compassionate souls. And, yes, one of those people was ME. (No wisecracks!)

So within a few days, we’d established the basis for a very firm friendship .. . and the distinct potential for a long-term relationship of love and adventure.


And speaking of adventure, let me tell you something briefly about the bio of Tom. Trust me, it figures into the story.


He was the ‘black sheep’ creative/artist-type son, one of four sons born to a Chinese/Japanese mom and dad raising a strictly upright family on the Big Island of Hawaii. As soon as he could, Tom struck off on his own to explore the world. A short stint in San Francisco soon led to work on the high seas aboard a ship out of Alaska. Soon afterwards, he came out as a gay man living in Tokyo, Japan ... and has characterized that country as perhaps not the best place to start out being openly gay. Afterwards, he lived in Hong Kong, Paris, Tel-Aviv & Jerusalem for a while with an Israeli boyfriend, and spent most of his formative years in Berlin. There he lived in a huge suite of apartments run by a husband and wife team who’d gotten together after each of their former spouses ran off - - leaving them with the sets of their respective children. They had no assets except for the huge apartment, and so let the place out to traveling young people such as Tom. So there were multiple generations living in the place, and a communal system of living that Tom took a real shine to. Constantly short on funds during this period, Tom often prepared meals for the Berlin quasi-commune ... starting on the road to becoming the gourmet kitchen-talent he is today. Yeah, he cooks, too. In five languages. Oh, there’s more ...

Finally, he decided to return to the States and settle down in San Francisco. But when his flight made a layover in New York on the way in from Europe ... he decided he’d like to live in Manhattan for a while ... and so spontaneously embarked on a year-long sojourn in New York City.


After that, he did make his way to San Francisco, where he eventually moved into a fantastic apartment in the Castro neighborhood, with his boyfriend - whom we’ll call Ben - who was the president of a major Hollywood studio’s independent films arm. Ben’s job took him all over the globe ... and together they continued to explore the planet, based out of San Francisco. In the fantastic apartment, I saw a sweet photo of them in Barcelona, heard about trips to Thailand, and was impressed by artifacts brought back from Cambodia. I have no doubt I couldn’t name a corner of the earth Tom hasn’t been to.

Oh, except I did find one ... when I mentioned my family’s plans to spend next Christmas in Zermatt, Switzerland, he told me he’d never been there. Ah-ha! Oh, but it inspired reminiscing of horse-drawn sleigh rides through the snow-clad forests outside Vienna during Christmastime. Oi. And when he found out my family hails from Poland, he relayed the daring tale of when he smuggled contraband to the Polish intelligentsia and food to the starving peasants when the Soviets cracked down hard in the 80's. Le sigh ... can he get any more dreamy?


Anyway, once settled -more or less- in San Francisco, Tom became an independent filmmaker and spent a good deal of the 90's working with various film festivals and organizations around the world. Things got so hectic for him with a 5-nights-a-week schedule of public appearances at fund-raisers and screenings, that he’s slowed down quite a bit in recent years. But he still attends festivals in Berlin, and Hong Kong and Rotterdam (where he’s headed at the end of the month), and has his own film project in pre-production right now that should start lensing this Spring.

In the meanwhile, his other business seems to be taking off ... he and his two partners (very close friends from New York) have landed two major investors for their bio-mass clean energy enterprise based out of Honolulu ... so he’ll be spending lots of time in Hawaii to get that off the ground. That works out well, since his parents moved to Honolulu from the Big Island some years back.


Ok, as you might imagine ... between vagabond world traveling, creative film making, and environmentally conscious energy businessing, I was becoming pretty impressed with Tom. Add to that he’s a funny, quirky, smart, mega-deep and adventuresome man with a devilishly dominant streak characterizing his darkly nasty homosexual love life ... and it was all I could do to stop myself from simply falling in love with this man over the course of a single week.



There were just two little problems. He was completely stuck on this married guy, Cole. Oh, and yeah, Tom and I had never actually met in person.


Oh, hmmm, that last one is pretty pesky alright. So lest I get ahead of myself and count the unhatched chickens pecking their way into a life of total fantasy fulfillment ... I tried to lighten up my own expectations game by indulging myself in flights of total fantasy about the kind of life Tom and I could lead together. I purposely made it a little “out there” because that was the only direction to go when elaborating on a boyfriends lifestyle that was already in the fairy tale realm for me.

It was a delicious world tour of dominance and submission ... with the fascination and grudging respect of Asian powerbrokers in Tokyo and Hong Kong for the frowned-upon Chinese/Japanese race betrayer owning a humbled American white-boy slave ... wild sex club debauchery and crazy limit pushing to unforseen strains of eroticism in Berlin and Rotterdam ... au’naturale jungle love living on the beaches of Hawaii ... and pure romantic lovers paradise shared by two gay men in Gay Paree.

I wrote it up for Tom, embellishing a prologue of our long-distance relationship between L.A. and San Fran with lots of juicy details and falling in love that eventually enticed me to move up north and become his live-in boyfriend / lover / kinky submissive. The coup de grace of the story’s relocation inspiration was an idea that had hit me as a real inspiration ... starting a new life where i was openly some guy’s gayboy sub ... which seemed to me somehow easier than making the transition to that role in L.A. and having an awful lot of potentially embarrassing explaining to do to lots of friends. (ok, so why am i saying that right here, where lots of my friends will read it???? Oi!)

I sent the steamy story to Tom and, well, our conversations became a lot more erotically charged, downright sexual, and delving into potential details of a possible Dom / sub affair between us. It got so far as Tom confessing to me he’d like, if potential economic conflicts could be avoided, to have his lover actually be employed by his various businesses to provide expertise as both his personal assistant, traveling the worldwide film fest circuit, and in managing tasks for the clean energy company ... and thus having such employment further serve the internal interests of the lovers’ relationship. I think that was when, for the fifth or sixth time, I told Tom I was getting the eerie feeling he was reaching straight into my head and pulling out my deepest desires as real-life possibilities to dangle before me in bewitching tantalizement.

He had already hit the nail right on my head when it came to specific sexuality, desired eroticism, aesthetic appreciation, creative expression, human adventurism ... and now professional aspirationisms. I had to put down the phone and take deep breaths, because I started to hyperventilate. It’s not that world travel, hot sex, boyfriend love, movie making and planet-saving employment wouldn’t appeal to a wide variety of people ... but the sense that Tom’s lifestyle and desires meshed on a cellular level with the template of my life-long fantasies was very intense and palpable.


So ... far from the far-out fantasy putting the chill on, for all its outlandishness ... it simply served to fuel the fire of a dream life itching to be born to waking reality. Sigh.

It was clear I was getting carried away. Really.freaking.carried.away. Bad case of the vapors.


But, as Tom cautioned, and I concurred ... we had not yet really met.


At this point, though ... I wasn’t happy waiting the two weeks until he was going to be down in Palm Springs (dog sitting for Ben the ex) ... and I didn’t much like the idea of our first meeting being a one-hour visit to me on my office lunch-break while he was nearby in L.A. for a day.

So, I hatched the idea of going up to San Francisco for the weekend to meet him, just 2 days away. I had to know if there really was going to be some spark of attraction between us. Even though chances of that are deathly slim ... because one of the two people was going to be, well, me. Intermittently attractive at best.


Oh, and there was the matter of the other fella. Cole - the good-looking, 6-foot-3 triathlon athlete. Who was, on the other hand, seemingly stuck in an endless loop of marriage horror with a wife who simply refused to accept that her weak-willed husband was gay. And the marriage breaking thing had been going on for almost a year ... with Tom getting into the picture 4 months ago and now beginning to lose patience a bit. (Heheh, Tom had been describing to his friends his dual attractions for marriage-stuck, drama-life Cole and completely available, drama-free me [um, no comments from the peanut gallery, please] ... and his friends invariably urged him to, teehee, pick me.)


Alas, friends don’t get to pick for you. Tom wasn’t into choosing between us anyway. And what seems good over the phone and internet might not pan out in person.

Still, I had to end the crazy week of burgeoning expectations one way or the other, and I told Tom I’d like to come up for the weekend. So we made some sketchy plans on Thursday for me to maybe come up north ... and on Friday morning we solidified that with some flights booked for that same night, and a kind offer on his part to let me stay over at his place.



BUT ... he made it very plain, and reiterated again and again, that the meeting was to be on the basis of JUST FRIENDS. Ya see, Tom wasn’t really intending to start something on the side while still pursuing Cole. He was just letting off some steam of frustration with insufficient marriage-ending progress by flirting with a few guys on that website. Innocent enough, usually mostly fluff ... and neither of us expected to create the kind of connection we had inadvertently created. So I promised it would be a FRIENDly visit, with no expectations whatsoever of romance. Yet I confided that somewhere in the back of my head, I’d be looking for subtle signs of an attraction that could pay off later ... but pledged he would never notice the vibe was anything but the necessary one of Just Friends.

In all truthiness, it took a lot of pressure off ... and I was glad. If little ol’ intermittently cute me was making the trip for the primary purpose of measuring mutual attraction, I’d be very, very nervous and tense.


Stay tuned for Part Two when Steve flies up to San Francisco on a gay whim!